What Word?

Word of words, and the measure of all measures
Blessed is the name, the name be blessed
Written on my heart in burning letters
That's all I know, I cannot read the rest

********

Dear Kate,

If we are to say Jesus is God's first and final answer to our questions, and to presume our questions are quests for true humanity, I don't think it's a matter of controversy among Christians.

What is in dispute, now as then, is what Jesus the Word has spoken, then and now, and if we are to speak this Word in our particular life, how then should we speak?

Two days ago I footnoted my letter to remind myself of something unspeakable spoken to me this past weekend.  If you are to hazard a guess, you could easily guess the hazard has to do with human weakness.

We have no trouble talking about triumph and success, being encouraging and occasionally thankful, but to speak about weakness—weakness of ours and that of others that implicates our own, we are often at a loss for words, good words, barely meaningful words, hardly adequate and thus rarely audible.

I don't write these letters to give you answers.  I write them to suggest what are not.

"Authentic" humanity? was the question I raised yesterday, a question I haven't begun to answer.  What I have done, I hope, is to suggest what could be the bad answers, wrong answers, false prophecies we frequently cherish.

Today I am going to share with you two long passages from Rowan Williams, one speaks general and the other specific, about Christian spirituality.  Please read them slowly and prayerfully.  And afterwards please come back to consider this suggestion: If you want to truly know a person, listen to how she speaks about weakness, especially her own weakness (if her words are audible at all).  And then the same suggestion, put differently: If you want to know how authentic a Christian is, listen to how he speaks about the Cross of Jesus (if he speaks at all).

Yours, Alex

PS. The bold emphasis in the following is mine.

********

Christian faith has its beginnings in an experience of profound contradictoriness, an experience which so questioned the religious categories of its time that the resulting organization of religious language was a centuries-long task. At one level, indeed, it is a task which every generation has to undertake again. And if ‘spirituality’ can be given any coherent meaning, perhaps it is to be understood in terms of this task: each believer making his or her own that engagement with the questioning at the heart of faith which is so evident in the classical documents of Christian belief. This is not, it must be said, to recommend any of the currently fashionable varieties of relativism or to romanticize a wistful ‘half-belief’. The questioning involved here is not our interrogation of the data, but its interrogation of us. It is the intractable strangeness of the ground of belief that must constantly be allowed to challenge the fixed assumptions of religiosity; it is a given, whose question to each succeeding age is fundamentally one and the same. And the greatness of the great Christian saints lies in their readiness to be questioned, judged, stripped naked and left speechless by that which lies at the centre of their faith.

— Rowan Williams, The Wound of Knowledge: Christian Spirituality from the New Testament to Saint John of the Cross

********

He has walled up my way, so that I cannot pass, and he has set darkness upon my paths. (Job 19:8)

It is very easy to go round and round the paths for a long time. There may be nothing in particular that puts an obstacle in the way. Whether we think of ourselves as ‘conservative’ or ‘radical’ where spirituality is concerned, the same is true.

If I am a ‘conservative’, my circular path will be one of conventional sacramental observance and a theological picture, however vague or naive, which sees God as the reliable source of meaning behind it all - God arranging the Church and its observances as the best available means for me to get to him. If I am a ‘radical’, my God will be the disturber of the social order, the one who calls me into freedom and into creative action - the God of the future, of the new and liberated humanity.

Both of these pictures as they stand are delusory.

They are, equally, religious games, designed to comfort us and justify us in the style of religious life we have found congenial. As they stand, they are projections and wish-fulfilments, and all the unkind things psychologists have always tended to accuse religion of. ‘God’ is a word or a concept which has a well-defined function in the way I order my life: and when you have explained that function, you have explained God. Something else might do just as well.

The only defence religion ever has or ever will have against the charge of cosy fantasy is the kind of experience, the kind of reflection normally referred to by Christian writers - at least since the sixteenth century - as the ‘night of the spirit’. The ‘night of the spirit’ or ‘night of the soul’ is often thought of as another kind of religious experience, a very exalted, very painful, very dramatic mystical sharing in the sufferings of Christ, or something of that sort. But the truth is, alas, that it is simpler, and much more alarming. It is the end of religious experience, the very opposite of mysticism. It is a wall in the way, as Job says, it is the evacuation of meaning.

We have been going round and round the paths, and suddenly we see that our path goes round a hole, a bottomless black pit. In the middle of all our religious constructs - if we have the honesty to look at it - is an emptiness. It makes nonsense of all religion - conservative or radical - and all piety.

— Rowan Williams, Open to Judgement: Sermons and Addresses