Sunlight and silence

I can’t think of a more exciting way of spending a wintry morning in New England, than by sitting in a splotch of sunlight with a book by Rowan Williams on one’s lap—especially if it’s a lightweight paperback of just 117 pages.

      Williams served as the 104th Archbishop of Canterbury from 2002 to 2012, and was the first such archbishop in modern times not to be appointed from within the Church of England. (He is now Master of Magdalene College, University of Cambridge.)

      It’s hard to tell how many books have flowed from his pen (or laptop), because there are so many of them, but by my count there must be more than 40 publications of one kind or another.

They include many addresses edited for print, among which are the six chapters comprising Being Human: Bodies, Minds, Persons (Eerdmans, 2018).

      These talks were originally given between 2009 and 2015, and pose some difficult questions: “What is consciousness?” “What is a person?” “What is empathy?” “What are the positive and humanly constructive ways in which you might use time?”  And so on.

      Williams doesn’t compromise. “I think difficulty is good for us,” he says, conceding, perhaps with a wry smile, that some of his books are not ‘‘easy reading.” And for me, Being Human is among them.

      But he hastens to explain that difficulty is one of those things that obliges us to take time. The more time we take, the “more our discovery is likely to turn into habit and into inhabiting.”

He maintains that difficulty imposes discipline: it imposes the willingness to believe that there is more to work on.

      Taking time, Willams says—aware of the “more” that we have not yet absorbed—may be one of the things that make us a bit more patient with criticism, challenge, an alternative view, another world, another culture, another person.

      Time is a complex and rich gift, writes Williams, “it is the medium in which we not only grow and move forward, but also constructively return and resource—literally re-source—ourselves.”

      And it was with this awareness that I moved with measured strides through Williams’s exploration of the intricacies of neuroscience, philosophy, psychology, and world literature, coming eventually to his softly spoken insights into silence and human maturity. Especially silence, to which he devotes a whole chapter of nineteen pages, which, when taken at the right pace, is surely philosophical theology at its best.

      I’ll make no attempt to further explain the book’s reach and argument. What I can confirm is that it completes a trilogy of sorts after Williams’s earlier books, Being Christian and Being Disciples.
      Many people, the archbishop writes, are concerned about current models of human life and well-being, and the sources of the confusion they often bring. 

      Among his solutions is a call for a better grasp of the role of silence and worshipful listening. He suggests that we need to move beyond the urge to be in charge, to organize, explain, and manage. Instead, we should open up to the endless richness of the divine life that has been offered to us through the teachings of Christ Jesus.

      As I turned the last page of Being Human, my splotch of sunlight seemed to expand to fill the room, along with much of the silence the archbishop implores us to understand and know.