Peering into the Faith of an Archbishop
by John L. Kater, Jr.

Readers wishing for a window into the mind and heart of the new Archbishop of Canterbury would do well to read Lost Icons: Reflections on Cultural Bereavement and Writing in the Dust: After September 11. Readers wishing for an easy read, or for simple answers to hard questions, will be disappointed; so will those who hope (or expect) to find their issue of choice applauded (or condemned).

Rowan Williams is surely one of the most subtle and profound thinkers at work in the Anglican Communion today. Lost Icons (already in its fifth printing) offers the careful and patient reader the opportunity to see something of how he constructs theology, as well as his "reading" of current western culture. (The book is clear but not easy.) The "icons" to which the title refers are "patterns of reading and understanding human behavior… that are supposed to represent some of the basic constraints on what human beings can reasonably do and say together if they are going to remain within a recognizably human conversation" (pp. 2-3). It is those patterns of behavior that provide for common discourse, the loss of which he sees as dangerously missing from our world and which "imperil[s] so deeply the possibilities of corporate sense-making (and so of just social order)" (p. 4).

Williams believes that popular ideas about the purpose of childhood education both demonstrate and contribute to the loss of possibility for genuine dialogue. It is, he argues, conceived as a "consumer good" to be marketed and measured only insofar as it gives individuals the skills they will need to "make it" in a competitive, even cutthroat world.

The diminishing of education is mirrored in the eclipse of charity in its classic sense, meaning a commitment to others beyond immediate self-interest because of some recognized ‘common ground’. Without a sense of "an acknowledgment that someone else’s welfare is actually constitutive of my own," politics becomes "endless bargaining between interests" (p. 77). Williams understands that "the concentration on rights as the primary focus of political action, is a response to the long and appalling history of inequity"; but he notes that it often issues in isolation and the "competing narratives of different groups in the Balkans or central Africa or the Middle East" (p. 85).

Demonstrating a remarkable range of interest and expertise in the fabric of contemporary culture, Williams anchors his chapter on "Remorse" in contemporary reflections on philosophy, art, psychoanalysis, history, religion and literature. Remorse, he believes, is a phenomenon in which one self recognizes the other as both different from, and related to, itself, and analyzing it leads him directly to the heart of his study, which he calls "lost souls."

Williams considers that the experience of being ‘in love’ provides a clue to something of the mystery of being human: not desire or obsession, but "the moment of acknowledged conviction, shared by two people, that each is accepted, given time and room, treated not as an object of desire alone but as focus for attention and fascination" (p. 155). Williams applies the term soul to "a whole way of speaking, of presenting and ‘uttering’ the self, that presupposes relation as the ground that gives the self room to exist..."(p. 160). "Souls occur when trust of a certain kind occurs..." (p. 176). But the "lost icons" of the title refer to lost souls; "the skills have been lost of being present for and in an other, and what remains is mistrust and violence" (p. 175).

This would surely be a terminally depressing analysis if there were no hope. What Williams calls "the eastern Mediterranean (Jewish, Christian and Muslim discourses)" (p. 182), and Christian Trinitarianism in particular, have seen God as the "non-existent Other" who does not take up our space and therefore gives us room to live. The "lost souls" of our age turn out, in Williams’ view, to be suffering from the loss of the Other traditionally communicated by the Christian tradition. Our only hope, he suggests, is a "recovered confidence in the therapeutic Other, not ‘there’ for examination, for contest, even for simple consolation… [S]ometimes, whatever the risk, we have to force ourselves to talk, not of consolation but of hope, of what is not or cannot be lost" (p. 187).

In his introduction to Lost Icons, Williams makes a point of noting that, while deeply informed by Christian faith, his reflections are not bound by traditional dogmatic language; the conversation he is engaging is not limited to Christians, and he leaves room for others to speak out of the context of their own experience. Nevertheless, for all its passionate and sometimes agonized wrestling with the culture of which we are all part, its careful logic rarely touches the high drama behind Writing in the Dust. Yet the same perspective informs both books; indeed, we might say that Writing in the Dust is a reflection on a horrible event precisely from the perspective that underlies the earlier volume.

Williams was at Trinity Church, Wall Street at the time of the attack on the World Trade Center, and thus experienced its horror from only a few blocks away. The book is brief, coherent and impassioned, and touches on several themes related to his reaction to the attacks.

Perhaps the most powerful is his reading of the responses of those who were waiting for the end, in their office or on board the doomed aircraft.

Someone who is about to die in terrible anguish makes room in their mind for someone else; for the grief and terror of someone they love. They do what they can to take some atom of that pain away from the other by the inarticulate message on the mobile. That moment of ‘making room’ is what I as a religious person have to notice. It isn’t ‘pious’; it isn’t language about God; it’s simply language that brings into he wold something other than self-defensiveness. It’s a breathing space in the asthmatic climate of self-concern and competition; a breathing space that religious language doesn’t often manage to create by or for itself. (pp. 5-6)

The balance of this small book offers a number of valuable observations about responding to events such as September 11, and the important distinction between striking out and self-questioning; the consequences of random killing, both in terrorist attacks and in a "war on terrorism;" and the complex implications of living in what he calls a "global neighborhood" (p. 49). The last pages reflect on the ambiguous nature of religious symbols and their power to dehumanize. He insists, however, that the cross is

both ours and not ours; not a magnified sign of our own suffering, but the mark of God’s work in and through the deepest vulnerability; not a martyr’s triumphant achievement, but something that is there for all human sufferers because it belongs to no human cause.

Breathing space again...(p. 73)

Taken together, these two volumes give a coherent portrait of Archbishop Williams’ stance of faith, as he engages broad symptoms of cultural malaise and as he reflects upon terrible events. Both books are particularly pointed in their critique of aspects of North Atlantic culture (which he considers amply evident in Britain but even more exaggerated in the United States). It is interesting that while the sources he cites are entirely from the English-speaking world, his passion for ‘making room’ — for dialogue, for taking seriously the other to whom we are bound — finds resonance in the rhetoric of the latest generation of liberation theology, including the demands of the rebels of Chiapas for "a world with room for everyone." Readers wondering how his theological perspective can be applied to Christian decision-making, and how it shapes his attitude to conflict within the church, will find his address, "On Making Moral Decisions," delivered at the 1998 Lambeth Conference, of interest.

The Rev. John L. Kater, Jr., is Professor of Ministry Development and Director of the Center for Anglican Learning and Life (CALL) at the Church Divinity School of the Pacific in Berkeley, California. He previously served as rector of Christ Church in Poughkeepsie, New York and as Education Officer of the Episcopal Diocese of Panama. John is the author of Christians on the Right: The Moral Majority in Perspective, Making Sense of Life: Theology for Teenagers, and Finding Our Way: American Christians in Search of the City of God, as well as two books for children. He assists at the Congregation of El Buen Pastor in Redwood City, California and serves on the Diocese of California's Hispanic Commission and Multiculturalism Task Force. He may be reached by email at jlkater@aol.com