Archbishop of Canterbury learns Easter hope from Sudan
-13/04/06
The Archbishop of Can
Archbishop of Canterbury learns Easter hope from Sudan
-13/04/06
The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, has said that his recent trip to war-torn and poverty-stricken Sudan has reminded him to focus on the Easter hope for a world ìshadowed by abandonment, terror, painî, as on Good Friday.
The Archbishop ñ who is the local Canterbury bishop, as well as Englandís senior archbishop and spiritual head of the worldwide Anglican Communion ñ was making the point in a special seasonal message to his diocese, released this week.
Dr Williams, who is recognised as a man of prayerful compassion as well as a leading academic, has been much preoccupied by bitter divisions over issues of human sexuality throughout his church.
But his own concerns go much further and wider ñ including recent contributions to debates on education, health, poverty, the environment, and peace. He argues that Christian faith is about human transformation, not just the spiritual comfort of an in-group.
In his Easter message to the diocese, Dr Williams says that ìGod is always there ahead of us, his future already part of the present. I think that was the gift – or one of the many gifts – I received from our brothers and sisters in Sudan.î
The Archbishop has a background as a dissenting figure, once describing himself as ìa bearded leftyî.
When he was a Professor of Divinity at the University of Oxford he took part in anti-nuclear demonstration, and one of his Lent books, The Truce of God, is about peacemaking in a troubled world.
As former Archbishop of the Church in Wales he headed a non-established church. He is known to have had severe qualms about the continued establishment of the Church of England, but has kept his counsel about these since he has been in the Canterbury job.
The Archbishop believes the Church should have a role in public life, but his own style has been to encourage dialogue, faithful action and conversation ñ rather than to seek to entrench the power interests of the institution.
Nonetheless the Church of England is accused by critics within and without of defending its vested interests in church schools, in an unelected House of Lords, and in the privileges it enjoys through its unique relationship with (and subservience to) the Crown.
Today the religious think tank Ekklesia called Dr Williams ìperhaps the first post-Christendom church leader of a Christendom church ñ one still compromised by its ties with the state, and needing to break free if it is to have a healthy future.î
The Church of England is the only Established (state sanctioned) church in the 77 million worldwide Anglican Communion.
Dr Williamsí Easter message to his Diocese in full:
I was always taught, of course, that you should never under any circumstances say ‘Alleluia’ during Lent. It was like giving up chocolate or alcohol. Save it till Easter, and then you’ll really enjoy it as it was meant to be enjoyed.
There’s plenty of good sense about this, if we understand what Lent is properly about – a preparation for Easter, a reminder that we still live in a world in which Easter hasn’t yet quite sunk in and changed as it should.
Just as in Advent we have to remember that we all still in some ways live in a pre-Christian world, waiting for Christ to arrive not only in Bethlehem but in our hearts and minds, so in Lent: the cross and the resurrection are never over and done with, never things we have been through and understood once and for all. Ahead of us lies the immense bulk of failure and suffering, to be faced again and again with whatever degree of honesty we can manage. So every year, we need to live for a little while in such a way that Easter comes as a massive surprise and novelty.
Well, this year I started Lent in Sudan. Ash Wednesday found me in temperatures of 40-odd sharing in food distribution in a school and a refugee camp in Malakal and celebrating Holy Communion in a large and ultra-humid tent. Pretty well everything, every aspect of that environment, seemed set to remind us that we still lived in a world where the cross was the immediate reality and resurrection hope was definitely a thing of the future. Hunger, desperate poverty, the traces of unspeakable trauma and violence, and the present reality of the same unspeakable brutality not too far away in Darfur – this, surely, was a world untouched by Easter.
But one thing you quickly discover at worship in the Sudan is that there is no occasion free from alleluias. That Ash Wednesday service echoed with the joyful shouting of ‘Alleluia’ – from the children and the women especially as we came in, from every speaker who got near the microphone during the service, in hymns and songs throughout. My liturgical conscience had to resign and slink away. Lent it might be, but this was not an Easter-free zone.
Which is quite a good counterbalance to where I started. Yes, we need to be reminded by abstinence and restraint that the world is still a Good Friday sort of place, shadowed by abandonment, terror, pain. But what if you don’t really need reminding? What if, like the Sudanese believers, you have lived so long with abandonment and terror and pain that you can never forget or ignore it? These were people whose whole life was a particularly awful and crushing ‘Lent’.
Yet they could not stop saying, singing, shouting, ‘Alleluia’. If they lived in a long-term Lent, they also lived in an unceasing awareness of Easter. They had come through the horrors of war and oppression with the confidence intact that God was always there on the far side or in the depths of what they were enduring. If everyone else forgot them, God would not and could not. Because he was alive, they could live too – to echo the words of Jesus in John’s gospel.
The mystery of Christian faith is really something we can’t ever put into words because it is about so many things that are all true all at once, but we can only talk about them one at a time. Advent and Christmas and Good Friday and Easter and Pentecost, Baptism and Communion and birth and death are all packed up together, inseparably. But whether in our words or in the course of the Christian year, we usually have to pull them apart and take them in some kind of series. And it’s good that we do, since we have to give ourselves a chance to think things through carefully and to experience the time it takes to get from old to new, from death to life.
But once in a while something happens that pushes it all together again, confusingly and wonderfully, telling us that Advent is already, eternally, overtaken by Christmas, Lent by Easter, death by life. God is always there ahead of us, his future already part of the present. I think that was the gift – or one of the many gifts – I received from our brothers and sisters in Sudan. Yes, we ought as a rule to take things at their proper pace, one thing at a time. But let’s not forget that God is already ahead of us; that there really is an ‘alleluia dimension’ in the very heart of Lent and Passiontide. And the people who can tell us that are people like the Sudanese, who have, quite simply, met the Risen Lord in the darkest times.
With my love and prayers for a very blessed Easter season. +Rowan
[Available from Ekklesia: Rowan Williams, The Truce of God. Revised and updated from an earlier edition, this is a wide-ranging study of the causes, effects and proper Christian response to the violence that pervades every area of daily life – from popular entertainment, to street crime, to international relations. With his customary realism and humanity, Rowan Williams explores the inner fears and fantasies that give rise to violent attitudes and behaviour. He explores the meaning of Christ’s saying, ‘Blessed are the peacemakers’ and signals the contribution that faith can make towards peacemaking in today’s world. See also Peacenik as practical way of supporting peacemaking]
Archbishop of Canterbury learns Easter hope from Sudan
-13/04/06
The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, has said that his recent trip to war-torn and poverty-stricken Sudan has reminded him to focus on the Easter hope for a world ìshadowed by abandonment, terror, painî, as on Good Friday.
The Archbishop ñ who is the local Canterbury bishop, as well as Englandís senior archbishop and spiritual head of the worldwide Anglican Communion ñ was making the point in a special seasonal message to his diocese, released this week.
Dr Williams, who is recognised as a man of prayerful compassion as well as a leading academic, has been much preoccupied by bitter divisions over issues of human sexuality throughout his church.
But his own concerns go much further and wider ñ including recent contributions to debates on education, health, poverty, the environment, and peace. He argues that Christian faith is about human transformation, not just the spiritual comfort of an in-group.
In his Easter message to the diocese, Dr Williams says that ìGod is always there ahead of us, his future already part of the present. I think that was the gift – or one of the many gifts – I received from our brothers and sisters in Sudan.î
The Archbishop has a background as a dissenting figure, once describing himself as ìa bearded leftyî.
When he was a Professor of Divinity at the University of Oxford he took part in anti-nuclear demonstration, and one of his Lent books, The Truce of God, is about peacemaking in a troubled world.
As former Archbishop of the Church in Wales he headed a non-established church. He is known to have had severe qualms about the continued establishment of the Church of England, but has kept his counsel about these since he has been in the Canterbury job.
The Archbishop believes the Church should have a role in public life, but his own style has been to encourage dialogue, faithful action and conversation ñ rather than to seek to entrench the power interests of the institution.
Nonetheless the Church of England is accused by critics within and without of defending its vested interests in church schools, in an unelected House of Lords, and in the privileges it enjoys through its unique relationship with (and subservience to) the Crown.
Today the religious think tank Ekklesia called Dr Williams ìperhaps the first post-Christendom church leader of a Christendom church ñ one still compromised by its ties with the state, and needing to break free if it is to have a healthy future.î
The Church of England is the only Established (state sanctioned) church in the 77 million worldwide Anglican Communion.
Dr Williamsí Easter message to his Diocese in full:
I was always taught, of course, that you should never under any circumstances say ‘Alleluia’ during Lent. It was like giving up chocolate or alcohol. Save it till Easter, and then you’ll really enjoy it as it was meant to be enjoyed.
There’s plenty of good sense about this, if we understand what Lent is properly about – a preparation for Easter, a reminder that we still live in a world in which Easter hasn’t yet quite sunk in and changed as it should.
Just as in Advent we have to remember that we all still in some ways live in a pre-Christian world, waiting for Christ to arrive not only in Bethlehem but in our hearts and minds, so in Lent: the cross and the resurrection are never over and done with, never things we have been through and understood once and for all. Ahead of us lies the immense bulk of failure and suffering, to be faced again and again with whatever degree of honesty we can manage. So every year, we need to live for a little while in such a way that Easter comes as a massive surprise and novelty.
Well, this year I started Lent in Sudan. Ash Wednesday found me in temperatures of 40-odd sharing in food distribution in a school and a refugee camp in Malakal and celebrating Holy Communion in a large and ultra-humid tent. Pretty well everything, every aspect of that environment, seemed set to remind us that we still lived in a world where the cross was the immediate reality and resurrection hope was definitely a thing of the future. Hunger, desperate poverty, the traces of unspeakable trauma and violence, and the present reality of the same unspeakable brutality not too far away in Darfur – this, surely, was a world untouched by Easter.
But one thing you quickly discover at worship in the Sudan is that there is no occasion free from alleluias. That Ash Wednesday service echoed with the joyful shouting of ‘Alleluia’ – from the children and the women especially as we came in, from every speaker who got near the microphone during the service, in hymns and songs throughout. My liturgical conscience had to resign and slink away. Lent it might be, but this was not an Easter-free zone.
Which is quite a good counterbalance to where I started. Yes, we need to be reminded by abstinence and restraint that the world is still a Good Friday sort of place, shadowed by abandonment, terror, pain. But what if you don’t really need reminding? What if, like the Sudanese believers, you have lived so long with abandonment and terror and pain that you can never forget or ignore it? These were people whose whole life was a particularly awful and crushing ‘Lent’.
Yet they could not stop saying, singing, shouting, ‘Alleluia’. If they lived in a long-term Lent, they also lived in an unceasing awareness of Easter. They had come through the horrors of war and oppression with the confidence intact that God was always there on the far side or in the depths of what they were enduring. If everyone else forgot them, God would not and could not. Because he was alive, they could live too – to echo the words of Jesus in John’s gospel.
The mystery of Christian faith is really something we can’t ever put into words because it is about so many things that are all true all at once, but we can only talk about them one at a time. Advent and Christmas and Good Friday and Easter and Pentecost, Baptism and Communion and birth and death are all packed up together, inseparably. But whether in our words or in the course of the Christian year, we usually have to pull them apart and take them in some kind of series. And it’s good that we do, since we have to give ourselves a chance to think things through carefully and to experience the time it takes to get from old to new, from death to life.
But once in a while something happens that pushes it all together again, confusingly and wonderfully, telling us that Advent is already, eternally, overtaken by Christmas, Lent by Easter, death by life. God is always there ahead of us, his future already part of the present. I think that was the gift – or one of the many gifts – I received from our brothers and sisters in Sudan. Yes, we ought as a rule to take things at their proper pace, one thing at a time. But let’s not forget that God is already ahead of us; that there really is an ‘alleluia dimension’ in the very heart of Lent and Passiontide. And the people who can tell us that are people like the Sudanese, who have, quite simply, met the Risen Lord in the darkest times.
With my love and prayers for a very blessed Easter season. +Rowan
[Available from Ekklesia: Rowan Williams, The Truce of God. Revised and updated from an earlier edition, this is a wide-ranging study of the causes, effects and proper Christian response to the violence that pervades every area of daily life – from popular entertainment, to street crime, to international relations. With his customary realism and humanity, Rowan Williams explores the inner fears and fantasies that give rise to violent attitudes and behaviour. He explores the meaning of Christ’s saying, ‘Blessed are the peacemakers’ and signals the contribution that faith can make towards peacemaking in today’s world. See also Peacenik as practical way of supporting peacemaking]