blip : Basic Living Instruction Protocol :

As Rowan Williams writes in the preface, his latest book called Where God Happens: Discovering Christ in One Another is “a modest contribution to the discovery of a church renewed in contemplation” (xi). But unlike many contemporary attempts at techniques for a flourishing spirituality, Williams doesn’t think he has anything necessarily new to offer. His is a modest contribution that guides the reader in explorations into the riches of the old, the re-discovery of an ancient spirituality. In this book, Williams shares with us his wonderful gift of making an old world speak to us in the present without violating the distance and strangeness of history. Thus, Where God Happens is an invitation into the world of third-century, desert monasticism in order to discover contemplative practices that may renew our church.

These early monastics moved into the desert to catch a new vision of what the church could be and what it means to be humans together in the church. Williams writes, “they wanted to find out what the church really was—which is another way of saying that they wanted to find out what humanity really was which it was in touch with God through Jesus Christ” (12). The desert mothers and fathers went into the deserts to learn what it means to see their flesh transfigured as the light of Christ’s body fused them together into a new creation. Thus, for the monastics, the relationships between self and neighbor offered the ordinary moments where Christ appeared in the midst. Early in his text, Williams cites an important passage from Anthony the Great that captures this desert ethos: “Our life and death is with our neighbor. If we win our brother, we win God. If we cause our brother to stumble, we have sinned against Christ” (13). Williams explicates this bit of desert wisdom: “Living Christianly with the neighbor, living in such a way that the neighbor is ‘won’—converted, brought into saving relationship with Jesus Christ—involves my ‘death.’ I must die to myself, a self understood as the solid possessor of virtues and gifts, entitled to pronounce on the neighbor’s spiritual condition. My own awareness of my failure and weakness is indispensable to my communicating the gospel to my neighbor” (14). For the desert monastics, the Christian life revolves around putting the other in relation with Christ. And this is a death to the self because it sets aside one’s desires for the sake of the neighbor’s salvation.

But serving in the other’s relationship with Christ is not about fitting the other into one’s own method of spirituality. That’s the danger. In serving the other, we may be tempted into a paternal role: the neighbor is a child in the faith and needs my hard-earned spiritual wisdom. But that sort of attitude is exactly what “dying to one’s self” forbids. Williams writes, “We love to think that we know more of God than others; we find it comfortable and comforting to try to control the access of others to God” (15). Thus spirituality becomes a technique for self-satisfaction, a tool for our self-obsession. But the monastic writings Williams puts before the reader witness to a spirituality that dispossesses, a Christianity that does not seek to be the moral or spiritual lord over a sister or brother. He goes on, “To assume the right to judge, or to assume that you have arrived at a settled spiritual maturity that entitles you to prescribe confidently at a distance for another’s sickness, is in fact to leave others without the therapy they need for their souls; it is to cut them off from God, to leave them in their spiritual slavery—while reinforcing your own slavery” (23). The task of spiritual formation is not about setting oneself up in the heights of “a settled spiritual maturity” from which we may lead those below, awash in worldliness, into our mastered spirituality. Condemnation and judgment is not a monastic way to provide “therapy for the soul.” Rather, Williams points to another way: heal by solidarity. He writes, “The fundamental need as far as the counselor is concerned is first of all to put oneself on the level of the one who has sinned, to heal by solidarity, not condemnation” (20).

For the early monastics, according to Rowan Williams, the human being constantly attempts escapes from the reality of sinful selfishness. We don’t want to pay attention to our own sinfulness. So, according to this tendency, the other provides more opportunities for escaping from the hard work of our spiritual journey. In order to say something spiritually significant, we hide our own story of failures and thus confidently project a dishonest spiritual plateau onto which we can drag others. But that is not the way of desert spirituality. For the fathers and mothers of the Egyptian desert, “the plain acknowledgement of your solidarity in need and failure opens a door: it shows that it is possible to live in the truth and to go forward in hope” (23). This is spiritual formation through solidarity. The task of spirituality is to serve in God’s work of salvation by bringing one’s neighbor into an ever new relationship with Christ; but this giving of the self to the spirituality of the other also provides an opportunity for recognizing the hovering self-obsession clouding our grasps at a settled spirituality. The spiritual journey of our neighbor, with all their apparent failures, offers us the possibility of solidarity, and in that solidarity we learn to see our own spiritual needs. The other is not an opportunity for self-justification. Rather, the other is a chance for solidarity… and in that solidarity to offer space for God to happen. Williams writes, “Insofar as you open such doors for another, you gain God, in the sense that you become a place where God happens for somebody else. You become a place where God happens“ (24). Williams provides a short story from the desert literature that illustrates this sort of therapy through solidarity: “A brother questioned Abba Poemen, saying, ‘If I see my brother sinning, should I hide the fact?’ The old man said, ‘At the moment when we hide a brother’s fault, God hides our own. At the moment when we reveal a brother’s fault, God reveals our own’” (21). Our neighbor is sacramental, a means of grace, a vehicle of revelation. This is a dispossessive Christianity that loosens anxious grips of settled methods of spiritual formation, and learns to see our self in the other. And in this dynamic interplay of self and other we open our usually comfortable visions of faithfulness to the surprising work of God’s gracious work in Christ—the Christ who appears in our midst, in the inbetween… flowing through the newly discovered lines of solidarity.

At the end of his first chapter, Williams gives some outline to the sort of church this early monastic spiritual formation suggests our present life together. It is a church no longer rooted in an anxious ethos of self-justification: God “has already dealt with the dreaded consequences of our failure, so that we need not labor anxiously to save ourselves and put ourselves right with God” (27). Thus the task of spirituality is not achievement, nor should we proclaim an evangelical message based on the wrath of God—”Join the church, or else God might…” Rather, this is an evangelism that says, “Hey, we need you. Come help us see our sinfulness, and maybe you might discover this divine hope we taste and see in each other.” And this is a spirituality that embarks on the strenuous yet life-giving journey into the mercies of truth: “the strenuousness is in the effort to keep before our eyes the truth of our condition; the relaxedness is in the knowledge of a mercy that cannot ever be exhausted” (30). And this discovery leads us out of our comfortable self-enclosures of individualist spirituality into “the community of Christ’s body in which we live, ultimately, only through each other” (31-32). Living through each other—that is what a Christian spirituality is all about. And this life-through-each-other is called church.