Tokens of Trust by Rowan Williams

Author:Rowan Williams
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781646980413
Publisher: Presbyterian Publishing Corporation

DAVID JONES A Man for All Seasons, Sanctus Christus de Capel-y-ffin (detail)

DAVID JONES The Royal Banners, Vexilla Regis (1948)

FOUR

The Peace Dividend

He suffered and was buried,

and the third day he rose again

Peace and praise, reconciliation and delight; these are the purposes of God. But they are not at all in evidence in our world. Human lives are not in general very obviously reconciled to each other; the praise of God has to be listened for very hard. Across the ages, the image of God in the hearts and minds of human beings has too often been one that seems negative, frightening, trivial or all of these. The world is not where it might be, and where – if all we have been thinking about so far is true – it should be. God has made us and given us liberty to reflect his life, yet we use our minds and our freedom to protect ourselves rather than to pass on the life we have received. In St Luke’s Gospel we read the story of the runaway son, the ‘prodigal’; and when Jesus describes what the runaway’s life was like when things went wrong, he says, in the stark words of the King James version of the Bible, ‘no man gave unto him.’ The familiar world is one in which people do not habitually give to each other as they could, let alone giving to God. It is a world with powerful defences between individuals, nations, ethnic groups, classes and religions.

So we’re not where we could and should be, in a state where peace is sealed by what some like to call an ‘economy of gift’, living by one another’s generosity. Day by day, in the most ordinary things of life, we acknowledge how basic such an economy is, just by the exchanges of family affection and routine courtesy or kindness; yet in our own lives and even more in the lives of the great collective realities in which we live, of nations and cultures, it constantly goes askew. And each of us knows how readily we will take the path of least resistance if giving to another becomes complicated or demanding or puts us at a real disadvantage. Pause between the last sentence and the next, as I do in writing this, and think of the last twenty-four hours … And the Christian belief that is summed up in the language of ‘original sin’ is basically a way of saying that this is a tangle that goes back to the very roots of humanity. The image that comes to mind is one familiar from the country roads of Monmouthshire in the days when, as Bishop of Monmouth, I travelled them each week to outlying parishes: miss one obscure sign, take one wrong turning, and you can’t set it right just by another simple right turn. In humanity’s history, the ingrained habit of turning inwards, turning in upon ourselves, is passed on. We learn how to be human only as we also learn the habits of self-absorption.

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