Not a transaction we initiate

When Communion is celebrated, the intersection of time and eternity is such that we are remembering something we didn’t experience and looking forward to something we can’t imagine.

It sounds a bit like a sentence by Rowan Williams – and it was said at a lecture he gave for the clergy of the diocese in Ripon Cathedral this week – but it was actually something said by a Hospital Chaplain as he thanked the speaker.

Rowan Williams is, of course, always worth hearing and always stretching (as here and here ten years ago and here two years after that – all insights to which I return frequently and gratefully); I’ve even got something out of those parts of his 2013 Gifford Lectures I’ve been able to understand (although I discover that my bookmark is stubbornly half way through the third of the six lectures where it has been for a very long time). 

I remember especially a piece of work he did (with Sarah Coakley) in the 1980s which highlighted the sense that our praying is always the work of God – we can become aware in our silence that we are caught up in the exchange of love between Father, Son and Holy Spirit which is the life of God. 

Romans 8’s reminder that the Son takes the needs of the world to the right hand of the Father, and the Spirit makes our inarticulate groans into prayers, means that this isn’t something remote from human experience and hope.

So his lecture this week was indeed about prayer not being a transaction we seek to initiate but a slipping into action always already going on, something taking us into and towards the new creation which is God’s desire and purpose.  And Romans 8 was his primary reference.

But, this time, I've come home still dwelling on the Hospital Chaplain's paradox - with Jesus life and the Kingdom of God both close and within.

And I've also been thinking about a young member of the clergy in the row behind me who spent a quite inordinate amount of time on her mobile phone.  I wondered how her apparent need to be connected made her appear so disconnected from the experience and insights to which the Bishop of Leeds had explicitly asked us to take time together away from out busyness elsewhere.

It turned out that she was tweeting – distilling and sharing what was being said - and it was in fact me who was spending the time being distracted by judgmental thoughts even while listening to Rowan Williams carefully call me yet again to lay myself in silence before God (thus vulnerable, he suggested, to the possibility that I would see myself ever more clearly as my senses adapting to be in the light of Christ).

The picture is another one of light again this week spilling into St James’, Cross Roads .