OUR NEED OF STORIES

'We all need narratives to make sense of the world.'
Daniel Mendelsohn, An Odyssey, p.290.

GOOD TEACHING

'...the best teacher is the one who wants you to find meaning in the things that have given him pleasure, too, so that the appreciation of their beauty will outlive him. In this way - because it arises from an acceptance of the inevitability of death - good teaching is like good parenting.'

Daniel Mendelsohn, An Odyssey: A Father, a Son and an Epic, p.215.

CHURCH RENEWAL

'The church is always renewed from the edges rather than the centre.'

Rowan Williams, Silence and Honey Cakes, p.109.

CHANGING CHURCHES

'If you leave a church community too quickly, you find it becomes a habit; more salt to drink. Sooner or later you will have to confront the challenge of being pledged to uncomfortable reality - and how to cope with the inner restlessness which constantly suggest what look like simpler solutions, avoiding the difficult route of changing myself.'

Rowan Williams, Silence and Honey Cakes, p.97.

OUR UNIQUE PATH TO HOLINESS

'I cannot become holy by copying another's path. Like the novice in the desert, I must watch the elders and learn the shape and rhythm of being Christian from those who have walked further and worked harder; but then I have to take my own steps, and create a life that has never beeen lived before. At the Day of Juidgment, as we are often reminded, the question will not be why we failed to be someone else; I shall not be asked why I wasn't Martin Luther King or Mother Teresa, but why I wasn't Rowan Williams. The journey is always one that leads into more not less uniqueness; all to do once agan with the call to be persons, not individuals.'

Rowan Williams, Silence and Honey Cakes, p.95.

THE BODY SAVES THE SOUL

'Only the body saves the soul. It sounds rather shocking put like that, but the point is that the soul (whatever exactly that is) left to itself, the inner life or whatever you want to call it, is not capable of transforming itself. It needs the gifts that only the external life can deliver: the actual events of God's action in history, heard by physical ears, the actual material fact of the meeting of believers where bread and wine are shared, the actual wondeful, disagreeable, impossible, unpredictable human beings we encounter daily, in and out of the church. Only in this setting do we become holy - in a way entirely unique to each one of us.'

Rowan Williams, Silence and Honey Cakes, p.94.

INTIMACY WITH YOURSELF

'To be a real agent for God to connect with the neighbour in the way we have been thinking about, each of us needs to know the specific truth about himself or herself; that is to say, it's no good just saying to yourself, 'I'm a sinner,' in general terms. The specific facts of your experience may or may not be helpful to another - you should not assume that you always need to share the detail, but you need to know it yourself. To be the means of reconciliation for another within the body of Christ, you must be consciously yourself, knowing a bit about what has made you who you are, what your particular problems and brick walls are, what your gifts are.'

Rowan Williams, Silence and Honey Cakes, p.39.

CHURCH AS A COMMUNITY OF FAILURE

'The church is a community that exists because something has happened which makes the entire process of self-justification irrelevant. God's truth and God's mercy have appeared in concrete form in Jesus and, in his death and resurrection, have worked the transformation that only God can perfom and told us what only God can tell us: that he has already dealt with the dreadful consequences of our failure, so that we need not labour anxiously to save ourselves and put ourselves right with God. The church's aim is to be a community that demonstrates this decisive transformation as really experiencable. One of the chief sources of the anxiety from which the gospel delivers us is the need to protect my picture of myself as right and good. So one of the most obvious characteristics of the church ought to be a willingness to abandon anything like competitive virtue (or competitive suffering or competitive victimage, competitive tolerance or competitive intolerance or whatever). The church points to the all-sufficiency of Christ when it is full of people whose concern is not to seperate others from the hope of reconciliation and life by their fears and obssessions. A healthy church is one in which we seek to stay connected to God by seeking to connect others with God; one in which we 'win God' by converting one another by our truthful awareness of fraility. And a church that is living in such a way is the only church that will have anything different to say to the world: how deeply depressing if all the church offered were new and better ways to succeed at the expense of others, reinstating the scapegoat mechanisms that the cross of Christ should have exploded once and for all.'

Rowan Williams, Silence and Honey Cakes, p.33. 

THE BASIS OF GOOD CHRISTIAN COUNSELLING

'The fundamental need as far as the counsellor is concerned is first of all to put themselves on the level of the one who has sinned, to heal by solidarity not condemnation.'

Rowan Williams, Silence and Honey Cakes: The wisdom of the desert, p.28.

A COMPLEMENTARY MARRIAGE

'The big surprise that marriage to Vincent had sprung on her was contentment. She had moments of desolation and moments of great joy, but underneath was some steady current of feeling. Misty's propensity toward pessimism and Vincent's towards optimism really did complement. Vincent was not less cheerful, and Misty was only slightly less judgmental, but they seemed to have formed a third person who smoothed out their edges and made life together possible and profirtable.'

Laurie Colwin, Happy All the Time, p.205.