ARCYB 2002
© Anglican Religious Communities 2002
Places of Joy?
by Archbishop Rowan Williams
One of the keynote addresses at the
Millennium Conference of Anglican Religious at Swanwick in September 2000 was given by the Archbishop of Wales
and Bishop of Monmouth, The Most Reverend Dr Rowan Williams. In it, he explored the idea that the rôle of
Religious communities is to be places of joy in the Church. This article is a digest of what he said, which he
has kindly edited for ARCYB.
What can be said about communities as places of joy? The Church is not at present conspicuously characterised by
joy. There is euphoria in some places, but this may coexist with malaise and be short-lived. Much energy is put
into politics and joy seems to be put 'on hold'; joy as something lasting and nourishing. This is not just true
of Anglicans but also of the Church as a whole. How do we recover and nurture joy? One place to start might be
the work of Michel de Certeau, the French philosopher and historian of French mysticism in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, especially his essay The
Weakness of Believing. In it, he
takes from the literature of contemplation the theme that the praying, believing soul is above all the place where
delight and pleasure occurs. To be a 'self' is not to accumulate or acquire experiences, but to be in this space,
the place of the delight in the encounter between the self and Christ, and the delight of the Son's encounter with
the Father. It is therefore a place of 'double delight'.
This place of delight is not like other places; it is both a 'no-man's land' and also an 'everyman's land'.
It calls us to stop defining the life of faith as something we 'do' and instead see it as a place where we are.
And this says something about what the Church as a whole is: a 'no place', a place where Christ happens in the
world. It therefore can not be decisively mapped, with an inside and an outside, for it has no boundaries. Such
a view then rejects the idea of the Church as a safe territory, which will need to be defended. Yet this vision
of the place of delight is always being undermined by politics, that is, by the sense of success and failure, and
by groups bidding for territory. The desire for 'purity' among some at the moment is one of the ways the Church
can be seen to be getting more territorial.
Religious communities have the same problems as the Church. Here too, there is tension and distraction, and
the place of joy is being undermined. But communities should remind the Church of its character. The vows taken
by Religious, I suggest, are about renouncing territory. Chastity means no sexual claims, poverty no economic independence
to defend, and obedience means no exclusively individual purposes. To commit to these vows is to take the risk
of
living beyond territories, and consequently the concept of succeeding ought to be irrelevant. Success can only
be measured by continuing in commitment: it is about getting up morning by morning, not moulding circumstances
and people to our will and personality. This echoes the Beatitudes, which are vignettes of stopping the worry over
'succeeding'.
Religious communities then are not expected to produce above-average numbers of saints, or attract huge vocations
or achieve huge tasks. If they do these things, that is all to the good, but these are not the purpose of Religious
Life. The purpose is to be a place of joy.
Joy is a difficult word because it is confused with being happy and cheerful. But while we can not be happy
all the time, perhaps perpetual joy is possible? When we opt out of defending and succeeding, we are trusting Christ;
and then joy is possible. Joy is not a feeling we possess, but, as St John of the Cross said of this relationship
of delight which happens in the depths, it is something which possesses us. This can be related to what St Ignatius
Loyola said about consolation (and desolation) without preceding cause. St Teresa of Avila reflected that
'movements of the soul' which began in us and ended in God left us exhausted or jaded, whereas those that began
in God and overflowed into their end in us did not become stale.
The Church is in need of recovering this, for the Church as a human institution never fully trusts God. The Church
is anxious because God does not look after God's interests, and tries therefore to look for other reasons for its
being, and to legislate for the conditions under which joy may happen. And so we miss the sense of gratitude in
the Church - the vast, inexpressible gratitude that ought to be everywhere present and yet which is not the first
thing we see when looking at the Church.
There is no point trying to live the Beatitudes unless an attempt is made to find
a structure in which something 'other' can happen, both individually and corporately. Does this happen in Rules
and customaries? One example would be the injunction to 'Bless the Lord, O my soul', carried out in the public
praise of the Divine Office, (whether or not the participants 'feel like' praising) - this is to guard joy. Small
groups living together can also capture joy by the shape of their life together, witnessing that there is something
in one another that brings joy.
Without joy, we become a pseudo-community, producing contests and rivalry; and this in turn results in anxiety,
which is the greatest curse. So much anxiety is manifest about statistics, purity, tradition, the future. But this
reveals a fundamental failure to hear the Gospel of God's faithfulness, and to believe that God is committed to
us and to others.
The Church at large can not hold on to this commitment unless it has particular places which hold joy: this
is the rôle of Religious communities. They may also demonstrate the possibility of prayer, show people how
it is done, or provide quiet places, but these are not the primary task. The nature of the vows point to the primary
rôle as that of being places of joy.
When the Church ceases to be a place where joy happens, it becomes a territory whose interests need defending.
Yet, maddeningly, joy can not be planned for: the overflow into us of God's delight in God can not be planned.
For the experience of joy is of something that has happened, not something that has been acquired. It is like the
moment at the end of a concert when the choir stops singing, the moment before the applause, or at the end of a
play. Something has happened, the brush of a wing. That is joy. We are here not to organise the world, but so that
God can happen in us.