Ordinary Time: A Tribute to Rowan Williams by Stanley Hauerwas

I've just found this address by Stanley Hauerwas on a blog called Entangled States. Hauerwas discusses the work of Rowan Williams and especially William's concept of living in the present moment, especially in what Anglicans called Ordinary Time. This resononates with some of what Maggi Dawn was saying in her Greenbelt seminar The Rhythm of the Saints. It's just what I need to hear at the moment. Here's a small snippet:

Williams confesses that he longs for a Church more true to itself. Such a church would be one more determined to oppose war, a church capable of offering hospitality to resident aliens who may be gay, a church that can challenge the economic practices that perpetuate poverty. Williams believes his desire for such a church is Godly yet he believes he must also learn to live in and attend to the reality of the Church as it is, to do the prosaic things that can be and must be done now and to work at my relations now with the people who will not listen to me or those like me--because what God asks of me is not to live in the future but to live with honesty and attentiveness in the present, i.e., to be at home. We constantly try to start from somewhere other than were we are. Truthful living involves being at home with ourselves, not complacently but patiently, recognizing that what we are today, at this moment, is sufficiently loved and valued by God to be the material with which he will work, and that the longed-for transformation will not come by refusing the love and the value that is simply there in the present moment. Living in the truth involves the same sober attention to what is there--to the body, the chair, the floor, the voice we hear, the face we see--with all the unsatisfactoriness that this brings.

Comments

[Paul Fromont]

Cheers Andy. I shall look forward to reading this.

[Gary Manders]

Superb address & very appropriate when I don't want to do the hard work of being where I am right now. Thanks for posting it.