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Rowan Williams has written a clear book. A beautiful book, ‘quite the most beautiful writing on discipleship today’ if we are to believe the incumbent Archbishop of Canterbury. Based on a series of addresses given between 2007–2012, Being Disciples: The Essentials of the Christian Life carries Williams’ characteristic warmth and depth. The book is structured in six short and accessible chapters: Being disciples; Faith, hope and love; Forgiveness; Holiness; Faith in society; and finally, Life in the Spirit.
Christian discipleship, shows Williams, is primarily about being rather than doing, contemplation rather than activism, relationship rather than rules, permanence rather than sporadic piety. The disciple is not the nerdy pupil who shouts ‘just the facts ma’am’ or the ‘action points’ obsessed corporate animal, but a patient listener who waits for God, looking for the clues of ‘how reality is being reorganized around Jesus’.
Having listened deeply and looked carefully, disciples follow their master wherever he goes, sticking close to him and, through him, to the Father’s love. This takes them in unexpected and uncomfortable places, for “Jesus chooses the company of the excluded, the disreputable, the wretched, the self–hating, the poor, the diseased.” There is no ‘holier than thou’ superiority in following this Master.
Religious people are (sometimes deservedly) portrayed as aloof, detached from the rough and tumble of ‘real life’. Icons of saints, in this respect, are not immediately helpful here. Williams reminds us, however, that at their best, disciples practice prayer and holiness not as other–worldly pursuits, but as modes of being in the real world, doing ordinary things like washing up or washing wounds, only in a wider, eternal perspective. In this they are merely following their Master– God’s holiness made flesh – for whom to be holy is not be detached, but unreservedly involved, committed to the world in all its brokenness.
On the question of personal identity Williams makes the radical claim that discipleship involves nothing less than the complete rewiring of our humanity around Christ. As with all projects this sometimes involves periods of confusion and perplexity. ‘Who am I?’ ‘Where am I going?’ ‘Can the threads of my life be woven into a meaningful whole?’ Williams is reassuring here: “You have an identity not because you have invented one or because you have a little hard core of selfhood that is unchanged but because there is an abiding witness of who you are in all your messiness. What you don’t understand or see, the bits of yourself you can’t pull together in a convincing story, are all held together in a single gaze of love.” The Witness of our messy lives is an abiding Presence, who does not let go. Slowly, as disciples grow into this ‘dependable relationship’ with the abiding presence of God (Williams’ description of ‘faith’), they themselves become dependable persons for others in the world.
Significantly, this is one argument for the public relevance of faith. For which society can spare dependable members? Hard secularism, which consigns all religious expressions to the private sphere, creates a vacuum which market forces that ultimately distort our humanity and impoverish our common life rush to fill. Therefore, while faith voices must not impose their vision on society, they must be allowed in the public square to offer their moral horizons for consideration and their practical resources for strengthening our common life.
To conclude, Being Disciples is not a manual, let alone a list of rules. Those looking for do’s and don’ts or tersely presented truth propositions of the Christian faith will have to look elsewhere. What Rowan Williams offers in Being Disciples is a winsome picture of following Jesus, which speaks to the imagination no less than the mind, to the affections no less than the will. Here’s what the soul–posture of discipleship might look like.
“Being Disciples. Essentials of the Christian Life“ by Rowan Williams is published by SPCK/Eerdmans (2016)
