Rowan Williams: The Work Of Grace

Wonkette peruses the new issue of the Atlantic. The piece that stood out for me is Paul Elie's nuanced essay on the legacy of the archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams. Paul jolted me out of a lazy assumption that the man has no backbone or represents the intellectual path of least resistance. He doesn't. What Paul evokes of Williams' subtle and often conservative thought made me think anew about the man. These words of Williams' are part of what Christianity needs to regain if it is to engage modernity successfully:

Christian faith has its beginnings in an experience of profound contradictoriness. [So the church should proclaim] a hidden God, who does not uncover his will in a straight line of development, but fully enters into a world of confusion and ambiguity and works in contradictions.

Elie, whose marvelous book, The Life You Save May Be Your Own, every thinking Catholic should read, homes in on Williams' fine intellect:

From a sex scene in Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet, [Williams] drew a definition of grace as beautiful and convincing as any I know. 

There may be little love, even little generosity, in Clark’s bedding of Sarah, but Sarah has discovered that her body can be the cause of happiness to her and to another. It is this discovery which most clearly shows why we might want to talk about grace here. Grace, for the Christian believer, is a transformation that depends in large part on knowing yourself to be seen in a certain way: as significant, as wanted.

From there, the essay has the inevitability of a proof in philosophy. Gay people, too, deserve to be wanted sexuallydeserve the body’s grace. The full expression of this grace through sexual relations takes time and the commitment of the partners to come to know each otherthrough the commitment of marriage or something like it. Sexual fidelity is akin to religious fidelity“not an avoidance of risk, but the creation of a context in which grace can abound.” For the church to stand in the way of such relationships, straight or gay, is to stand in the way of God’s grace.

In the end, the battle for gay equality and dignity should be one of the pioneering Christian causes of our time. And when the history of this period is written, it may be Williams, and not Benedict, who forged the real way forward.

(Paul talks to Justine Isola about his essay here. Photo by Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty.)