Rowan Williams in Conversation

with Greg Garrett

Rowan Williams, GREG GARRETT & ROWAN WILLIAMS

• Publisher: SPCK Publishing
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780281083718
• eBook ISBN: 9780281083725
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Literature & the Arts in Christianity

Millions have read his words or heard him speak.

Now here's a chance to find out more about the man behind the books and speeches.

Be a fly on the wall as two friends – one the former Archbishop of Canterbury, the other 'one of America's leading voices on religion and culture' (BBC Radio) – talk about their shared passions and interests.

This is Rowan Williams at his most relaxed and personal. Listen in as he reflects on the vital pursuits that have characterized his life and ministry: among them, friendship, imagination, popular culture, faith and politics, prayer, and the blessings of sacred community.

Rowan Williams has made a unique contribution to the spiritual life of the English-speaking world. This eminently accessible introduction to the man and his thought reveals why.

Conversation Five

In Which Rowan and Greg Discuss: The Preaching Event / Preaching Styles / Preparing to Preach / Theology of Preaching / Preaching Influences / The Sermon and the Short Story / Preaching and Healthy Self-Disclosure / The Sermon in the Context of Worship / Imagining the Lives of the Listeners / Theology and Popular Culture / Archetypal Myths in Pop Culture / Culture and Community / Embedding the Gospel in Culture / The Gospel According to Doctor Who / The Parables / Evangelism

GG: It strikes me that this talk about poetry and recognition offers us a place where we can make a connection with preaching, which is something we both take seriously. This past Sunday in Paris, the sermon I preached was essentially what you just said: “This is how it seems to me. Is this how it seems to you?” And of course, we’re also saying, “Here’s what the tradition has to offer us.” But I know that both of us think of preaching as a very particular moment for a particular audience, and a big part of it is that thing we were talking about in poetry: I see where you are. We think of that in terms of the needs of a particular congregation on a particular Sunday or whatever day the preaching experience takes place. And I think another thing that translates is language: the well-chosen word, the well-chosen sound. Other things might translate for us as well.

RW: It’s exactly as you describe, I think. You’re trying to propose something recognizable and offer something recognizable. And as you know, one of the most moving things you can ever hear at the church door is “You might have been speaking to me.” You can only think, I hope I was. But if I was, it’s not because I calculated it. And that is one of the differences between poetry and preaching. Preaching is an event in the body of Christ. I want to give a great deal of weight to that. In some mysterious way, what is there is given in the community’s life, especially but not exclusively in the sacramental gathering. I’m not expressing a set of ideas to be imposed on an audience, but in some very elusive way, connections are being made. The Spirit links up, if all’s going well, with what people need to hear. You can tell when it’s happening. And when it’s not happening. I don’t know if you’ve had the experience I occasionally have of preaching a sermon where you might as well have a glass shield around the pulpit, the sense the words are bouncing off and falling into a heap. How does that happen?

GG: I was talking with your wife, Jane [Williams, theologian and author]. Who you know well.

It seems that in this conversation we are often violating one of the most essential rules of dramatic writing. I always tell my students that their characters shouldn’t talk to each other about things they already know. So any line of dialogue that begins “As you well know” is a bad line of dialogue. But there are some tiny bits of context that might be of value for our larger audience.

I was telling Jane last night about how often as a preacher I feel rescued by the Holy Spirit. There are those times for whatever reason when in my own attempt to gauge what a community needs, perhaps they don’t need what I thought they did. There does feel to me, unlike other kinds of writing—although even there, I have a practice of prayer. As I was working on this last novel, every time I went out to my friend Terry Nathan’s lake house to write I would begin sacramentally, some passages from the Psalms, and a very real prayer that the Spirit would be present and that my work might be useful—but the sacramental quality of what we do in the pulpit makes it that much more important to recognize. I long ago removed myself from any vanity that my being a good writer makes a difference necessarily to my preaching. The fact that I can move words around and find a striking image and tell a good story is an important set of tools. But if the Spirit is not present, all is in vain.

Our friend Greg Rickel [Episcopal Bishop of Olympia in Seattle, Washington] has an invocation with which he precedes every sermon, and I’ve taken to using it as well: “Holy Spirit, speak to us. And may we have ears to hear.” Because it seems to me that that is the central thing. I can think of some sermons where I thought, I don’t know if I have found the core, and if I’m going to be of use today, if these words are going to be of use, then Spirit is going to have to step in and move underneath them like water.

RW: Yes. That’s right. That’s why it isn’t about style or skill of composition. It’s very nice when you hear a sermon that’s well-composed and well-delivered, but that’s not it. You and I have both heard sermons which are formally not particularly impressive. But they get there. They get there. Which I suppose is what people like Saint Augustine are reflecting about when he talks about sermo humilis, the simple, the unadorned voice that preaching needs. [Augustine teaches about unadorned style in On Christian Doctrine 4, and about the power of simple sermons in Instruction 4.56; Erich Auerbach’s seminal essays about sermo humilis are collected in his Literary Language and Its Public in Late Latin Antiquity and in the Middle Ages, 1965.]

I wonder how some of the really great preaching stylists of the past managed, a [John Henry] Newman or [Lancelot] Andrewes, or [John] Donne for that matter. Or Archbishop [Thomas] Tenison. [John] Tillotson. The great eighteenth-century preachers. It must have felt a bit different, and yet, looking at classical sermons, something about Donne does strike you. He’s a stylist, he’s a performer, he’s a rock star.

GG: He’s a rock star.

RW: Yet. Read that stuff aloud and it connects, because something in him is connecting.

GG: Something culturally was different. We’re talking about a time that was preinternet, pretelevision, premovies. It was—not to diminish those sermons in any way—but it was also a form of entertainment. People would drop what they were doing in Oxford and go to hear Newman preach. When you’re talking about Donne as a rock star, there had to be some awareness on their part that they had to keep their audience interested in some way. I think that’s also true in some respects for us, although of course in our tradition, our sermons and homilies are shorter, and the question of keeping people entertained is less central. In the tradition in which I was raised, a twenty or twenty-five or thirty-minute sermon was not uncommon. If you are an African-American preacher, there’s a tradition of longer sermons yet.

RW: Indeed. And in the last couple of years I preached once or twice in Afro-Caribbean or African churches, Pentecostalist churches, on behalf of our charity, Christian Aid, and I think the first time I did that in a Nigerian Pentecostal church, I asked how long, and they said, “Well, probably not more than forty-five minutes.” And you’re preaching in both services.

GG: Now we have heard sermons that sounded, to us, as if they were going forty-five minutes.

We were talking earlier about craft, and there is some importance to craft, because sermon writing is a form. As we’ve talked about poetry, drama, the novel, the short story, in every form, there are things that, historically, have worked that once you know them, then you can think about perhaps departing from them. That’s why it’s fair to say that a sermon can be well-crafted, although what the Spirit does with that—spirit blows where it will.

I think that may be something for pastors and priests to keep in mind. This is an event, it’s liturgical, it’s Spirit-led, but it’s also a place where you can bring your craft to it. I have heard horror stories about people who didn’t prepare to preach. Who relied on the Holy Spirit side of the equation. My homiletics professor [at Seminary of the Southwest], Roger Paynter, once told us about a preaching conference where he got up and talked about how he prepared to preach, and offered a really good, useful set of practices, some of which I use to this day. And then the next speaker got up and said, “Well, I just get up in the pulpit and say what the Spirit wants me to say.” Roger told us, just to reinforce the horrified response that we were evincing, that the next person who followed that speaker, the first thing that speaker said was, “Please don’t ever, EVER do that.”

RW: If preaching is an event within the body of Christ, then it’s an event within the Holy Trinity. In other words, it’s an event in which the Word is born out of silence and activated by the Spirit. That, to me, roots it in the furthest depths in which we could possibly root it. It’s all a part of that flowering out of silence which is the eternal begetting of the Word or the Son in the Divine Life. But that Word or Son always overflows through the Spirit, and in our context, overflows in this place and this time, where the word comes alive in the relation between those who are gathered as the Body. I think we sometimes sell preaching short by not plugging it into that deepest of contexts, which is the Trinitarian life. So it becomes part of how the Spirit molds a community into the likeness of Jesus Christ. And that’s all about so much more than what you do with your notebook on Saturday evening.

GG: Who would you say are the people who have been most influential in your preaching life?

RW: Good question. I was very fortunate growing up to have two pastors who were both outstanding preachers, and outstanding holy people too. The first few years, as a little boy going to a Presbyterian chapel in Cardiff, my pastor’s name was Geraint Nantlais Williams, from a very famous non-Conformist dynasty of scholars and preachers. He was someone who brought a very solid theological mind to bear on all this. He was somebody who had a great gift of human accessibility. Then when my family and I had become Anglicans, when I was a teenager, again Canon Eddie Hughes, our parish priest, had in the pulpit a mixture of depth and passion and warmth that absolutely reflected the person he was, the priest he was. Somebody deeply rooted in an Anglo-Catholic spirituality that wasn’t in the least bit fussy or sectarian or precious, but conveyed all the time the intensity of divine love. You could warm your hands at his sermons.

I remember coming back from my first term at Cambridge, and going to Mass on a Sunday, and saying to my parents, “I’ve been hearing two sermons a week at Cambridge for the last eight weeks, but I haven’t heard anything to touch what the vicar does.”

So those two when I was a young man certainly had a big impact. And then, it’s a bit different, but I listened to Archbishop Antony Bloom [also called Anthony of Sourozh], the Russian Orthodox teacher, speaking on many, many occasions, and he had the same warmth and spontaneity and theological depth, and certainly made a very big impact. Though it wasn’t conventional Anglican preaching.

I do read sermons, and I do read, again and again, Austin Farrer, Farrer by common consent being one of the great Anglican preachers as well as one of the great Anglican minds of the last century. And Farrer’s sermons are so beautifully crafted; they are, literally, wonders of economy and elegance of expression and theological acuity. I don’t think I could preach like that now to save my life. I don’t think many people could. But for Farrer, the sermon was a bit like what we were saying about the short story. He clearly thinks, I’ve got twelve to fifteen minutes to say something, and it’s got to be said with every single bar of the music noted.

GG: My teacher Robert Olen Butler used to talk at the University of Iowa about the relationships between the reader and the novelist and the reader and the short story writer. It went sort of like this: If you’re a novel writer, you walk up to the reader, and you take their hand, and sort of swing it, fancifully.

RW: Yes. I like that.

GG: And you tell them, “I have a story to tell you. Let’s go for a walk. This may take a while. We may wander into some brambles, but we’ll get out.” But the short story approach is sort of like those scenes from the horror film where you grab somebody’s hand and run, hand in hand, through the forest—why that happens we still do not know; it is not physically possible, I think, to run faster hand in hand—but that’s the image we have of that urgency. “This is us; we are in this together; I’ve got a story to tell you; I don’t have much time. So stick with me. Every moment matters.”

RW: That’s a brilliant analogy, I think.

GG: That sense of urgency. In preaching, because as you were talking about, that person comes to the back door and says, “You were preaching to me today,” there have been times in my life that I absolutely needed to hear that sermon that day. And it is a hugely important thing to remember. I first walked in the doors of St. James Episcopal Church [Austin, TX] and heard a wonderful sermon by Greg Rickel, and it was precisely the sermon I needed to hear in that dark moment of my life. I am fond of saying that that church and that priest are responsible for my being on the planet today. The notion that preaching is anything other than life and death is a notion we have to resist.

RW: That’s right. It certainly isn’t just filling...

Table of contents

• Foreword by Greg Garrett
• Conversation One In Which Rowan and Greg Discuss: Friendship / Being Archbishop of Canterbury / The Practice of Prayer / Intention and Attention / Celtic Christianity / Welsh and Celtic Writers / Being Present / Cooking and Singing as Spiritual Practices
• Conversation Two In Which Rowan and Greg Discuss: Cooperation and Community / The Creative Process / Writing the Novel / Meeting Characters / Reading and Empathy / Trollope and Dickens / Marilynne Robinson / Everyone’s Story Matters / Characters and Redemption / Story Endings / Sequels / Doubting Thomas / Augustine and P. D. James
• Conversation Three In Which Rowan and Greg Discuss: Why Shakespeare Matters / Live Drama / The Preaching Event / The Danger of the Live Event / Shakespeare on the Theatrical / Shakespeare on Politics and Power / Writing Plays / The Unity of Creative and Theological Writing / Good and Bad Christian Writing / Writing Redemption / Story and Embodiment / Literature as Theology
• Conversation Four In Which Rowan and Greg Discuss: Writing Poetry / Writing Short Stories / Differences between Long Forms and Short Forms / The Last Temptation of Christ / Writing Practice / Poetic Technique / Shakespeare’s Language / Faulkner / Poetry’s Task: To Make You See / The Pastoral Value of Poetry
• Conversation Five In Which Rowan and Greg Discuss: The Preaching Event / Preaching Styles / Preparing to Preach / Theology of Preaching / Preaching Influences / The Sermon and the Short Story / Preaching and Healthy Self-Disclosure / The Sermon in the Context of Worship / Imagining the Lives of the Listeners / Theology and Popular Culture / Archetypal Myths in Pop Culture / Culture and Community / Embedding the Gospel in Culture / The Gospel According to Doctor Who / The Parables / Evangelism
• Conversation Six In Which Rowan and Greg Discuss: Faithfulness in Political Life / Bonhoeffer’s Ethics / Immigration in the States / A Faithful View of Humanity / Political Tribalism vs. Faithful Engagement / Abortion / Rights vs. Responsibilities / Failure as Humane / Guns / MLK / The Hope of the Christian
• Conversation Seven In Which Rowan and Greg Discuss: The Church at This Time / Institutionality and Relationality in the Church / Church as Every Day / Welsh Community / Hope for the Church / The Shifting Manifestation of the Church / Sacraments / What Is Saving Your Life Now?
• Afterword by Rowan Williams