I want to return to Christ the Stranger: The Theology of Rowan Williams by Benjamin Myers 📚

…A book that I read some time ago but want to note a few key quotes.

In a discussion on Rowan Williams formation by Orthodox theology, Myers notes the profundidty of the theology of the cross and the ‘Eastern’ approach of “Negative Theology” (What God is not):

Crucifixion: >Looking into the darkness of Golgotha, he lurches back into the brooding depths of creation, where the swirling galaxies take form in his own congealing blood. His wounds cut deep into the sinews of eternity; he has bled forever, crying while his blood brought forth the ‘heat and weight’ of all the worlds. ‘There was a cross in the heart of God before there was one planted on the green hill outside Jerusalem.’

Apophatic approach: >Negative theology, he argues, can never be ‘a move in a conceptual game’; it is not a technique, or a linguistic trick, or a clever way of circumventing obstacles in our language about God. It is rather a process of transformation, a conversion of the intellect – or rather, a conversion of the whole self – whereby we are drawn outside ourselves into the presence of someone who is different. According to Lossky, the doctrine of the trinity is a crucifixion of the intellect, ‘a cross for human ways of thought.’ If the cross is a revelation of God’s identity, then personality itself – what it means to be a person – is revealed as a ‘kenotic’ reality. In the trinity, there is no self-interest, no ‘individual will,’ but only an enormous movement of painful, ecstatic self-renunciation. This self-renouncing pattern of life is the root of all personal being.

Lastly, a key passage about Williams as a poet:

…Williams argues, the poet confronts the failure of language with complete honesty, and then endures this failure in order to go on speaking: ‘The return to language requires an act of faith, and an acceptance of the probability of failure.’Such a return to language is grounded in a Wittgensteinian awareness that there are no private or individual meanings, only the shared meanings that we exchange with one another. Part of the vocation of poets is to share with others their experience of the difficulty of language, their hurtful awareness of limitation, frustration, and inarticulacy. It is not the successes of poets but their failures that matter most: poets expand our human capacities by exposing us to the sheer objectivity of language, the way it enables human community while resisting human mastery and control.

A funeral hymnn cited by Fr John Behr in this talk on the economy of God:

I weep and I wail when I think upon death, and behold our beauty, created in the likeness of God, lying in the tomb, disfigured, bereft of glory and form.

O Marvel! What is this mystery concerning us? Why have we been given over unto corruption? And why have we been wedded unto death? Truly as it is written by the command of God, who gives the departed rest

Prayer for Persons Troubled in Mind or Conscience

Blessed Lord, the Father of mercies, and the God of all comforts: We beseech thee, took down in pity and com- passion upon this thy afflicted servant. Thou writest bit- ter things against him, and makest him to possess his former iniq- uities; thy wrath lieth hard upon him, and his soul is full of trou- ble: But, O merciful God, who hast written thy holy Word for our learning, that we, through patience and comfort of thy holy Scriptures, might have hope; give him a right understanding of himself, and of thy threats and promises; that he may neither cast away his confidence in thee, nor place it any where but in thee. Give him strength against all his temptations, and heal all his distempers. Break not the bruised reed, nor quench the smok- ing flax. Shut not up thy tender mercies in displeasure; but make him to hear of joy and gladness, that the bones which thou hast broken may rejoice. Deliver him from fear of the enemy, and lift up the light of thy countenance upon him, and give him peace, through the merits and mediation of Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen

-The Book of Common Prayer (1662).

Leafing thru this list of peotry resources from poet Christian Wiman, I found a great article on T.S. Eliot by former archbishop Rowan Williams.

From Rowan Williams (Poetic stanzas Eliot’s):

Where, then, is healing? Here Eliot is at his most stark: there is no escape, except into fantasy. There is only a penetrating further into the blackness and destructiveness of the world. Face the truth; face the fact that the world is a world of meaninglessness, of destruction, violence, death, and loss, that no light of ecstasy can change this. Only when we stop projecting patterns on to the world can we live without illusion, and living without illusion is the first step to salvation. “Only through time time is conquered.” And here the starkness gives way to gospel. If there is a God whose will is for the healing of men and women, he can heal only by acting in the worldliness of the world, in and through the vortex of loss and death. He must share the condition of our sickness, our damnation, so as to bring his life and his fullness into it.

        The wounded surgeon plies the steel

        That questions the distempered part;

        Beneath the bleeding hands we feel

        The sharp compassion of the healer’s art

        Resolving the enigma of the fever chart.

This is the pivot of the Quartets: God has borne all that we bear and so has made the fabric of history his own garment. The world has no discernable meaning or pattern, but into it there has entered the compassion of God. Give up the futile struggle to dominate and organize the chaos of the world in systems and mythologies, and realize that the empty destitution of confronting darkness is the only way in which love can begin. Only if we are honest about the world can we see the choices that confront us. Either there is only destruction and death, or there is destruction and death that we can take into ourselves to let it burn away our self-obsession and so make room for active love, compassion, mutual giving, life in communion. And the only sign of this possibility is the ambivalent memory of a dead and betrayed man.

        The dripping blood our only drink,

        The bloody flesh our only food.

Does he bear not only his future pain but the wounds, words, deeds, and things of all, for all time: the splitting of the atom, the finding of fire, the exploding of the bomb, the child pinned under the Pinto, the dog sunk in a black pond, the smoke rising over the vain city, the first split cell, mutation of fish, arrow into beast, tufts of gun smoke, sunspots on a high window, gallons of cold coffee? Does he bear it all, Christ, churning within him, every war that ever was or ever will be, dancing in his molecules so that it is just challenging to be around this man? Does Christ carry the you of two thousand years away, you and all your pretty madness, the girl you left behind, the bad movies, the failed exams, the love child, the weird quiet relief of cutting the lawn, the crushed cathedral, the mushroom and the cloud and the way a snake turns everything around it into sacred fear? Does he bear that, him down on the end of your bench? […] The disease, love, joy, tender flesh in a battlefield; a carjacking, a first kiss, a last breath. Does he carry these things, he who became sin?

—Joe Hoover, SJ O Death, Where is Thy Sting? A Meditation on Suffering

“The women who had come with him from Galilee followed and saw the tomb and how his body was laid. Then they returned and prepared spices and ointments. On the that Saturday they rested according to the commandment.”

St. Luke 23:55—56

[Of the Cross] Its breadth lies in the transverse beam on which the hands of the Crucified are extended; and signifies good works in all the breadth of love: its length extends from the transverse beam to the ground, and is that whereto the back and feet are affixed; and signifies perseverance through the whole length of time to the end: its height is in the summit, which rises upwards above the transverse beam; and signifies the supernal goal, to which all works have reference, since all things that are done well and perseveringly, in respect of their breadth and length, are to be done also with due regard to the exalted character of the divine rewards: its depth is found in the part that is fixed into the ground; for there it is both concealed and invisible, and yet from thence spring up all those parts that are outstanding and evident to the senses; just as all that is good in us proceeds from the depths of the grace of God, which is beyond the reach of human comprehension and judgement.

St. Augustine: On I John.

"Concealed and invisible" alluding to the depth of the cross—its victim, and work— reminds me of (1)Jesus' and (2)Wendell Berry's words:

1. "Listen carefully: Unless a grain of wheat is buried in the ground, dead to the world, it is never any more than a grain of wheat. But if it is buried, it sprouts and reproduces itself many times over. In the same way, anyone who holds on to life just as it is destroys that life. But if you let it go, reckless in your love, you’ll have it forever, real and eternal.

2. Put your faith in the two inches of humus
   that will build under the trees
   every thousand years.
   Listen to carrion — put your ear
   close, and hear the faint chattering
   of the songs that are to come...Practice resurrection.

It seems like Augustine cannot but help himself from interpreting St John's letter with the language of the apostle of the cross, St Paul. Did Paul have the multi-dimensionality of the cross in mind when he wrote to the Ephesians, Dear Bishop of Hippo?

that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.