Because if my faith rests on ignoring such tensions . . . my God is going to be the presiding spirit of whatever makes me comfortable.

LISTENING YESTERDAY TO A LECTURE by Rowan Williams,  One being with the Father, given last September,  I thought I would transcribe it and go over it during the first week or so of the new year.   But this morning, looking at RMJ's blog I read this comment originally from bluesky:

The thing to remember is that destroying the Kennedy Center is the point of all of this. Shut down arts, shut down science, shut down academia so that radical Christianity can take over.

Reading that I realized that instead of me writing something of less value,  Rowan Williams had said something far more apt and a far better refutation than anything I could come up with.  Here from about 35:20 in the lecture .

Engagement with the ongoing risky time-taking business of finding where life is under threat and asking how we may receive and give life there. Yes, that is a crucial element in what the Christian community is summoned to do.

But for that to go on happening, the imagination must be served day by day and century by century. An imagination which helps to give us the tools for seeing where that reciprocity, that communion is challenged or where it is failing. 

And that is where the life of the arts so profoundly comes in as part of our belief in the eternal word who is of one being with the father. This creativity exercised realized within time involves us in the kind of imaginative enterprise in the arts which has the courage to live with irresolution, incompleteness, to give breathing space to the questions.

To listen hard and attend hard to those who seem impenetrably different and threatening. To listen hard and attend hard to those who barely know what it is to be listened to.

Which is why, of course, art that comes from a Christian soil is not always consoling.  Art that comes from fidelity to the Gospel should be and so often is an art that is not afraid of discord.

In this moment, the most important thing may not be to look for what feels like or sounds like reconciliation, but to listen intently for what is not yet resolved and to make sure that that is drawn in.

You might perhaps expect me to refer to Dostoevsky here, so I shall.  [Williams is a respected Dostoevsky scholar.]

But when Dostoevsky in his last and most formidable novel, Brothers Karamazov,  talks about what he's doing, he says, I'm trying to make a better case for atheism than an atheist can.  I'm trying to show that a Christian can look harder and listen harder to the actual stress, tension, and incompletion of the world.  Because if my faith rests on ignoring such tensions, my God is not going to be the father almighty, creator of heaven and earth. My God is going to be the presiding spirit of whatever makes me comfortable.

And as you will be aware, the church has refined that kind of theology to something of a specialism in many areas of its life across the centuries. And I dare say it's not wholly unknown these days. Maybe not even in the United States of America.

Instead of looking for the consolation of familiarity and making God the ultimate sanctioner of the familiar and the safe, the Christian artist seeks to make sure that the worst, the hardest is not ignored. The Christian artist allows breathing space for difficulty, for tension,
breathing space for the expression of despair,  the expression of hopelessness, even though the very act of imagining that is an act of hope.

In the terms of the comment which is about Trump plastering his name on the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC,  I can guarantee the fashionable despiser of Christianity that, in these most profoundly Christian terms, such art, seldom if ever made it to the Kennedy Center, at least in so far as what I used to see from there on PBS or recall reading about.   Even the more challenging of high-overhead art is, in the end, dedicated to whatever makes its audience comfortable.   Such art might, once in a while, show up on the best sellers list at the NYT or at least it used to, but in the performing arts, it's seldom given such a big stage.   Looking at what else he posts on bluesky,  I doubt he has much use for such art as Rowan Williams says a committed Christian artist has to produce to be true to their profession of faith.  

I hope to revisit this passage when I go through it,  if I don't get distracted by the news or something else.  If you have the time to go through the lecture it's probably about as worth doing as anything else I can think of right now.   I was listening to one of the more erudite and learned of current theologians on something like this, going through the early history of Christology and its conception of the cosmos in relation to the identity of Christ with the Father, which was very interesting but I couldn't find much to apply in my life from it.  I wouldn't refute anything that was said, though I am left with my very Catholic conclusion that that relationship is mysterious and that human reasoning through it is probably for the most part irrelevant, no matter what the Neo-Platonists among the Church fathers may have believed.   I found much in Rowan Williams lecture that I could apply as well as think on.