An Hour With +Rowan

Although it was my day off, all I had to do was click the Zoom link and sit and listen to Rowan Williams talk about ‘The Catholic understanding of mission’ as part of a series organised by the diocese, so I thought it would be churlish not to.  Of course the venerable ex-Archbishop has a useful ability to summarise complex matters in simple, or simplish, formulations: he pointed us away from any definition of Catholicism that stressed universality – the straightforward meaning we might be familiar with – but what he described as a more Orthodox conception, qualitative rather than quantitative: ‘that form of Christian life which intends its members to live a risen life’, ‘to receive and give more radically than in any other form of human living’. +Rowan went on to discuss what tradition does and doesn’t mean (‘always a way of praying, not something passed on by a Masonic elite but a steady regularity of reading and reflecting’), the sacramental life as our response to God’s promises, the conviction that God is at work in the world and so our action must not be based on anxiety, and the belief that the Church is something God has made, not us.

Hmm, as I thought – I thought – we’re not actually going to get anything very practical here. The gentleman from the diocesan Mission Enabling Team hosting the seminar asked +Rowan what it might mean when a parish followed these ideas well, a rather deft way of saying ‘But what do we actually do?’ without using those specific words, it seemed to me, and Lord Williams remembered some of his own experience in parishes where the eucharist was celebrated in the homes of people who invited their neighbours and friends, or where parishioners gathered in small groups for an hour of contemplative prayer. That was OK. I suspect what we need, maybe what we really wanted, was the next step beyond what our speaker gave us – ‘Applying the Catholic Understanding of Mission’, perhaps.