Williams - Rowan Williams and Greg Garrett

IN CONVERSATION

Rowan Williams
and Greg Garrett

Copyright 2019 by Rowan Williams and Greg Garrett

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher.

Scripture quotations contained herein are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

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Cover design by Marc Whitaker, MTWdesign
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A record of this book is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN-13: 978-1-64065-129-6 (pbk.)
ISBN-13: 978-1-64065-130-2 (ebook)

Printed in the United States of America

WHEN NANCY BRYAN, who commissioned this book for the In Conversations series, first spoke to me about it in her Manhattan office several years ago, I smiled and said it sounded like a lovely idea. Rowan Williams and I have been having enjoyable and, for me, certainly, transformational talks for over a decade, and more than once I have had other friends say theyd love to be a fly on the wall for our conversations. I mentioned Nancys offer to Rowan in an e-mail, and said I thought it might be fun. But I also thought it unlikely ever to happen, as you would be hard-pressed to find two people with more things to write than Rowan and myself. But Nancy persisted, sat down with Rowan at the University of the South during his stateside visit there in fall 2016, and talked him into doing this book.

The idea behind the In Conversation series is very simple: two friends who happen to be theologians come together to talk about their lives, their spiritual practices, the Church, their passions. In the process, readers are permitted to be flies on the wall as the speakers reflect on matters that are personal but also of universal importance. When the first book in the series came out in 2017, it set a high bar, featuring, as it did, two trailblazers, the Most Rev. Michael Curry, the first African American presiding bishop of the American Episcopal Church, and Barbara Harris, the first female bishop elected in the entire Anglican Communion, as well as the first African American bishop in the Episcopal Church. Bishops Harris and Curry talked about their long friendship, their history with the Church, social justice, and what it felt like to constantly be the first something. Their lives have been remarkableBishop Harris marched with Dr. King and Bishop Curry recently electrified the world by preaching Jesus at a certain royal weddingand they ushered in the series with distinction.

To follow such dynamic leaders, thinkers, and preachers, I suppose Nancy thought only a Rowan Williams would do. Although he is not the sort of person to delight in such praise, Rowan is not only the past archbishop of Canterbury, the spiritual leader of some eighty million Anglican Christians around the world, but was recognized even before his term as archbishop as one of the worlds best and most important theologians. I would listen to Rowan Williams talk about cleaning the oven or baking breadtwo things we do in fact talk about in these conversations. He has written marvelous books on the Church and Christian belief, on literature, on Christian spiritual practices, on Christian traditions, and much more. I first encountered Rowan in 2004 as a seminarian reading On Christian Theology (2000) in my first semester at the Episcopal Seminary of the Southwest. The density of his thought, the intricacy of his reasoning, the construction of his arguments, and the beauty of his language floored me; he became my favorite theologian, and remains so to this day. When he wrote in his essay The Judgment of the World in that collection that all good stories change us if we hear them attentively; the most serious stories change us radically (42), he was expressing my own long-held but newly theological belief that storywhether novel, film, or powerful personal experienceoffered the keys to transformation.

As a novelist, memoirist, and film critic, I had come to seminary to learn new kinds of writing, and to understand how the writing I had been doing could have a sacred value. When I discovered Rowans Grace and Necessity: Reflections on Art and Love (2005), a book about the Southern writer Flannery OConnor, with whom I have always felt a strong connection, and the Welsh poet and painter David Jones, he showed me that story and culture were most definitely vehicles for spiritual meaning. Here was the archbishop of Canterbury and my favorite Christian theologian demonstrating that films, music, and other forms of culture could be taken as seriously as I cared to take them. While Id cowritten, in addition to my novels, a book on The Matrix films and a book on the spiritual themes of comics and graphic novels, Grace and Necessity encouraged me to go deeper, to think more seriously about the relationship between the supposedly secular and the sacred, and what followed for me were a book on Hollywood film structured as systematic theology, a book on grief exploring archetypal narratives for their meanings, and a book on the rock band U2 exploring the theological dimensions of their songs, of their work for peace and justice, and of their life together as a sacred community.

I was discovering that my fiction, my spiritual autobiography, and my work as a cultural theologian were all linked through the desire to make meaning, to understand why we are here, to what we are called, what the basic shape of the universe might be, and what might be at the heart of it. It was at about this time that, as we relate, Rowan began reading my work, beginning with the first edition of my spiritual autobiography, Crossing Myself. I still have Rowans letter from Lambeth Palace dated October 25, 2006, in which he described having to tear himself away from reading it to get on with other work. (That I almost didnt receive his letterand that our friendship thus might have never happenedboggles my mind.) But I did, and we became first pen pals, sharing thoughts on each others latest work, and then, eventually, friends meeting face-to-face to share a cup of tea or a meal and to talk about the writers we admired and the families we loved.

Rowans encouragement of my work as novelist, memoirist, and cultural theologian was important to me early in my career, and continues to be important to this day. (You can hear his encouragement in the conversation youre about to read, just as I hope you hear my encouragement to Rowan to continue to create as a poet and playwright, two forms in which I wish more people knew his work.) Now when we meet for conversation, we do so on slightly more level ground, for there are things I have learned to do well, and gaps for each of us completed in some way by the other. When I ask him about his prayer practiceor he asks me about reading popular culture for spiritual meaningthere is genuine curiosity, growing I suppose out of the recognition that the other has helpful knowledge.

But in this conversation, most importantly, I hope you hear two friends who delight in each others company, and who find their imaginations fired by the exchange of ideas themselves. I had told people that what Rowan and I do when we get together is talk; what you will read in the pages that follow is the proof of that, but also the value of it. As I said, I would listen to Rowan talk about bread rising, and even though we revisited topics we had discussed many times, I learned much from the three days in July 2018 we spent in Rowans study in Cambridge, where he is master of Magdalene College. I hope this conversation inspired new thoughts for Rowan as well; as Ive listened again to the audio files, Im struck by how often one of us responds to the other with yes, or of course, or a laugh, or a grunt of recognition, or by completing the others thought. These conversations were good for the two of us, which suggests to me that there will be something here for you as well, whether youre interested in the practice of prayer, or how Christians are called to approach politics, or how we write, or what happens when we write well, or how Shakespeare teaches us to be more human, or the preaching event, or why Doctor Who deserves his own Gospel According To book.