Rowan Williams on St. John of the Cross, Understanding, Desire, Remembering and Love

Paul writes – Archbishop Rowan Williams recently (06/03/10) delivered an important lecture under the title:  Faith, hope and charity in tomorrow's world. I was reminded again of what it is that Rowan does so very very well, and why I continue to listen to, and read him. 

Here are a few excerpts from that lecture: 

“...St John [of the Cross] -- like everybody else in his generation of Catholic theologians -- takes for granted a picture of the human mind which sees it as working in three basic ways: the human mind understands, it remembers and it wants. Or, in more abstract terms, the human mind is made up of the interaction of understanding, memory and will. And the distinctive and fresh insight that St John of the Cross offers, is that if you put together understanding, memory and will with faith, hope and charity you have a perfect picture of where we start and where we finish. In the Christian life, faith (he says) is what happens to our understanding; hope is what happens to our remembering; and love is what happens to our wanting. To grow up as a Christian is to take that journey from understanding, into faith, from memory into hope and from will into love.

 

St John also believed that in that process of Christian growing-up, one of the very difficult things that happened was that we lost our bearings on the way. What we thought we understood we discover that we never did; what we thought we remembered is covered with confusion; and what we thought we wanted turns out to be empty. We have to be re-created in faith and hope and love for our understanding our memory and our will to become what God would really want them to be.

 

...We've lost a lot of our bearings. The Church at large continues to say what it has said; it says what it has always said in the context of worship and it reads its Bible faithfully. And yet in so much of the life of the Church there is a degree of loss of nerve and loss of confidence...

Somewhere in ... talk about freedom; we lose touch with the sense of the deep desires that actually make us who we are. We lose touch with the sense that there is a current in our lives moving towards a goal...”

You can read or listen to the lecture by going here.