Quotes from Rowan Williams

you move towards thanksgiving, and you understand thanksgiving as something more than just private acknowledgement of God's goodness; you have to learn to approach it as a 'soaking-in' of what God is. 'We give thanks to thee for thy great glory', as the Prayer Book has it. When all these things come together (says Cassian) we are on fire with the Holy Spirit. And when we look at Jesus we see someone whose entire life is on fire in that way, with the Spirit.

Perhaps baptism really ought to have some health warnings attached to it: 'If you take this step, if you go into these depths, it will be transfiguring, exhilarating, life-giving and very, very dangerous.' To be baptized into Jesus is not to be in what the world thinks of as a safe place. Jesus' first disciples discovered that in the Gospels, and his disciples have gone on discovering it ever since.

We are the guests of Jesus. We are there because he asks us, and because he wants our company. At the same time we are set free to invite Jesus into our lives and literally to receive him into our bodies in the Eucharist.

He has decided to be our friend – indeed, the word in Greek can be even stronger, our lover – the one who really embraces us and is as close as we can imagine. Very near the heart of Christian prayer is getting over the idea that God is somewhere a very, very long way off, so that we have to shout very loudly to be heard. On the contrary: God has decided to be an intimate friend and he has decided to make us part of his family, and we always pray on that basis.

To be the student of a teacher was to commit yourself to living in the same atmosphere and breathing the same air; there was nothing intermittent about it. Being

Henri de Lubac, one of the most outstanding Roman Catholic theologians of the twentieth century, put it with a clarity and brevity very hard to improve upon: 'It is not sincerity, it is truth which frees us… To seek sincerity above all things is perhaps, at bottom, not to want to be transformed.

Becoming holy is being so taken over by the extraordinariness of God that that is what you are really interested in, and that is what radiates from you to reflect on other people.

To engage with the Church's past is to see something of the Church's future.

What right has a non-worldly, a discarnate, God to forgive any human being? … he is not to be found, his grace and mercy are not to be found, anywhere but in the past of human violence.

salvation does not bypass the history and memory of guilt, but rather builds upon and from it.

If God wants [my] company, musn't we say that God wants the company of all those who have made [me] to be [me]?

God doesn't love "even" you; though God certainly loves "even" me. Above all, God loves us, as we are together.

Revelation is something communicated from infinite agency or reality to the finite mind. But (in Farrer's picture) this is not a matter of God just interrupting the process of the world to 'insert' something alien into the gap; it happens as a result of what happens in the world of finite agents or substances, as these finite realities are modified in their relations to one another, drawn into newly meaningful shapes.

Without silence, we will not get any closer to knowing who we are before God.

prayer is in significant part about resolving conflict and rivalry. If people prayed seriously they would be reconciled.

So the Lord was with Joseph, and Joseph was a lucky fellow' was one of Tyndale's great phrases from his translation of Genesis.

we need to bear in mind that the Reformation debate was not one between self-designated Catholics and Protestants; it was a debate about where the Catholic Church was to be found. 'Is the Pope a Catholic?' was not a joke in the sixteenth century.

To think of myself as a body, to be conscious of myself as a body, is to be conscious of other people's consciousness.

to be conscious of myself is to be aware of myself as a node point in a web of information exchange, which corporately constructs the idea of objects, selves, persons.

But the reconciliation of the world to God cannot be described as an episode in history among others; it is a change in what historical agents may hope for, think about and pray about.

sustainable' justice Ã¢â'¬â€œ that is, a corporate habit of relation that allows a community to believe that the security of its members does not depend entirely on contingent relations of power at any given moment.

The Creator is that which activates a potentially unlimited set of modes in which finite agency is exercised, but is also simply what eternally is.

We're talking about a reality in which people enter into the experience, the aspiration, the sense of self, of others. And

Memory is the 'self', because it is my presence to myself, the way in which I constitute myself and understand myself as a subject with a continuous history of experience.