The golden aura of turning leaves…the poignancy of those falling.
Perhaps you, too, know the compelling power of passion. It covers the universe spanning from blissful ecstasy to deepest suffering. Rowan Williams in Passions of the Soul very helpfully journeys through this complex, reviewing religious writers who demonize desire as well as those who paint the angelic, heaven-directed gaze.
His contemplation on the Beatitudes is particularly moving. The “goodness of desire” risks corruption into avarice/lust:
“To love someone else simply as someone who ‘plugs a gap’, whose role is to complete you, is to treat them as less than human, to make their identity serve ours, instead of wondering at their difference, their mystery; and so it never allows your relationship with that mysterious otherness to lead you deeper into the ultimate mystery which is God. ‘Lust’ is something to do with that inhuman or dehumanizing desire that reduces the independent reality around you to mere functionality, a set of characteristics that will slot into the pre-existing space in your heart” (p. 59).On Matt 5:8, “how blissful the pure in heart for they shall see God” (David Bentley Hart’s translation), Williams says, “Our purity of heart is discovering again and again, in this or that relationship, in this or that situation, what it is that which opens out on to a deeper level of longing; instead of stopping or freezing our growth, fixing it at the level of temporary gratification” (p. 61).
Rowan Williams earlier magnificent work focuses with its title the cost of those who seek God: The Wound of Knowledge. The knowing of God may be glimpsed in the stunning sunrise but no less and perhaps more in the darkness of loss, the personal experiences through to the social crises that shadow the cross.
God is here. Transcendent. Immanent. Williams’ closing paragraph:
“Christianity begins in contradictions, in the painful effort to live with the baffling plurality and diversity of God’s manifested life—law and gospel, judgement and grace, the crucified Son crying to the Father. Christian experience does not simply move from one level to the next and stay there, but is drawn again and again to the central and fruitful darkness of the cross. But in this constant movement outwards in affirmation and inwards to emptiness, there is life and growth.” p. 190
