This past Sunday’s New York Times featured an interview with the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams. Williams is probably one of the most widely respected contemporary Protestant church leaders in the world. He presided over the fractious Church of England from 2002-2012, which made him also at least the symbolic leader of the even more fractious global Anglican communion (of which the US Episcopal Church is a part). Now 74, Williams remains active as a poet, playwright, theologian, author, and popular public speaker.

Rowan Williams is a reflective and persuasive advocate for the Christian faith. By no means a fundamentalist, he nonetheless has a pastoral and evangelical heart for bringing people into a meaningful relationship with God. (In that way, he reminds me of the new Pope Leo.) But this means more than adopting certain beliefs or belonging to the right church. Rather, as Williams says at the end of the interview, it’s about coming to experience life and the world in a new way.

What I’ve most wanted to convey, I suppose, is that sense of the enrichment just around the corner of your vision, the perspective of that eternally overflowing source of love and mercy and how that lights up everything. I’d like people to see the world afresh. I suppose that’s why my other vocation, if you like, as a poet, has come in there. And I see what I do as a poet and what I do as a theologian or a preacher as absolutely bound up. I’ve been — I still am, to some extent — an academic theologian. I preach regularly. I write poems. They’re all about this new landscape, trying to get people into a new landscape.

Rereading the interview to write this post, I was moved even more than I was the first time. Williams’ sincerity and compassion shine through. The interviewer, Peter Wehner, carefully poses to Williams several of the head-scratching challenges to belief in the modern world. I was struck not only by the quality of Williams’ responses but by how it was obvious he himself  had struggled with them, and was still doing so.

I especially appreciate that Williams still considers God to be the central issue. Because God has become such a problem in the modern world, both intellectually and for personal faith, many in the church, both liberal and conservative, have avoided the subject and become absorbed in church affairs or social issues. But for Williams, God still matters because he recognizes that God, however understood, is fundamentally intertwined with life and the world.

For Williams, God is not so much an idea to be studied and debated but a reality to be experienced. This, of course, is very biblical, though often forgotten in the church. And that experience is not all flowers and rainbows. So, Williams says that his struggle is not with whether God exists but how to integrate his life with this sacred dimension.

Looking back, there have been very few times when I felt what you might call a substantive doubt of the whole thing. You know, “Is any of this true?” It’s much more, “Does any of this make sense where I am?” I’ve always resonated with the person who said, “God exists, but I don’t believe in him,” in the sense that the system’s there, the pattern’s there and it’s compelling. But how much am I actually inhabiting it? How much am I making it my own? How much is it really making sense of where I am? And there have been periods, especially of personal loss and personal awareness of struggle and uncertainty, where it’s been not so much I doubt that God exists but I don’t know whether I’m connecting with what’s there — and I don’t know how to.

The great problem of the Bible is idolatry. Not the “graven image” in some B-grade sword-and-sandals movie but our individual and cultural creation of a God that meets our needs and our approval. Williams understands that this temptation is our desire to escape the mysteries and conundrums of life, our desperate need for it all to make sense. But too often we’re forced to acknowledge that we can’t make sense of it all, as in times of tragedy or being overwhelmed by the seeming pointlessness of life.

Wehner: Why would God deny tangible assurances — empirical and nearly incontestable proofs — to those whom he loves and who desperately cry out for it?

Williams: It’s not that God is deliberately making things difficult but that God is God. God is not a thing among other things. God is not an item in the world, and God is not a response to our mail order form. He doesn’t simply slot into what we think is intelligible or manageable. God is the infinite, unmanageable, unconditioned context of all that we are and we do, and so it’s not entirely surprising if we can’t boil that down into something we can manage. That’s why, of course, in Hebrew Scripture, when the people of Israel gather at Mount Sinai, the mountain is covered with cloud and fire, and God says to Moses: Keep your distance. I’m sorry. This is how I am. You’re not going to boil me down to something that’s manageable.

There’s always an innate depth, inaccessibility, unmanageability about this, and at times that comes home to us with enormous force when we would like there to be a simple answer — part of the burden of what Old and New Testaments alike say: Be careful of idolatry. You’re always prone to making a God you can manage. That’s what idolatry boils down to. You can make that manageable God in any number of forms. You can make it in religious forms. You could make it in economic and social forms. Just be very conscious that, as the Lord says to Moses, “You shall have no other gods before me.” Don’t go putting in his place something which is a pseudo-God.

After the 9-11 attacks, a group known as the New Atheists became prominent. They declared religion to be worse than useless as it was the source of unending oppression and violence. Williams engaged in several public debates with them. He did not dispute their judgment on religion’s failings. What he did challenge, however, was their idea of God.

I always learn from those encounters, and I have respect and affection for them. I think what’s missing sometimes is precisely that sense that when we talk about God, we’re not just talking about a thing or a person, in the sense of an individual…. But very often the God who’s being attacked and questioned by them … is a God I don’t believe in, either: an individual who sits in the remote parts of the universe and treats the rest of the universe as an intriguing hobby for himself, rather than the God who is much more like the ocean that soaks through everything that is and yet is infinitely beyond it.

I found recently in the work of a 17th-century Welsh Catholic writer, Augustine Baker, a wonderful image: that the soul without God, the soul cut off from God, is like a whale stuck in a pond. It longs for the ocean, he said. It can’t be in the depths where it belongs. Now, I don’t hear very much of that sense in the New Atheists. They come up with all sorts of very neat and, as far as they go, perfectly rational arguments about how difficult it is to believe in some chap out there in mid-space.

I want to say, “Well, yeah. I have no interest in a chap out there in outer space, none at all.” But I am quite interested in what the infinite, unconditioned life of generosity is within which I and everything else live. And I have every interest in the story of how that life astonishingly comes to fruition in the middle of our history in the life of Jesus. Now, that’s something I do think I can spend my life thinking and praying about and something that transfigures the horizons in which we live.

There is much more of value in this interview and I encourage you to read it, if you have the chance. Remarkably, Rowan Williams seems to have skimmed off the cream of Christian faith for his ministry and personal life. Yet, he is aware and acknowledges that in practice Christianity has produced a lot of curdled milk. And while affirming traditional Christian doctrines and theology, Williams holds them lightly as pointing to, but not being, the reality of God.

Wehner: It sounds like what you’re saying is God is elusive but deeply present.

Williams: Deeply present, yes. Absolutely that, and I love the Jewish image of the divine glory, the Shekinah, being present everywhere in the world but present as if it were a beggar in the street, as if scattered, exiled, obscure. Yet around every corner is this presence, this insistent reminder.

This God, then, is not here to answer all our questions or solve all our problems. Rather, this God draws us into the joy and mystery of life, which includes turning many blind corners, not with fear but with trust and anticipation of what is ahead of us. God is “this insistent reminder” of what life is really about.

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