Quotes from Rowan Williams

I think there is a great deal of interest still in the Christian faith.

the love of God is the kind of love that identifies with the powerless; the kind of love that appeals to nothing but its own integrity, that doesn't seek to force or batter its way through. It lives, it survives, it 'wins' simply by being itself. On the cross, God's love just is what it is and it's valid and world-changing and earth-shattering, even though at that moment what it means in the world's terms is failure, terror and death.

It is, as some modern Christian thinkers have said, what makes the Church what it really is. For that short time, when we gather as God's guests at God's table, the Church becomes what it is meant to be — a community of strangers who have become guests together and are listening together to the invitation of God.

To use infinite agency to close a gap is to rob it of its infinite character.

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.