An Interview with one of my heroes …
David Hare interviews Archbishop Rowan Williams here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/jul/08/rowan-williams-interview-david-hare?INTCMP=SRCH
Quotable:
I don’t want to see the church so balkanised that we talk only to people we like and agree with. Thirty years ago, little knowing what fate had in store, I wrote an article about the role of a bishop, saying a bishop is a person who has to make each side of a debate audible to the other. The words ‘irony’ and ‘prescience’ come to mind. And of course you attract the reproach that you lack the courage of leadership and so on. But to me it’s a question of what only the archbishop of Canterbury can do….
What changes people is the extraordinary sense that things come together. Is it Eliot or Yeats who talks about a poem coming together with an audible click? You think, yes, the world makes sense looked at like that…. you can see the connections somehow and – I tend to reach for musical analogies here – you can hear the harmonics. You may not have everything tied up in every detail, but there’s enough of that harmonic available to think, ‘OK, I can risk aligning myself with this.’…
I came back yesterday morning from the Congo. What I’ve been looking at there and in Kenya is localism of a certain kind. The church is doing really remarkable things with new farming techniques, in a cluster of villages. Things like a biogas project to prevent the cutting down of trees for fuel – very low-investment, very low-technology solutions. I think one of the most moving experiences – yes, moving – was at a village in Kenya that had, thanks to the work of the local church, rethought its farming practices, restocked with indigenous plants, begun to explore very tentatively local fisheries and, out of the modest profits, was just about to start credit union arrangements for the whole community. Now that’s localism, if you like.