Being Disciples Quotes

“There are no useful self-help books on being holy.”
― Rowan Williams, Being Disciples: Essentials of the Christian Life

“And this means that a really holy person is someone like a great artist or musician or poet. They help us to see what we would otherwise miss: dimensions and depths in the world that we might not otherwise spot. Not every artist is a saint, by any manner of means. Some of them are conspicuously selfish egotists in their personal lives. But somehow in their work they forget themselves enough for something to come alive, to come through. And the saint, the holy person, is somebody who has been enabled to create that kind of artwork out of their very lives, to let something come through, to let a bigger world appear, a new light and a new landscape.”
― Rowan Williams, Being Disciples: Essentials of the Christian Life

“A holy person makes you see things in yourself and around you that you had not seen before; that is to say, enlarges the world rather than shrinking it. ...Holiness [is] not an extra special kind of goodness... [or] competing levels of how good you are. It's ...about being involved in the world. A holy person is somebody who is not afraid to be at the tough points in the centre of what it's like to be a human being... this boils down to something extremely simple and extremely difficult, which is that holy people, however much they may enjoy being themselves, are not obsessively interested in themselves. They allow you to see not them, but the world around them. They allow you to see not them, but God. You come away from them feeling not, "Oh, what a wonderful person," but "What a wonderful world," "What a wonderful God," or even, with surprise, "What a wonderful person I am too.”
― Rowan Williams, Being Disciples: Essentials of the Christian Life

“I've always loved that image of prayer as birdwatching. You sit very still because something is liable to burst into view, and sometimes of course it means a long day sitting in the rain with nothing very much happening. I suspect that, for most of us, a lot of our experience with prayer is precisely that. But the odd occasions when you do see what T.S. Eliot... called "the kingfisher's wing" flashing "light to light" make it all worthwhile. And I think that living in this sort of expectancy--living in awareness, your eyes sufficiently open and your mind both relaxed and attentive enough to see when it happens--is basic to discipleship.”
― Rowan Williams, Being Disciples: Essentials of the Christian Life

“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.”
― Rowan Williams, Being Disciples: Essentials of the Christian Life

“A healthy democracy, then, is one in which the state listens to the voices of moral vision that spring from communities that do not depend on the state itself for their integrity and meaning.”
― Rowan Williams, Being Disciples: Essentials of the Christian Life

“The Christian disciple, in other words, does not campaign for political control (which would undermine their appeal to the value of personal freedom) but for public visibility—for the capacity to argue for and defend their vision in the public sphere, to try and persuade both government and individuals that a better moral basis exists for ordering public life.”
― Rowan Williams, Being Disciples: Essentials of the Christian Life

“The community that most perfectly represents what God wants to see in the human world is one where the resources of each person are offered for every other, whether those resources are financial or spiritual or intellectual or administrative. This is the pattern of the Body of Christ as St Paul defines it. It is not only that the least or apparently most useless has the dignity of possessing a gift and a purpose; it’s also that everyone is able to give to others, to have the dignity of being a giver, being important to someone else. And instead of being a static picture of everyone having dignity, the Christian vision is dynamic—everyone is engaged in building up everyone else’s human life and dignity.”
― Rowan Williams, Being Disciples: Essentials of the Christian Life

“Give us this day our daily bread’ is, then, a prayer that inevitably looks beyond the present moment and the settling of immediate needs—though at the same time it forbids being anxious about tomorrow. It is as if in order to live in peace and hope today, we have to ask for that foretaste or ‘advance payment’ of God’s future which Paul identifies as the Holy Spirit (2 Corinthians 5:5, cf. Ephesians 1:14).”
― Rowan Williams, Being Disciples: Essentials of the Christian Life

“Forgiveness is the exchange of the bread of life and the bread of truth; it is the way in which those who have damaged each other’s humanity and denied its dignity are brought back into a relation where each feeds the other and nurtures their dignity.”
― Rowan Williams, Being Disciples: Essentials of the Christian Life

“Love: an expression of the freedom to receive. Love: that which drives us to take time and to let go of anxiety. Love: that which permits us to be enriched and to be ‘given to’, made alive, to be breathed into. Not a passive thing, as some of those images might suggest, but a state of openness to joy. Love: not simply as doing good but as a deep contemplative regard for the world, for humanity in general and for human beings in particular, and for God.”
― Rowan Williams, Being Disciples: Essentials of the Christian Life

“Being where Jesus is means being in the company of the people whose company Jesus seeks and keeps. Jesus chooses the company of the excluded, the disreputable, the wretched, the self-hating, the poor, the diseased; so that is where you are going to find yourself.”
― Rowan Williams, Being Disciples: Essentials of the Christian Life

“We use the language of being "purpose-driven" when often, alas, we just mean "made capable of more aggressive assertion.”
― Rowan Williams, Being Disciples: Essentials of the Christian Life

“The Eucharist is our symbol of what it would mean for the Lord’s Prayer to be answered fully: God feeding his people through the death and resurrection of Jesus, which establishes that new community of the Spirit in which forgiveness is the common currency.”
― Rowan Williams, Being Disciples: Essentials of the Christian Life

“Disciples are expectant in the sense that they take it for granted that there is always something about to break through from the Master, the Teacher, something about to burst through the ordinary and uncover a new light on the landscape.”
― Rowan Williams, Being Disciples: Essentials of the Christian life

“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”
― Rowan Williams, Being Disciples: Essentials of the Christian life