Being Human Quotes

“I am now going to turn to a couple of the ways in which the New Testament depicts significant silence. One of the most dramatic of these moments is Jesus’ silence before his judges, before the High Priest and the Governor. The gospel narratives show us how the High Priest or Pontius Pilate urge Jesus to speak: ‘Why don’t you answer me?’ says Pilate, ‘Don’t you know that I have the power to crucify you or to release you?’ And we’re told in St John’s Gospel that when Jesus gives no answer to the charges made against him, Pilate wonders, he is ‘amazed’. Now the odd thing in these stories is that Jesus is precisely in the position of someone having his voice taken away; he is a person who has been reduced to silence by the violence and injustice of the world he is in. But then, mysteriously, he turns this around. His silence, his complete presence and openness, his refusal to impose his will in a struggle, becomes a threat to those who have power–or think they have power. ‘For God’s sake, talk to me!’ says the High Priest, more or less (‘ I adjure you in the name of the living God, tell us!’). And Pilate’s wonderment, bafflement and fear in the face of Jesus’ silence are a reminder that, in this case, Jesus as it were takes the powerlessness that has been forced on him and turns it around so that his silence becomes a place in the world where the mystery of God is present. In a small way, that’s what happens when we seek to be truly and fully silent or let ourselves be silenced by the mystery of God. We become a ‘place’ where the mystery of God happens.”
― Rowan Williams, Being Human: Bodies, Minds, Persons

“We’re talking about a reality in which people enter into the experience, the aspiration, the sense of self, of others. And”
― Rowan Williams, Being Human: Bodies, Minds, Persons

“to be conscious of myself is to be aware of myself as a node point in a web of information exchange, which corporately constructs the idea of objects, selves, persons.”
― Rowan Williams, Being Human: Bodies, Minds, Persons

“To think of myself as a body, to be conscious of myself as a body, is to be conscious of other people’s consciousness.”
― Rowan Williams, Being Human: Bodies, Minds, Persons

“And when in Acts (1.1–11) Jesus speaks of the Holy Spirit as the ‘promise of the Father’ that is going to descend on the world, he’s speaking of the way in which the gift of the Holy Spirit of God enables us not only to be a new kind of being but to see human beings afresh and to hear them differently. When the Holy Spirit sweeps over us in the wind and the flame of Pentecost, the Holy Spirit gives us the life of Jesus. It gives us something of Jesus’ capacity to hear what is really being said by human beings. It gives us the courage not to screen out those bits of the human world that are difficult, unpleasant, those that are not edifying. It opens our eyes and our ears and our hearts to the full range of what being human means. So that, instead of being somebody who needs to be sheltered from the rough truth of the world, the Christian is someone who should be more open and more vulnerable to that great range of human experience. The Christian is not in a position to censor out any bits of the human voice, that troubling symphony which so often draws into itself pain, anger and violence. And to recognize that we’re open to that and we hear it is not about shrugging our shoulders and saying, ‘Well, that’s just human nature’ (one of the most unhelpful phrases in the moral vocabulary). On the contrary, we feel the edge, the ache in human anger and human suffering. And we recognize that it can be taken into Christ and into the heart of the Father. It can be healed. It can be transfigured.”
― Rowan Williams, Being Human: Bodies, Minds, Persons