How does the light get in? Leonard Cohen suggests, "There's a crack in everything / That's how..." Whether from our restlessness, our fear, or our trauma, to see the world rightly might start with the need to acknowledge the crack in everything. Only then can we see a new world of understanding and belonging and well-being. Graham Ward (University of Oxford) joins Ryan McAnnally-Linz to reflect on the purpose of theology, Christology as the place where the divine and the human come together, trauma, restlessness, fear, the human capacity for creativity and destruction (and which will we choose?), and how the Gospels offer a new sense of belonging.
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How does the light get in? Leonard Cohen suggests, "There's a crack in everything / That's how..." Whether from our restlessness, our fear, or our trauma, to see the world rightly might start with the need to acknowledge the crack in everything.
Only then can we see a new world of understanding and belonging and well-being.
Graham Ward (University of Oxford) joins Ryan McAnnally-Linz to reflect on the purpose of theology, Christology as the place where the divine and the human come together, trauma, restlessness, fear, the human capacity for creativity and destruction (and which will we choose?), and how the Gospels offer a new sense of belonging.
About Graham Ward
Graham Ward is Regius Professor of Divinity at the University of Oxford and is author of several books, including How the Light Gets In and Another Kind of Normal.
Show Notes
Production Notes
Evan Rosa: For the Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture. Visit us online at faith.yale.edu.
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Blessings, my friends.
Graham Ward: There is a profound disposition towards restlessness within the human condition. We are restless creatures. What is it we're exiled from? What is it that we feel would constitute rest? What is it we're looking for in our restlessness? I think it's more than another meal.
Or, I think it's about a better way of accommodating ourselves to the world, a better way of accommodating ourselves with each other, and a better way of understanding ourselves in relation to the whole of creation. And unless we face those dark sides of that restlessness, it's fundamentally related to the nature of fear, our fear, the fear that's deep within us, what Hebrews says, the fear that has bound them all life long.
What kind of fear is it? And what kind of pathologies emerge from refusing that fear, refusing the vulnerability of that fear, wanting to be the hero, wanting to make a name for ourselves, the need to be in control, the need to handle fear and threat in a way that controls. And I think my question is, what is it in that?
That I see the whole of the gospel actually trying to do is to bring it into a new incorporation, that there is a sense of belonging. The order of creation is towards the whole of creation being incorporated in Christ, which is its well-being.
Evan Rosa: This is For the Life of the World, a podcast about seeking and living a life worthy of our humanity. I'm Evan Rosa with the Yale Center for Faith and Culture. There's a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in:
"There is a crack, a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in. That's how the light gets in. That's how the light gets in."
Those words from Leonard Cohen's song "Anthem" do that amazing work of saying so much in so little. And they remind me of a poem by Izumi Shikibu, a Japanese poet writing about a thousand years ago, translated by Jane Hirshfield. Shikibu writes, "Although the wind blows terribly here, the moonlight also leaks between the roof planks of this ruined house. Although the wind blows terribly here. The moonlight also leaks between the roof planks of this ruined house."
These two expressions of light getting in help me think in important ways about the Incarnation, that in Christ assuming a whole human nature, a body and a soul, that's another way light gets in. Entering the human condition, Christ leaks through, trickles in, sneaks past, grows up in a body. And theology is another way the light gets in, along with the whole human endeavor to know and understand.
Or at least, it's what we try to do with the light that we have to work with. And after all, we have so much to work with. But our guest today, priest and theologian Graham Ward, thinks theology that isn't pastoral is worthless. So when he writes theology, he wants to put into words something of the felt experience of life in this world.
He's the Regius Professor of Divinity at the University of Oxford and is author most recently of How the Light Gets In and Another Kind of Normal, two connected works of theology in what he's calling an ethical life series that represent his effort to make sense of human experience of beauty, goodness, and truth in this world.
In this conversation with Ryan McAnnally-Linz, Graham Ward comments on the purpose of theology, why he chose Leonard Cohen's lyric to start this work, Christology as the place where the divine and the human come together, an understanding of trauma, restlessness, and fear, the human capacity for creativity and destruction, and with that important question, which of those will we choose?
He talks about living out whatever it is that we worship and how the Gospels offer a new sense of belonging. Thanks for listening today, friends, and Merry Christmas.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: Graham Ward, thank you so much for coming and taking the time to talk with me.
Graham Ward: You're very welcome.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: So you're in the middle of a multi-volume project that you have called Ethical Life, and I wanted to start by asking you, what are you hoping to offer to Christians and to the Church with this project?
Graham Ward: What I wanted to do was to think through, how would I go about doing a systematic theology?
And I think there is a way in which we want to see how things cohere more and how we might express that kind of coherence. So, in a sense, you want to give Christians and the Church the awareness that theology doesn't arbitrarily pick this Christology, that doctrine of the Church, that understanding of being human.
They actually all relate to each other. There's an inner, inner coherence or a theo-logic that makes them cohere. So, it was trying to see the various sites in which I wanted to work in a systematic theology, um, namely creation, Christology, salvation, and eventually the Church and the Trinity. And, and then, okay, now how do you show inner coherences here that your doctrine of Christology will feed directly into your doctrine of creation?
That your doctrine of creation will feed directly into your anthropology, and that anthropology can only feed directly into an ecclesiology. It was that inner coherence that I wanted to bring to the Church in a kind of catechetical sense. And that for me is one of the reasons why Scripture plays quite an important part in the way I try to move through the various subjects because Scripture is that common text.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: That is a really interesting feature of the project, the way that Scripture winds its way through and structures a lot of what you're saying. I wonder if you could say a little bit about how you're relating to Scripture in those passages. I think at some point you talk about yourself as handing on the tradition, and what is it doing when you read Scripture?How are you relating to it? And then bring it to the page in theology?
Graham Ward: I think this is probably the key question. About the kind of work I do because it seems to be when you look back over the early understandings of the evolvement of doctrine in any coherent way, it was always done through scriptural exegesis, scriptural mediation.
What really helped me there was understanding that in the tradition, the Scripture's always being a lectio that's just passed on. Always the Church has read and re-read, sermonized about, and whatever, the Scriptures. And in that sense, then, I could take note of source criticism or form criticism or whatever editorial things.
But at the end of the day, I had a text and I had a text that actually worked for the Church and has been working for the Church, albeit in different translations. It's been working for the Church for millennia. There's another reason, and I think that this is a really important reason, and that is we do believe God speaks to us through the Scripture, um, and, and have it tested, you know, as to what, what's actually going on.
Um, because we're not hearing voices in that kind of way. You know, this isn't a psychosis, but there have been, interestingly enough, uh, psychiatric experimentation on the difference between a schizophrenic hearing voices and Christians who say they hear the voice of God. But we do believe that in some way we are encountering the voice of God.
We are hearing God in and through the Scriptures. And that, that becomes important. You know, as a writer, you can't harness that. You know, I can't make people hear. I clearly draw attention to subtleties that I feel are there.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: You're through two volumes so far of the project. The first one is called How the Light Gets In, and the second, Another Kind of Normal. I wonder if you could tell me why those titles for these two volumes?
Graham Ward: Well, what I wanted with the titles is, I don't want to be read by Christians. I want to find ways in which what I say is of interest. And so I want a title that invites them. And everyone knows Lenny Cohen's song. And, and it's always struck me as being one of those places where you could have a whole model of revelation that you could actually articulate in and through that song.
And, and that first volume is very much about, you know, setting up the scaffolding for the revelation and the unfolding of the systematic that will happen. So it's trying to prepare the ground, which is then why I wanted to call it, well, How the Light Gets In. And I think I've become more aware. I want simple things. I don't want to make it over complicated.
Of course, theology is complicated. Theological thinking, some of the philosophical thinking is complicated. I am not easy to read. I absolutely get that. But that's how you just want to be able to offer lifelines for readerships who might just be dipping in. The other thing I think here is that I do believe since the Second World War, what we have seen, it's used to always regard as being a demise of the Christian faith.
I don't believe that at all. I think there's a demise in the belief of organized Christianity. And so that means to me, there's a lot of the Church who are not in church on Sunday.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: Gotcha, and so you want to be speaking to folks who are outside of the church on Sunday, but would be ready to hear and maybe needing to hear.
Graham Ward: And one of the key things I always think that theology has got to be pastoral. If it's not pastoral at the end of the day, then it's worthless. It really is. It's just a B-games. So, so there's got to be a way in which, actually, this is also a pastoral, you know, I, I bring these people in, I want to include these people.
I want to speak into their experience and hopefully try and leave something that they connect, they've experienced and think, "Wow, you've put into words something I've felt that I haven't." Good writing can do that. Good writing can find the phrasing which unlocks what other people have had. They just haven't had that phrase or that word.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: So your two volumes are one, kind of Revelation and Prolegomena, talking about theology and what it's doing. And in volume two, you start with Christ and then move to creation. And that's an unusual order in the history of systematic presentations of Christian faith. And I wonder, is that related to your pastoral aims to start with Christ rather than say, doctrine of God as you get in Thomas or something?
Graham Ward: Obviously, when you're beginning something like this, you weigh up the options. I mean, Barth starts also with the doctrine of God. I kept coming back to a question, why can't I do that? And Catherine Solon Eggers begins with the doctrine of God as well. Why is it I feel I can't do that?
And I think theology is speaking more about what it is to be human than what it is to be divine. And however much I really believe that God speaks through Scripture to us, it is human words, voices, syntax, metaphors, contexts that have come out of. So it's a thoroughly human text. I wanted to move through the human, if you like, to the divine.
And it became very obvious once I clarified the grounds for what I want to do and the notion of revelation, that the only place I could start is Christology, because that's where the divine and human come together.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: So you start with Christology, where the divine and human come together, and I found myself when reading through your Christology, thinking of a movie from maybe the 1990s called Dogma, in which Matt Damon and Ben Affleck are angels or something.
But there's a gag in the movie where one of the religious folks is kind of trying to rebrand Christianity a little bit, and that what they go for is buddy Jesus. And it's a Jesus who's super smiley, and he's got two thumbs up and he's your bud. And you seem to be very far from buddy Jesus in what you're doing.
You present Christ as a kind of haunting presence, as enigma and paradox. And when you get around to the end of it, you say all of those things remain. Christ is, there's still enigma, there's still a riddle, there's still a scandal, there's still paradox. And you're not trying to do a Christology that kind of resolves all of those things.
Graham Ward: No, no, I'm trying to do a theology that defamiliarizes. So, I want to bring out, and I do believe it's there in the Gospels, that's why I appeal. Particularly, it's there in Mark, there's an eerie quality to the nature of Mark's ellipses, for example. And there's something that it's very difficult to convey when you're translating, but actually Christ is not what you think and is always disrupting what you think.
Again let's come back to the pastoral, here, because the buddy Jesus hits a rock when in fact your son is killed or your husband dies young, because then you think, "Well, where were you?" You know, where is this friendship, buddy, whatever? There is friendship in Christ, and I do want the historical Christ to be absolutely there.
And I'm not trying to evaporate the historical Christ, and Christ himself calls us friends. But at the same time, trying to grasp hold of what that friendship might be. You know, let me take the last two weeks, for example, I've had a lot of work I've had to do, and in fact I've been down with a chronic virus which has caused all sorts of scares with the doctors.
I'm fine, I'm fine at the moment, I'm fine. But if I thought, buddy Jesus, I'd think, no, but I've still got to accept that this is the love of God towards me. So what that means is that I have to go back to those kind of passages in Isaiah. My thoughts are not your thoughts.
Your ways are not my ways. So there's always that. Don't tell me you think, you know, and you've pinned this down. And that's what I try to do in the Christology. I draw it out in my own particular way. I mean, people like Kierkegaard would, were moving in this direction, and he was trying to do the same thing to the Lutheran Church, at the time in Denmark.
He was trying to defamiliarize. Who do you think you're confronting every Sunday? Who do you think you're standing for? I think those kind of accommodating images to us do more damage than they do good. I mean, I have my worries sometimes that the Church preaches and performs placebos. It's actually only reinforcing people's pathologies rather than bringing salvation.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: And that helps me to start to see, but I'll ask to get more precise. In what respect is this unfamiliar, unaccommodated Christ the good news for us?
Graham Ward: It is totally the good news because the word coming into flesh and dying as flesh actually is the very process of salvation. And every one of us will go through the same kind of process in our formation into the body of Christ.
So that's why the proclamation of Christ is the good news. The defamiliarization is really important. We all have to undergo that encounter, or like the interchange of acknowledgements. Unless there's that real interchange of acknowledgements, then the process of healing can't begin.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: And so, and so making sure that the strangeness of Christ is there, that you're actually being confronted with it is that kind of important point of drawing out or sparking or provoking that interchange of acknowledgements?
Graham Ward: Both. It is drawing out. It's also trying to, and I suppose this is both the pastoral and the more stylistic way in which I'm trying to form something. So I try, trying to lead people into that defamiliarization, but also, and particularly because of the way I want to begin creation with doxology.
So you need to balance the defamiliarization with also a kind of understanding of the glory of creation, if you like. Although, you know, at the end of another kind of normal, I want to put some rosy tinted spectacles over what we understand by the resurrection.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: What do you mean by that? I'd like to learn more.
Graham Ward: Because I think we jump from the crucifixion to the resurrection very easily. And I think actually the Church is really good at proclaiming an eschatology. And I'm afraid you've got to look hard in the face of what Hamas did to Israel and what Israel is doing to Gaza.
And actually looking in the face saying, this is human beings. These are human beings. You can't just, all right, when Christ comes, all this will be over and done with. There's a move from there to there. It's a long and complex move. And my goodness, there's a weight of shit to be got rid of in order to get to that place.
So, start to talk about the resurrection then. I'd want to talk about it through Fra Angelico, for example, or depictions. It's there. Jesus is resurrected. But understanding what that means, none of us know what that means. None of us.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: That is very Marcan of you, right? The idea that the resurrection might provoke something like awestruck terror and confusion rather than a kind of, oh, everything's all right, feeling of relief.
Graham Ward: And I don't, I think actually the early Church, there was an element of trauma. I mean, I see this in Paul. But in fact, that conversion experience, you know, he had must have been utterly traumatic. No wonder he had to, you know, go into Antioch and stay in Antioch and then go away for two years afterward.
How do you process this? I think we would be terrified. We wouldn't know. We wouldn't know. Isn't it a most merciful kindness that when, when Christ met Cleopas and Antipas on the road to Emmaus he did not reveal himself until the very end, and then left them to it? He was not going to traumatize them.
Because even in the upper room on that first night, they were traumatized, and the language actually is one of, "Whoa, whoa, what on earth is happening?"
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: Yeah, I've got to say, I've never thought of that passage in Luke 24 as being a kind of pedagogical mercy to kind of bring the disciples along. It's beautiful.
Graham Ward: I definitely think it is that in fact. It's not just a transition to the breaking of the bread, but actually walking with them and that prior to any revelation, that registration within themselves that their hearts were burning: "When he spoke to us, were our hearts not burning?" There are many people, and this goes back to speaking to those who are not necessarily in the Church.
There are many people who, in hearing certain things, it suddenly lights something up inside them. And it may be way down the line that they, things join together and they make another connection, or it may be way down the line when they remember. Suddenly, as death encroaches, they are more aware that they want the questions open.
They're not going to close the questions down. So they're more open to negotiating those kind of liminal experiences, experiences that they may have rejected in the past or whatever, but in fact, they're more open to thinking those things through.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: Talking about having the questions open, it strikes me that, so to move from Christology to anthropology a little bit, you land on a note of the human being.
It seems that the question is always open, that we are at some level questions as you see us. I wonder if you might reflect a little bit on why that sort of, it's not a low anthropology, but it's a unsettled anthropology that you offer, where the question of our lives is a kind of unsolvable one.
Graham Ward: You're exactly right. And in fact, in moving more towards the anthropology in volume three, one of the most important chapters is actually about sin and transgression, and that inner questioning has also got to do with, if you like to use the language, although the whole chapter is trying to guess out what do we mean by this, it relates to the nature of original sin.
And I don't mean origin as in genetic origin or an understanding of, uh, that you might find in Augustine or historical because I dealt with that at the end of Another Kind of Normal. I do not believe in a, that we read Paradise or the Fall in, in that way, uh, at all. But nevertheless, there is a profound disposition towards restlessness within the human condition.
And I've drawn on several kind of paleoanthropologists that talk about the crossings and the walkings and the development of human beings through different species that came from different places. We are restless creatures in a very different sense of the word restless from Augustine's sense, where he starts.
But in fact, there's a very, there's a lot then about what is it we're exiled from? What is it that we feel would constitute rest? What is it we're looking for in our restlessness? I think it's more than another meal. Or I think it's about a better way of accommodating ourselves to the world, a better way of accommodating ourselves with each other, and a better way of understanding ourselves in relation to the whole of creation, animal as well. Animal and non-animal. There's the whole ecology here that, that, that, that is built into our restlessness, and we are migratory creatures. We, we are inner restless. We are instinctively transgressive.
So we don't know where the way lies, what the rules are. We have to learn all the time what they might be. And unless we face those dark sides of that restlessness, it's fundamentally related to the nature of fear. Our fear, the fear that's deep within us. What Hebrews says, the fear that has bound them all lifelong. What kind of fear is it and what kind of pathologies emerge from refusing that fear, refusing the vulnerability of that fear, wanting to be the hero, wanting to make a name for ourselves.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: That kind of securitizing against, uh, the inescapable. Well, you say that's at one point that we're more like flies than angels. We're caught up in the strong winds of change and circumstance, planetary and cosmological. And yeah, you can see how trying to buttress against those fears would be deeply pathological and would then kind of wreak havoc on other human beings and on and on ecology as well.
Graham Ward: Right. I think that, that, that becomes quite important to realize. One, in order to have an ego, we have to control and we have to have a sense of control. But in fact, a lot of being in Christ is losing our control. And that's not easy. You know, that's what formation is actually about. But that power of wanting to be in control also has another side.
I've yet to deal with this other side because I'm not sure how to deal with it. It's something you see in, well, the animal and plant kingdom. You see it in the human kingdom, and that's predation. Uh, that we are predators. And what, where is that? Where do you put that? That you are a predator because you want to be in control.
You, you are aware of fear and you are aware of threat, but actually to move beyond that, to move your own, beyond your own predatory way in which you want to gain control of things.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: Your reflections on predation reminded me of a passage in Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass, where she talks about being a heterotroph, uh, kind of what it is to be a sort of creature that, that can't get its energy except by consuming other creatures.
And that is a really, it can be a painful thought that the predicament we're in now is precisely that, and it can roll down the hill into something like Nietzsche's observation that to live and to be unjust is the same thing. And I want to find a way of, of refusing that, that role. I wonder if you have thoughts on how we might do that.
Graham Ward: I, I love that book, by the way. Um, if anything could make me turn to becoming a vegetarian, something like that would, and that I love her story of the three beans, which holds life together for these women in their communities, which is absolutely great. I disagree with the Nietzche and the Freudian line, that in fact this is all slaughter all the way down.
And that, you know, civilization is just built on endless amounts of slaughter and who controls whom. Um, because it has no account of grace. It has no account of love. I don't know whether the American newspapers, uh, had that, had the small name, but in most of the English newspapers, on the front was the old woman hostage who had been released by Hamas, shaking hands with the Hamas captain as she left to board the plane.
And I don't know what went on in her head that she, she did that. Maybe she was confused. But I have come across gestures of love in the most appalling situations, and it's that that actually enables you to see somehow grace operates, providence operates. Our difficulty is we want it to operate according to our logics. And when it doesn't operate to our logics, we say, okay, it doesn't exist then.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: You reflect a little bit in Another Kind of Normal about grace being pedagogical, and you say in particular, this is a quote, that the pedagogy of grace is the rhythm of repentance.
And it seems to me that we're kind of, we've woven from that sense that something needs to change, right? That we need another kind of normal, not just the one that we've got. And then these kind of eruptions of grace in the world. Do you see those eruptions of grace as kind of trying to lead us to repentance? And what does that repentance entail for us?
Graham Ward: When you're doing theology, particularly if you're looking at the Church and beyond the Church, you're having to find another language. If we call repentance, somebody who, whose hand is shaken at the door of the church as they're leaving, that suddenly brightens up their life, that, that's at the level I'm talking about some grace speaking.
When you see justice being done, for example, there's a kind of whole, inner sense that, yes, yes, that's right. And we've been waiting for that to be put right. And now somehow it's come together, and it's put right. And we feel all of us, you know, as nations, as communities. Yes, but it happens. That is the nature of formation.
So that when Grace operates then, then it is in those evenings. And it can be a small, sometimes I have been in the total doldrums, I'm feeling, I just don't know where, where all this is going or where any of this is leading at all. That's my life, by the way. I do really don't, don't understand, and um, and my attention is turned to something really small, like sunlight on a violet.
You know, there's a, there's a, there's a rubbish heep just outside here in Christ Church. We don't make much of the rubbish heeps in Christ Church because Christ Church is ultra sanitary like Disneyland, right? But there is a rubbish heep over the other side of the, of the, of the meadow. It gets the sunshine really quite early in the morning and it has violets in it, right?
It's that . You see that? And repentance is not beating your chest, necessarily. It may be, but I don't think I've got much to beat my chest about anymore. But it is about awakening to something that you want to say thank you for, you want to be grateful for, you want to give thanks for. I see the operation of grace.
In fact, this accumulative, slow transformation from ego centered, "I will make a name for myself," to "thy will be done, not mine." And I will accept whatever I have to accept because I believe, and this is the really crunch thing, I believe it's love. And that, and that can be hard. I believe it's love, whatever, whatever it is, I believe it's love.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: So I wanna maybe push on that a little bit. Whatever it is, I believe it's love. Do you mean that it is love or do you mean that whatever it is, love is operative or working there?
Graham Ward: Okay, let's go with your definition. There is a love that's operative there. I was brought up by my grandmother who brought up me and my three brothers and my mother because my mother was dying of Huntington's Chorea, a genetic disease that took two of my brothers out and left me and left my younger brother without it.
There is no justification. If you work it out on a human level, there is no more worth to my life than Neil's. No more worth to my life than Stuart's. I have to believe that there is a love in this somewhere. That's what I mean.
And that, that, that's the hard love. You know, this isn't the romantic love. This is the hard love, demanding God's sacrifice, but also demands my sacrifice of what I think love should be. I'd like to be wrapped up in cotton wool, all right, take me from place to place in a padded car, you know, just keep me safe, etc.
It's not going to be like that. Never will be like that. We are never extracted from the world. We're always put in the world, and we have to live. All that it has. But maybe, maybe what we do in our interior life, and this probably comes back to my understanding of prayer, is that we are filtering the world through Christ.
That we are bringing the world constantly to Christ with an ongoing prayer because Christ is within us. and that actually all these sometimes appalling situations. My brother was, younger brother, was ill for 18 years as we saw him deteriorate, and he has a young son. It was awful, painful, demanding on his wife and family.
Somehow it's got to be absorbed because I do believe that when I am, I know even as I am known, I will understand. And when I understand what I'll see is all this that looked to me like jagged basalt is actually not what you thought it was.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: You're reminding me very much of Julian of Norwich right now.
Graham Ward: Right, she also went through a lot of illness. You know, we always like to go straight to the end of Julian Norwich and, you know, and all will be well, all manner of things will be well. That's right. Yeah, but read through the rest of the Revelations before you get there because actually she went through torment.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: And she recognized that the world around her was in torment.
There's a sentence in Another Kind of Normal that I can't not ask you about because it struck me as, as beautiful and potentially deeply significant. You write, "It is God, not the devil that lies in the detail." What do you mean by that?
Graham Ward: I think it, it, it actually comes from my understanding. We are not translated and neither is spirituality about being lifted out of something, that we go deeper and deeper, you know. I'm fascinated by science and fascinated by materiality because the deeper and deeper we go, we understand actually, fluctuations and all kinds of things, which I find just absolutely fascinating that nothing's as stable as you thought it could be stable.
You go into God, and it's the full details. You'll not hide from anything. You're not allowed to hide from anything. The little details are the things that actually get changed, in some instances, because they need to get changed.
You know, your fear that suddenly is evoked every time you go to the cash machine to take out some, you know, or you get a bank statement, or someone sends you something, all those kinds of things. And I was just playing with the phrase because the devil is in the detail, and it's not. It's God that's in the detail.
That actually at the end of the day, that's, that's what there will be. As far as I understand, you know, evil is not, but the detail will show us that evil is not. I think we have a choice always before us. And the choice is, will you be creative or will you be destructive? And I believe everything that we do as artists, as people, every little thing.
Dostoevsky has a lovely story of the peasant woman who dies. And an angel goes and pleads before the gates of heaven and said, you know, God says, "She must have done one thing, one thing." And yes, she gave a peasant woman, another peasant woman who was hungry, an onion. Any tiny thing that's good, no matter by whom, no matter where, I see as creative.
Everything else is destructive. And when I therefore mean evil, there's nothing. It doesn't bear anything. It simply destroys, all right. It's not productive. It's not moving the world forward. It's not moving someone who experiences it forward. You know, trauma, uh, freezes them so that, so they have to get beyond a blockage that that trauma has caused in order to move forward and be creative.
And by be creative, it's being open to the world and to people, you know, all around us really, that kind of sense in which, you know, all of us are creative. And I do, you know, do see that some people have facilities in music or sculpture or whatever, but in fact, all of us are creative, and we can decide when we're confronted with an argument or the potential of an argument, whether to release the anger or not release the anger, or to just back away.
But sometimes you've got to speak the anger. I mean, the other, you know, there's no, you know, sometimes actually speaking the anger can be speaking the truth to power that's got to hear what the anger feels like.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: Right, it's not an easy thing to, to discern what's creative and what's destructive in any particular situation, right?
Graham Ward: It's not, but I think actually that is part of our formation is in moving towards understanding how to be more creative, how to be less destructive. You're absolutely right. We remain human.
We're not angels. And so things flare up. Things happen. You know, you do react. You do react. And our first reactions, because they are the most ingrained within us, can be some of the reactions we have to have unwoven as we move towards a better kind of creative living. But yeah, there's always a discernment process.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: Yeah, what do you think is the role of the Church or Christian community in that discernment and in the formation of people who are discerning?
Graham Ward: Well, you'll notice that besides Scripture that keeps kind of coming back, liturgy comes back. I've just finished an essay on Jean-Louis Chrétien and the nature of liturgy, trying to pick up again, and get the Church to pick up again, a language of mystagogy.
What is mystagogy about? And again, it's trying not, you know, forget your ghostly stuff. This is about practices of liturgical living and worship, but it's coming into an understanding of what it is that you're worshipping when you're in worship. Liturgy will play quite a part in that, the constitution of that community.
I think we often get confused between sociality and community within the Christian Church. And there's a lot of forced sociality. I am the person who hates coffee time after, after the service. I just find that false sociality really difficult. And I don't believe that's the nature of community.
So I want to talk about that relationship between the institution, which is necessary, and the Church that is more than the institution, and that therefore throws a huge emphasis upon openness and hospitality. That in fact, because there are so many who belong to the Church who are not in the Church, the Church has got to be open. Open, open, open and welcoming. But if what we're trying to do is welcome them into a community that can be counted and can pay their dues, we've lost whatever it is we think we're trying to do.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: You, right at the very beginning of Another Kind of Normal, raised the category of belonging. And you say that belonging is at the very core of ethical life. Belonging strikes me as one of those categories that a lot of people are attracted to right now. It's got a certain gravity to it. I think of, for instance, our colleague at Yale, Willie Jennings, his, the subtitle of his After Whiteness is "An Education in Belonging."
And I guess I have a kind of two part question for you. Why do you think belonging is kind of presenting itself as a category we need for theology now? And why did you say that belonging is at the very core of ethical life?
Graham Ward: What we're experiencing globally now, both on global interconnectedness, and then our increasing fragmentation within that global or globalizing sense, is the massive disruption of identities and narratives of people's lives that would have given them a kind of sense of, of being situated somewhere.
So it doesn't surprise me that mental health is just in shreds really and everywhere that people are struggling with questions to do with mental health. And, and it's not about those old questions about identity.
It's actually that our lives are so complex. And so many different influences are coming in. I mean, just think about your love of film or your love of music, and you've got 101 different kind of sources for wherever this is coming from now. Whereas before it was very limited, much more limited. Our narratives, the narratives of our lives are very complicated.
Our relationships are complicated. They're made more complicated by telecommunications and less complicated because there's a, almost an insistence that you can be speaking to someone all the time and the kind of pressures that people put themselves under. So there's a massive amount of fragmentation, not belonging, along with a lot of kind of multiculturalism and pluralism about, well, where does this fit with that?
How does this do with that? We're all hybrid to the position where we're not sure then how to make a single narrative out of all this. So I think actually then something like wholism, well-being, the eco, you know, and belonging is another one that can, they're nice words in this kind of environment to actually use.
They're words that offer comfort zones. There is a place for you, or whatever. Now, my sense of why I want to talk about belonging goes right back to that anthropology. That we are predispositional towards intense restlessness. The need to be in control. The need to handle fear and threat in a way that controls, that I think goes right back before we even had memories.
And I think my question is, what is it in that, that I see the whole of the gospel actually trying to do? It's to bring it into a new incorporation. That there is a sense of belonging. I see that belonging not just as An ideal we want to move towards with things like eco this and well-being that, but it's actually, this is the order of creation is towards the whole of creation being incorporated in Christ, which is its well-being.
Evan Rosa: For the Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture at Yale Divinity School. This episode featured theologian Graham Ward. Production assistance by Macie Bridge. I'm Evan Rosa, and I edit and produce the show. For more information, visit us online at faith.yale.edu, where you can find past episodes of the podcast, videos, articles, plenty of books to read, and other educational resources that help people envision and pursue lives worthy of our humanity.
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