The discipline of being a creature

I recently came across some beautiful words by Archbishop Rowan Williams about being a creature. In a reasonably difficult, but rewarding, article on Creation, Creativity and Creatureliness: the Wisdom of Finite Existence,Williams reflects on the importance for discipleship of remembering we are creatures. The whole article is worth a read, but the following words struck me as particularly wise and particularly challenging in a culture fixated on human potential and human capacity, even as many things we have built fall apart.  The following paragraph come toward the end of his sermon. Enjoy.

Discipleship in the body of Christ is in one sense simply a matter of constantly battling to be a creature, battling against all those instincts in us which make us want to be God or make us want to be what we think God is. There, of course, is the catch. And that’s why discipleship challenges at every level those unrealities which distort humanity, which distort creatureliness. That’s why discipleship challenges those enterprises in our world and our culture which feed the illusion that actually we could be God if we tried hard enough.

What are those things about? Well you many find them in the deep unease so many in our culture feel about ageing and dying. You find it in our denials of death. You find it in our passion for absolute security, our desire never to be at risk. You may find it in a defence programme, you may find it in the technological exploitation of the environment. At level after level, our temptation is to deny that we are finite. And when I read, as sadly I sometimes do in discussions of our environmental crisis, that we can be confident technology will find a way, my blood runs cold, because I hear in that the refusal of real creatureliness. ‘These limits are temporary, our skills will find a way, we shall at some point be able to get to the stage where we are safe’. And the gospel tells us you never on earth get to a place where you are safe; but you will get to a place where you are blissful and united with your Father in heaven. In the immortal words of C S Lewis, ‘he’s not a tame lion, you know’.

The outworking then of created wisdom, created Sophia, is this joyful embrace of being created, of not being God, the acceptance that we shall die, that we are fragile, that we are fallible. And it is ‘here on this lowly ground’, in John Donne’s phrase, that we come into contact with the transfiguring, transformative life of the eternal God. Creation, creativity, creatureliness – you see perhaps the connections that I’m trying to draw out between those three clusters of ideas. When we understand what it is for God to create and how that is rooted in his trinitarian being, characterised by holy wisdom, then we begin to understand how creativity works in our world. And as we understand how creativity works, how it is always bound up with love, with that bracketing of the self to be for the other, that will for the good of what is made and so on, then we see that our holiness is not the denial but the acceptance of being creatures – made possible in that great central mystery of the creator himself becoming a creature, uncreated love working through the created humanity that is Jesus of Nazareth so that created mortal life is touched and glorified.