The secular phalanx, rather like religious fundamentalists, is blinded by a certainty which conceals anxiety. The process of modernisation in the rest of the world is not following the pattern established in NW Europe. We are the exception and we are beginning to understand for example how the ecological challenge we face is a function of a way of being in the world which is arrogant and lacks reverence and awareness; and which arises from a false estimate of ourselves as masters and possessors of the earth rather than its stewards.
Yet there is no cause for religious people to be triumphalistic and try to outdo the God-deniers in shrillness. Suddenly it has also become urgent to distinguish in our country between healthful and lethal religion and to find the way to initiate the young into the former rather than the latter.
Lethal religion is one version of the idolatry which the prophets spend so much time denouncing. It is the manufacture of gods out of our own rage and impotence. A bruised ego finds a surreptitious way to re-ascend by making a god in its own image. This is a problem for all religions. When we are so sure that we have the right idea about God and want to clone or condemn all the others, then we are like the god deniers almost certainly on the wrong track. As the poet said of God, â??You have such a quiet manner of existence that those who name you with a loud insistence show that theyâ??ve forgotten your proximity.â??
Richard Charters, Bishop of London Induction of the Revd Nicholas Papadopulos
* * *
Evensong at Westminster Abbey
You are invited to attend Evensong in the presence of His All-Holiness Bartholomew I Archbishop of Constantinople, New Rome and Ecumenical Patriarch and of His Grace Dr Rowan Williams Archbishop of Canterbury, Primate of All England and Metropolitan John (Zizioulas) of Pergamon to celebrate the publication of:
The Church of the Triune God, the Agreed Statement of the International Commission for Anglicanâ??Orthodox Theological Dialogue, 1989â??2006.
30 January 2007, Tuesday 5 p.m. at Westminster Abbey, London
All are welcome
