Hauerwas – Coming Late to the Party

As with many things I tend to take a while to get around to reading what everyone else has been talking about for a while. Nelly first introduced me to Stanley Hauerwas through Living Gently in a Violent World (Resources for Reconciliation)Living Gently in a Violent World. Now one of my former housemates has helped me along with a copy of Hannah’s Child: A Theologian’s MemoirHannah’s Child – Hauerwas’s memior. I’m drinking it up.

A few weeks ago we had a session for young leaders on Spiritual Formation, which Hauerwas speaks into wonderfully saying:

Thus Jesus does not tell us that we should try to be poor in spirit, or meek or peacemeakers. He simply says that many who are called into his kingdom will find themselves so constituted. We cannot try to be meek or gentle in order to be a disciple of this gentle Jesus, but in learning to be his disciple some of us will be gentled..

Another comment caught my attention too, especially thinking back to various theological debates, and our need to try to explain everything, dot every i and cross every t:

Only in God are existence and essence one. Accordingly, our language about God is necessarily analogical, which means that theology has the task of helping the church not say more about God than needs to be said.

Enough said…

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Living Gently in a Violent World

I’m getting my Hauerwas introduction from Nelly through the wonderful little book co-written with Jean Vanier – Living Gently in a Violent World – The Prophetic Witness of Weakness.

Vanier is the founder of L’Arche and lives and works with people who are disabled. The following few lines in the introduction stopped me in my tracks:

If it is correct that in France in the next few years there will be no children born with Down’s syndrome because they will all have been aborted, then something is deeply wrong with our society. As my friend John, who has Down’s syndrome puts it, “That doesn’t make us feel very welcome does it?” And he’s right. One of the very real dangers for people with disabilites in Western cultures is compassion!

The clincher:

Our desire to alleviate suffering in the name of compassion easily leads to the destruction of people whom God has created and loves beyond all things.