quizcustodiet

(I leave you peace; my peace I give you.) What's with the title? Well, the Latin is mostly because I'm pretentious, with a small side-order of my feeling that that sentence and so much of the rest of the liturgy just sounds lovely in Latin. The text itself was what Rowan Williams chose to preach on last night at Evensong in the college chapel.

shreena and I went to listen, and also got to attend a more informal Q&A session with the Archbishop after dinner. I am now almost as much of a fan of the beardy one as Shreena is!

The theme of the sermon was loosely related to yesterday's Remembrance Sunday services; it started by demolishing the idea that Jesus' words above mean that Christians can expect a trouble-free life. Indeed, as he pointed out, the passage above continues 'I do not give as the world gives'. The Archbishop claims instead that God's peace is to be found in the reflection (a "harmonic", as Dr. Williams put it somewhat obsessively) of God found in all people and all things, and thus how Christians are called to set aside their own agenda to try to appreciate what makes other people and other things lovely to God before approaching them with one's own agenda. From this, of course, comes a requirement on Christians not to write anyone or anything off as irredeemably evil and thus to _commune_ with even their enemies. The strong suggestion of his sermon was that if this were done more often there would be rather fewer honoured dead for us to be remembering! I'm not sure I'm as optimistic as he is on that last point, but it was an interesting, challenging and well thought-out message.

I was also impressed by his overwhelming air of faith, and by the sense of humor he displayed in the question session after dinner. All in all, he definitely seems to me a Good Thing.

The rest of the weekend was reasonably quiet, but nice; went bowling on Friday evening with Sul-Ki-Do, worked on Saturday then watched Super Size Me. On Sunday was the Remembrance Sunday service on St. Giles, lunch at the Gardener's Arms and a stroll across Port Meadow before the Evensong discussed above.

Completely unrelated to the above, anyone who has been annoyed by Orson Scott Card at some point will probably enjoy this humorously venomous critique of Pastwatch.