mjknight Author, dreamweaver, visionary – plus actor.

Balthasar, Williams and urban spirituality

• October 21st, 2009
• 11:14 am

In London of an evening, a month or two ago, my friend Endre Kormos from Budapest asked a table-ful of people an excellent but open-ended question. After three days in England’s capital, he wanted to hear our thoughts: ‘How do you meet God in the city?’ A few weeks later, I was in Guildford talking to James Butler, and he was asking a question along similar lines, ‘Where do you start with an urban spirituality?’ These two friends occasion the following. My dull brain has been slowly waking to this pertinent poser – by which I mean of course the question, not James Butler.

Hans urs von Balthasar, one of the most creative voices in Catholic theology in the twentieth century, wrote in The God Question and Modern Man of the pain of the struggle to pray in the city:

Before the dawn of the technical age it was easier to create genuine culture from genuine recollection. Life was more peaceful, man’s surroundings expressed eternal values more directly . . . How immediately can a landscape absent of men unite us to God, for example high mountains, a large forest, or a freely flowing river! . . . In the cities, however, only man’s handwriting is everywhere visible . . . Concrete and glass do not speak of God; they only point to man who is practically glorified in them. The cities do not transcend man; hence they do not guide to transcendence. Quickly and greedily they devour the surrounding countryside and turn it into a dirty, defiled forecourt of cities. For some years now the Roman Campagna has ceased to exist, the Swiss landscape likewise. The Rhine has long ‘had it’. Overnight, ‘nature’ will be turned into a reservation, a ‘national park’ within the civilized world; and besides, in national parks – mostly crowded – it is not very easy to pray either.

The guantlet having been thus laid down, where might we find a way forward? Personally, I have been encouraged by Rowan Williams. In Silence and Honeycakes: The wisdom of the desert, Williams hints that a spirituality for modern urban life could be found, oddly, in drawing upon the spirituality that was once hammered out in the desert, by some of the first monastic communities. He writes:

The desert looks shapeless – the sandy desert of Egypt especially, where the sand shifts and landscapes dissolve. It looks like nowhere in particular; yet you go into it so as to become more particular than ever. In the modern context, you could compare it with the other sort of non-place we are familiar with – places stripped of any local identity, featureless and totally unsurprising – the airport lounge, the fast-food outlet, places designed entirely for individuals looking for repeatable experiences. No doubt fourth-century Alexandria had its equivalents: our job, as particular people trying to live something of a calling to contemplation, as a church looking for renewal and integrity, is to seek out the non-places where we can become personally faithful. We need to identify those bits of our immediate environment that can serve as sites for recovering a covenant with the self and the body.

So, what to make of it all? And who do we look to as our teachers of urban prayer?

When asked the question, ‘Who are the equivalents of the desert monks today?’, Williams mentioned, among others, Charles de Foucauld and the Little Brothers of Jesus, ‘exploring their Christian calling in a literal and physical desert and in the desert of the anonymous urban environment’.

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• balthasar, city, prayer, williams