Flight

Monastic flight, Rowan Williams emphasizes (Silence and Honey Cakes), wasn’t “running away from responsibility or from relationships.” Rather, it is “about denying yourself the luxury of solving your problems by running away literally or physically from them . . . and about taking responsibility for your sins” (62–3). We might try to relieve the stress of our sins not by fleeing, but “restoring to ‘human company’”—but this can “blur the sharp edges of responsibility” and lead us to “imagine that you can arrange your situation to your comfort. Change the furniture, change the scenery and you can change your inner landscape.” Or, “talk to others and manipulate their reactions to you, and you can soften or share out the guilt you feel and fear” (63).

Williams’s example is incisive: “Someone has offended or hurt me, accused me of something, pointed out something I’d rather not recognize; the attractive way through is to talk to someone else and get them to reassure me that I’m wonderful and (ideally) that my critic is not worth listening to.” In the long run, this fails: “I shall have to work very hard indeed at silencing that critical voice, and it can become an obsessive search for absolution.” It is what some of the desert fathers call “the heavy burden of self-justification.” Flight is the answer: “run from the company that will make you feel better but will equally involve you in a lifetime’s frustration” (63). Flee to a community of truth.

Williams puts a contemporary gloss on this by suggesting that the monks were fleeing “projection”: “from other people’s projections onto us, ours onto them, and our own inflated expectations of ourselves” (63). A life in the church is no guarantee that one can escape these dynamics, and Williams takes the monks’ reluctance to accept episcopal office as another effort to extricate themselves from the network of projection: “while some Christians are of course called to exercise public ministry (the desert literature is never anti-sacramental or even anti-institutional in the sense of trying to reinvent the church as a community of perfect souls who are too spiritual to need the ordinary means of grace), the fact is that the calling to monastic witness is not going to be easily compatible with a life in which it is easy to be ensnared in the fantasies of others and caught up in an illusory position of dignity” (66). The monks took seriously the biblical injunction: Let not many be teachers.