The struggle to make Christ meaningful with our limited vocabulary is part of the faith journey

Christ the Heart of Creation
Rowan Williams
(Bloomsbury Continuum, 304 pp, £25)
Tablet Bookshop price £20 • tel 020 7799 4064

Ilook around at the people I work with and minister to, and find myself ­asking: “What is it to have a Christian faith?” And Rowan Williams’ Christ the Heart of Creation helps me identify something about their spirituality and mine. To have a Christian faith is to grope towards trying to understand what it is we’re caught up in, as individuals, as the Church, when we acknowledge Christ as Redeemer.

Faith is a seeking, a filtering of our ­experi­ences of the world through our acceptance of Jesus Christ. In that seeking lies our formation in Christ, and that makes faith a foraging and responding to and grappling with God’s ­providential care for us. We will never arrive at the point where we fully understand. We are always stretched beyond ourselves and our knowledge of how things in the world work. But the quiet insistence of faith compels us to reach out towards something in ourselves and in our ecclesial communities that is in Christ and is Christ. Nothing is hidden from us. Grace is offered totally to us. But we are taught our very human limitations in and through our believing, and that what we are immersed in is inexhaustible.

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