In a series of public remarks, including his Christmas Eve sermon and brief reflections for Vatican Radio, the Archbishop of Canterbury has stressed healthy dependence on God and openness to other people.
 
Both themes appear regularly in the archbishop’s leadership style and in his messages to Anglicans, such as his reflections on the Anglican Communion Covenant.
 
In his two-minute remarks for Vatican Radio [RealMedia], Archbishop Rowan Williams drew from the account in Luke 2 of angels proclaiming good news to shepherds about the birth of Jesus.
 
“This is a story that’s good news for everyone,” the archbishop said. “If it’s a story for everyone, it can’t be a story of winners and losers, insiders and outsiders, us and them. Really taking the Christmas story on board is to go beyond all that, to let go of this compulsive human habit of thinking of everything in terms of conflicts that someone wins and someone loses, or competitions in which we have to get the better of them. Somehow, we need to believe that the love of God, turned into flesh and blood in this baby in the stable, is big enough, spacious enough, for any and every human being, so that when we look at another person, our first thought should be, ‘They’re welcome in the stable. They’re welcome in the place where God lives.’ ”
 
In his Christmas Eve sermon, preached at Canterbury Cathedral, the archbishop contrasted dependence on God with modern culture’s emphasis on independence and pride.
 
“Relationship is the new thing at Christmas, the new possibility of being related to God as Jesus was and is,” he said. “But here’s the catch and the challenge. To come into this glorious future is to learn how to be dependent on God. And that word tends to have a chilly feel for us, especially us who are proudly independent moderns. We speak of ‘dependent’ characters with pity and concern; we think of ‘dependency’ on drugs and alcohol; we worry about the ‘dependent’ mindset that can be created by handouts to the destitute. In other words, we think of dependency as something passive and less than free.
 
“One of the worst effects of this culture of impatience and pride is what it does to those who are most obviously dependent — the elderly, those with physical or psychological challenges and disabilities, and, of course, children,” the archbishop said. “We send out the message that if you’re not standing on your own two feet and if you need regular support, you’re an anomaly. We’ll look after you (with a bit of a sigh), but frankly it’s not ideal. And in the case of children, we shall do our level best to turn you into active little consumers and performers as soon as we can. We shall test you relentlessly in schools, we shall bombard you with advertising, often highly sexualized advertising, we shall worry you about your prospects and skills from the word go; we shall do all we can to make childhood a brief and rather regrettable stage on the way to the real thing — which is ‘independence,’ turning you into a useful cog in the social machine that won’t need too much maintenance.”
 
The answer rests in imitating Jesus and becoming “gladly and unashamedly dependent,” Archbishop Williams said.
 
“As we learn how to be gratefully dependent, we learn how to attend to and respond to the dependence of others. Perhaps by God’s grace we shall learn in this way how to create a society in which real dependence is celebrated and safeguarded, not regarded with embarrassment or abused by the powerful and greedy,” he said.
 
“God has spoken through a Son. He has called us all to become children at the cradle of the Son, the Word made flesh, so that we may grow into a glory that even the angels wonder at. To all who accept him he gives power and authority to become children of God, learning and growing into endless life and joy.”
 
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