Archbishop - Christmas teaches us joy of dependence

Preaching at Canterbury Cathedral tomorrow morning, Dr Williams says that Christmas teaches us that a truly fulfilled existence means accepting joyfully our dependence on one another.

"Relationship is the new thing at Christmas, the new possibility of being related to God as Jesus was and is. 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' mind set that can be created by handouts to the destitute. In other words, we think of dependency as something passive and less than free."

This is too narrow a view, he says;

"There is a dependence that is about simply receiving what we need to live; there is a dependence that is about how we learn and grow.  And part of our human problem is that we mix this up with passive dependency and, in (quite rightly) trying to avoid passivity we get trapped in the fantasy that we don't need to receive and to learn."

Trying artificially to rush children out of their natural state of dependence, in the belief that they will be more complete, is leading to misery and exploitation.

" .we have over the long millennia of human existence created a whole culture in which there is a basic impatience about learning - we want to get to the point where we can say, OK that's enough, I know what I need to know - and about receiving - we don't want to be indebted to others, we want to stand on our own two feet."

Adults need to treasure the dependency of children and endeavour to provide them with all the security they need, to prevent the suffering that occurs:

"...perhaps one of the most appalling phenomena, still affecting hundreds of thousands of children, is the exploiting of children in the meaningless and savage civil wars in places like Congo and Sri Lanka - children who are abducted, brutalised, turned into killers, used as sex slaves.  To hear of these experiences is almost unbearable, yet the scandal continues."

" .children are created, like all of us, to become fully and consciously children of God .their suffering is an insult to the purpose of God and a contemptuous refusal of the gift of God by those who keep them in their different kinds of slavery."

All this reinforces our need to be dependent he says; a state in which we can learn

" .to ask from each other, to receive from each other, to depend on the generosity of those who love us and stand alongside us.  And that again means a particular care for those who need us most, who need us to secure their place and guarantee that there is nourishment and stability for them. As we learn how to be gratefully dependent, we learn how to attend to and respond to the dependence of others.  And perhaps by God's grace we learn how to create a society in which real dependence is celebrated and safeguarded, not regarded with embarrassment or abused by the powerful and greedy."

ENDS

Notes to editors:

The full text of the Archbishop's Christmas sermon is here.

For further details about the service at Canterbury Cathedral please contact Christopher Robinson 07759 215537