On Being Welcomed

Early in 2022, I remember reading an essay by Rowan Williams just a few days prior to moving into the intern house at A Rocha, on ‘Faith, Hope and Love’. I remember being stopped in my tracks by how Williams wrote, with reference to St. John of the Cross, of how each of these three qualities can undergo a kind of ‘dark night.’ And when Williams came to describing what can emerge on the other side of faith’s dark night, I remember feeling a deep sense of promise, a sense of something real, that I was being invited to anticipate and look for, as I prepared to go on my way to a new community living experience at A Rocha. I had been struggling in the preceding years with making sense of my faith and wondering whether I could belong in a community of faith again, and these words came as reassurance. Williams writes: 

”Out of this sense of a ‘brick wall’ before our intelligence, this sense of confusion and loss where our understanding is concerned, faith grows in its true meaning, It appears not as a system, a comprehensive answer to all our problems. It appears quite simply in the form of ‘dependable relationship’. You may not understand, or have the words on the tip of your tongue, but you learn somehow to be confident in a presence, in an ‘other,’ who does not change or go away. You realize that when the signposts and landmarks have been taken away there is a presence that does not let go. And that is faith, I would say, in a very deeply biblical sense.” 

Deep peace and blessing,
Anne

Rev. Anne Baxter Smith
Pastor, Southpoint Church