Abstract
Ben Quash,
Abiding: The Archbishop of Canterbury’s Lent Book
, 2013, Bloomsbury: London, 2012; 272 pp.: £10.00 (pbk), £9.99 (ebook)
Ben Quash’s Lent book is a tremendous piece of writing which challenges and inspires in equal measure. It is full of profound but accessible theological insights which give pause for prayerful thought. Essentially an extended meditation on the word ‘abiding’, the book begins by noting that it is not a word much used nowadays except, as the author later points out, in a negative sense of ‘not being able to abide’ someone or something. It is, though, central to St John’s Gospel, and one for which it is difficult to find an alternative, having, as it does, ‘the sense of a full, personal commitment’ (p. 1).
Quash suggests that ‘abiding’ should be a watchword for Christians. In showing how we are called to abide in body and mind, through care and in relationships, in exile and through wounding to find a peace that abides, he engages accessibly not only with the Scriptures and various theologians but also with individuals as diverse as St Benedict to a fictional character Momo from the novel of that name by the German author Michael Ende, from Brave Sir Robin of Monty Python fame to Joe Rose in Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love, from Damiel in the film Wings of Desire to the fourth-century saint Macrina, and finally to ‘The Dude’ in Joel and Ethan’s cult movie The Big Lebrowske. As well as using such varied sources of wisdom, the author draws movingly on painful personal experience in a way which, as Rowan Williams observes in the foreword, ‘lacks any jarring note of self-dramatising’ (p. 10).
As the book makes clear, there are many ways in which Christians are called to abide, ways which exhibit the tension between a call to abide through stability, as exemplified in the Benedictine inheritance, to abiding in change and loss, particularly self-loss in relationships. Some of the forms of abiding Quash commends gave me considerable pause for thought: for example, he suggests that arguing with others is a form of abiding through caring – especially when the alternative is walking away from them. He accepts that not all arguing is good but points out that Jesus did a good deal of arguing, as did Paul and the prophets (p. 83). There is a lesson there not just for individuals but for today’s Christian Church and the world.
Quash proposes that the Christian vocation involves attempting ‘to stitch together the fragments of lived experience in all the changes and chances of this fleeting world in order to make something meaningful from them; to live lives that are signs of the faithful God who abides eternally’ while being ready to relinquish control and an embrace of uncertainty (p. 136). I found his book an inspiration in encouraging and helping me to do so in the hope of abiding with God beyond death ‘in wonder, and as a grace exceeding all expectation… because of what happened to Jesus Christ’ who was raised from the dead and ‘came again and spoke words of love and promise to his followers’ (p. 240).