A new read on fantasies...

Lately I have been lamenting that fact that I haven't taken much time to just sit an read. I have been constantly on the go and just seem to fill up my hours with actions rather than thoughts. So, in an effort to remedy the situation, I ordered a new book for myself - The Truce of God by Rowan Williams. The book is an older one, but was recently rewritten almost entirely last year by the author. It is his effort to help us understand what peace means in today's world, both as a society and as an individual.
In the first chapter, he suggests that the proliferation of fantastic novels and films over the last twenty years or so is indicative of a deep seeded problem. In all of these works, the catastrophes are things that happen to people, whether it be a natural disaster, alien attack, or the actions of a sociopathic killer. Since people in these works are made out to be victims, we associate ourselves with them. We always seem to identify ourselves with the innocents...and here lies the problem.

We are intensely aware of danger, of the real and potential violence in our environment; and we are deeply determined to imagine violence as something whose origins lie outside ourselves so that we can maintain some belief in our innocence.

The problem with this is that Christian theology constantly keeps two contradictory truths in the front of our minds - that we are somewhat dependent, not fully in control of our circumstances and that we are also free and responsible for the different environments in which we live.

In the face of denials of guilt and fantasies of innocence, the gospel tells us that we have to repent, to take responsibility for what we have made of our world and beg for the vision and strength to do better.

This constant disavowing of our responsibility in the present state of affairs is an indication that we try to keep the pain, sickness, horrors and destruction of the world apart from our true selves. The tragedy is that by trying to protect ourselves from these atrocities in life, it actually prevents us from using the spiritual resources we have to confront the pain and guilt that we cannot bare alone and try to avoid. Williams sees a tendency in our culture that allows ourselves to be overcome with all of the troubles and injustice, to fall into hopelessness - but to mistake this for a false sense of peace.

It [hopelessness] absolves us from facing the humiliating picture of ourselves as idle, self-indulgent and culpably ignorant - when we take our freedom seriously. We do not have to think about guilt. Yet this means that repentance is not a possibility: and if repentance is impossible, so is grace, reconciliation, hope. So this is a 'peace' which must be unmasked for the lie it is - peace bought at the cost of reality, at the cost of human dignity. Our evasive fantasies must be brought to judgment before we can be brought to grace.

This is only the first part of the first chapter...I'm a little concerned that I bit off more than I could chew with this "little" book. He calls so many assumptions into question - opinions on violence in the media, belief in my efficacy in society, the nature of a common humanity...you get the idea. Any thoughts?