A place where the desperate anxiety to please God means nothing

Not long ago, I developed a paper on why place matters and that loving one's neighbor cannot exclude caring about (loving) that neighbor’s neighborhood.  In an article by Stanley Hauerwas, “The place of the church and the agony of Anglicanism,” he draws our attention to Rowan Williams, who “observes that the New Testament testifies to the creation of a pathway between earth and heaven that nothing can ever again close.”

​A place has been cleared in which God and human reality can belong together without rivalry or fear. That place is Jesus, in Christ, now better known as “church.” It is a place where a love abides that is at once vulnerable and without protection; a place in which human competition does not count:

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“. . . a place where the desperate anxiety to please God means nothing; a place where the admission of failure is not the end but the beginning; a place from which no one is excluded in advance.”