Mick Hartley

The Times seem delighted to be publishing an extract from the new biography of Archbish Rowan Williams by Rupertt Short Rupert Shortt, Rowan's Rule. It turns out that he was in New York on 9/11. In the print edition, under the main headline, September 11: where the hell was God? we have:

"In an exclusive excerpt from his new biography of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rupert Shortt reveals how  Rowan Williams's faith was tested to its limits when he nearly died during the attack on the World Trade Centre in 2001"

Online it's changed to:

"In our exclusive excerpt from the biography of the Archbishop of Canterbury, we reveal how Rowan Williams's faith was tested to the limit in the attack on the World Trade Centre"

Spot the difference? I wonder if someone objected to the implication in the print version that it was the threat to his own skin that prompted the great man's doubts – a rather unworthy response for someone of such high moral standards. It might suggest to the cynical that, as we might have suspected all along, the Archbish's God is like most people's: a kind of personal comfort blanket to ensure that nasty things don't happen to him personally.

If, as the amended version implies, it was the general loss of life that caused our man his momentary doubt, the inevitable thought arises that surely, as a leading Christian intellectual, such a notion should have occurred already. Where was God, to take the most obvious example, during the Holocaust? Or where is he during the thousands of tragedies that regularly punctuate our lives: earthquakes, tsunamis, and the like? Where is he whenever a child dies? And so on and endlessly on.

Still, it all ends happily ever after:

“When [Rowan] got to the rubric for the homily he was totally surprised; he hadn't expected to preach, so he preached off the cuff. He went back to an encounter that he had with an airline pilot on the streets at 7am that morning. The pilot said to him, “Where the hell was God?” Rowan's answer was that God is useless at times like this. Now that's pretty shocking, but actually what he then went on to unpack is that God didn't cause this and God [was not] going to stop it, because God has granted us free will, and therefore God has to suffer the consequences of this like we do. So in a sense he exonerated God…”

Rowan gauged each intercession so as to address a different facet of the disaster. At first the response (“Hear our prayer”) to the invocation “Lord, in your mercy” was quiet. Then [the Reverend Fred] Burnham sensed a swell of feeling throughout the congregation.

“As they realised how he was touching them, each one individually, they began to shout their response and by the time he finished, the response was like a football game…I was standing there with tears streaming down my face and I could hear people on all sides of me sniffling…in a magnificent way Rowan had liturgically connected with the people. And it was profound.”

At first the response to the invocation “Lord, in your mercy” was quiet. I wonder why.