Rowan Williams:

Representational speech will carry a good many features that are irrelevant to prediction and control, but answer to something more like a sheer desire to understand and to deploy verbal symbols in ways that enlarge the repertoire of communication that can be both purposive and more playful or (to use a loaded word) contemplative—attuned both to scientia and sapientia in the language St Augustine used to distinguish instrumental and reflective or contemplative knowing, knowing whose point is simply knowing, in the sense of intelligently enjoying the presence of the other.

Rowan Williams:

Literal and metaphorical speech are not related as more and less ‘faithful’ representations of an object: both seek to secure the intelligible presence of what is perceived. But it is arguable that the metaphorical, or at least the non-slavishly literal, has in some circumstances a better chance of representing what is spoken of, in so far as it seeks to identify a form of action that is active within another phenomenal shape—so that the distinctive form appears (paradoxically) more plainly when ‘playing away from home,’ detached from its original specific embodiment and linked to another context; just as the distinctive feature of or moment in the life of the ‘host’ subject becomes more itself when phrased in a borrowed terminology.

‘It must be inconvenient to be made of flesh,’ said the Scarecrow, thoughtfully, ‘for you must sleep, and eat and drink. However, you have brains, and it is worth a lot of bother to be able to think properly.’

Brad East, on how grace is received corporately—on how we learn to respond in gratitude as a community:

We learn gratitude first of all as a community, as a people defined by prayer. After all, how do children and catechumens learn to begin their prayers? They listen to the gathered assembly at prayer. And what do they hear? “O God, we give you thanks . . .”

So the church, as the corporate body of Christ fed by his sacramental body and drawn forward in time by his Spirit to the public manifestation of his risen body, is a community created and defined by gratitude to God. Indeed, the inception of the church is itself the occasion of a gift, the great giving of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost (see Acts 2). The Spirit who indwells the church and animates its life through word and sacrament bears the personal name of Gift, as Augustine recognized long ago. The singular Gift with which the Father presents the Son, thus eternally begetting him as the Son through the eternal breathing-forth of the Spirit on him, is one and the same as that which is poured out on the apostles during the great feast in Jerusalem, granting new life to the Son’s reconstituted body and holy Breath to the living temple of God—one not made with human hands (see 1 Corinthians 3:16–17; 6:19–20; Acts 7:48).

The shape of this community’s life is eucharistic from start to finish. It breaks bread in grateful memory of the Author of life (see, e.g., Acts 2:37–47), who died and rose again to grant eternal life to all who call on his name (3:15; 4:12). It offers itself to God on behalf of the world, and to the world on behalf of God.