Rowan Williams on 'Being disciples'

Rowan Williams' talk given at the Fulcrum conference on 'Being Disciples" is here .

His particular theme is that being a disciple is not an intermittent business: it is rather a call to consistent and expectant listening to the master. But I also liked this closing paragraph:

...discipleship is indeed about traveling, and about growing. You can't begin to describe the life of the disciples in the New Testament without coming to grips with that dimension of traveling. Disciples were people called away from home because they must be where their master is. And that is never going to be comfortable; but perhaps it becomes intelligible when one realizes (something that again is writ large on every page of scripture) that the home where you will finally realize who and what you are is the home, the place prepared for you, by Jesus. And the disciple is engaged in a journey from a place that looks like a comfortable and manageable home towards a home that is eternal and that - as St Augustine says - doesn't fall away or fall into non-existence because we don't happen to be living in it at the moment. Discipleship is, paradoxically, a journey away from home, and a journey toward home. Just as the conversion that is the daily task of a disciple, is a break with what seems closest and dearest to us, and a cleaving to what is actually deepest and most natural in us.