Here's a fuller version of the article that will appear in December's edition of the Pompey Chimes - with more quotes taken from the Archbishop of Canterbury's visit to our cathedral on November 17.

IT was a day that was genuinely inspiring – for both clergy and community leaders.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, helped us to think about creating better communities across the diocese in a memorable day in our cathedral. He spoke of how to create a ‘soul’ dimension in our society, answered questions and celebrated the Eucharist.

It was his first official visit to our diocese since his enthronement in 2003. He was originally asked to lead a day for clergy, but – as the theme was ‘Seeking the Soul of Community’ – Bishop Kenneth had urged clergy to invite community leaders from their parishes. 

So the 300-strong audience included headteachers, police officers, council officials, and representatives from the NHS, the media and the military. Many seemed impressed with Dr Williams’ sharp mind, his humility and his sense of humour as he mixed academic theology with practical suggestions to improve community life.

In his first keynote address, he explained that a community with a soul was one that had both shape and story.

“The soul is what gives form, what gives shape, coherence and solidity to the body,” he said. “In the Christian life, soul is what relates to what you don’t immediately see. That suggests that the strongest, deepest and most lasting shape that bodies or communities can have is a shape that’s somehow given by relationship to what’s not just contained in the body or community.

“A community aware of its soul reflects a consistent sense of what and who people are: a community that doesn’t regard the essentials of human nature as up for re-negotiation all the time, that has some kind of underlying, unifying vision of what human beings are about, what is owed to them, what they are capable of. At the very simplest level, a community in which you can talk about soul becomes a community that treats people consistently.

“Secondly, soul is about having a story to tell. It helps people find the narratives in their own lives that they can share. In every healthy community, there must be people who hold those narratives. Oral history groups, museums and libraries are good at holding these memories. In the Kirby estate in Liverpool, that story was about the incompetence of planners and bureaucrats, and it produced a sustained low-key resistance to authority among those who lived there.

“What gives shape and what gives story? The Church can hold that space for aspects of humanity that have got squeezed out by a culture that insists you’ve got to earn your credibility all the time, a culture that insists that there are always going to be dispensable people. Seeking the soul of community is looking around you and critically questioning what is being squeezed out and asking how can we make space for it to flourish.”

Participants then split into groups to discuss what the archbishop had said. Each group came up with a written question for Dr Williams to answer. Among the points he made in response to those questions were that a healthy society was an argumentative society, in which people could disagree freely.

He criticised funding regimes for regeneration projects for the short-term outlooks it produced – those involved in a three-year project could spend the final 18 months of that time looking for new sources of funding. 

He admitted that the Church of England had a ‘troubled soul’ at the moment, as it tried to treat all sides in the debates over women bishops and gay clergy consistently. But he was encouraged that Anglicans were still using the language and the authority of the Bible in those debates.

And he also encouraged schools to find breathing space in overcrowded timetables for children to find time for the soul, rather than constantly trying to measure achievement. He suggested that children could be encouraged to meditate – sitting still and breathing deeply – and be taken to exhibitions and war memorials to expand their horizons.

After leading a Eucharist in which he preached about the 12th century saint Hugh of Lincoln, he ate his lunch with new incumbents before delivering his second address. In it, he spoke about Communist China as an example of a community that had tried to eradicate religion and ended up without a soul.

“There’s something about human beings that doesn’t get eradicated in these circumstances of extreme pressure,” he said. “That something is our basic relationship with God. China in the 1950s and 60s tried to keep any suggestion of a relationship with God out of sight. It was a consistent and coherent community in which the Party knew what you needed and gave it to you. That society tried to suggest that top-down provision of pre-determined needs was all that was required.

“When China began to open up to the west, there was economic growth, but social stagnation. It was impossible to generate that level of critical moral energy in a society that assumes it can meet all your needs. There was a recognition of the moral vacuum and the cost of being a soulless society.”

He also spoke about ‘Soul in the City’ projects in Manchester and London in which young people took on menial tasks such as sweeping streets, tidying gardens and painting playgrounds to express God’s love.

“One bit of work was about redoing again and again what vandals had torn down the night before, every night for two weeks,” he said. “The affirmation that some things are worth doing because they are worth doing is a memory worth living with. That’s where the language of the soul belongs.

“I’m trying to hint at ways of opening up theological language. God is both the shape and the story, the form of all forms. The more that intelligence and creation flourishes, the more it reflects God’s creativity. The soul in the community becomes the recognisable image of God going on around us.”

Dr Williams then answered questions from a panel that included Professor John Craven, vice-chancellor of Portsmouth University, Carol Damper from the Roberts Centre, which helps families in Portsmouth, Barbara Thompson, director of economic development for Portsmouth City Council, Jonathan Montgomery, chairman of Hampshire Primary Care Trust and Tim Daykin, from BBC Radio Solent.

He agreed that scapegoating of particular sections of society – certain youngsters or certain foreigners – was an easy option, which the government often colluded in. The harder option was to empathise with such people and see things from their perspective.

And he agreed that it was heartbreaking to see children dying of poverty and old people dying of cold when so much money was spent on destroying life elsewhere in the world.

“It’s heartbreaking to see what we find it possible to spend money on and what we seem to find it difficult to spend money on,” he said. “It’s not as simple as saying money could be diverted from one thing to the other, but that outrage and contradiction needs to be underlined.”

He answered a question about interfaith relations by saying: “Interfaith dialogue between Christians, Muslims and Jews often starts with someone saying ‘I’m not a Jew because of x, y and z’. The Jew then thinks: ‘That’s not right, but if that’s how you see us, that’s how we’ll behave.’ That’s not dialogue. It’s better to say: 'I'm a confident enough inhabitant of my faith to be able to listen to what you have to say'."

He said he admired those in local authorities who have to make difficult decisions, knowing that they would play badly in the media. He said: "It's costly, and it begs the question: 'Who am I answerable to?' It feels like the media, but it's actually other people, or for a Christian, God.

“We have elements of the national media that promote an uncritical and mythological view of the British identity, and an uncritical adoption of the views of a couple of thousand people in a couple of miles of north London as the position of modern western humanity. The role of a good national media is to keep an intelligent and fully-resourced national conversation going about the isues that affect everyday life.”

The day ended with participants hoping to take things further in their own neighbourhoods. The chief executive of the Isle of Wight Council, Joe Duckworth, wants to create a faith forum to help the island’s strategic direction, and was able to spend time talking to the new Archdeacon of the Isle of Wight, the Ven Caroline Baston. Others hope the relationships that started or developed during the day can lead to genuine change in their communities.

For more photos of the day, click here.