The year 2004 marks the 1,400th anniversary of the first Christian community in London. To mark this the Bishop of London has organised a Diocesan mission of renewal and reinterpretation of faith in the city.
The opening part of the book is a history of the Christian community in London and a description of how it has faced the problems of an evolving metropolis. The Church now faces a God-forsaken world in which human beings themselves have assumed the role of gods. In the process, of course, they have discovered that, alienated from the Creator and Source of Life, they have no life in themselves to help themselves and they taste death.
The knowledge in Wisdom, springing from the Creator, has the power to penetrate our lives and effect a transformation of the mind. His transforming power is symbolized in the Bible by anointing. Christ is the anointed one who possesses the fullness of the Wisdom of God and who is in the world to open up the way to Paradise regained.
TS Eliot expresses this perfectly: "Where is the wisdom that we've lost in knowledge. Where is the knowledge we have lost in information."
Special attention in this book is attached to liturgy for in this is an action in which the Holy Spirit enrols us in Christ's work of regaining Paradise. For most of us however the primal vision is clouded. Our crisis therefore is a crisis of awareness.
