THE ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY is sitting in a chair in the State Room of Lambeth Palace, his face rigid with tension. He hates posing for photographs, so I try engaging him in conversation while our photographer snatches a few shots. For a moment or two Rowan Williams’s face becomes lively and expressive, but as soon as he stops talking it sets again in a concrete grimace, bracing itself against the intrusion of the lens.

The Archbishop rarely gives newspaper interviews; this is only his third since he was appointed nearly two years ago. Like his predecessor but three, Michael Ramsey, to whom he is often compared, Williams is painfully shy of the public eye. Ramsey’s portrait and bust grace the Lambeth Palace corridors: in both, his head is lowered, his eyes downcast so that they can barely be discerned under his bushy brows. Williams too is finding it difficult to cope with the light shining fully and searchingly on his face.

“The sheer level of attention is one of the things I hadn’t quite expected and perhaps that was silly of me,” he admits. “I was thinking about this, actually, before you came. When you are talking to someone who’s hard of hearing, you have to pitch your voice in a certain way and keep it at that pitch. And as you can imagine, I sometimes find this very difficult. It’s one of the things my mother used to shout at me about in her last years.” His voice is indeed so soft that my tape recorder can only just pick it up.

“And as you pitch your voice like that, and try to keep it audible, you become more self-conscious about what you’re saying and perhaps more stumbling, more hesitant. And that struck me as one of the best analogies for trying to speak in a position like this.

“Everybody’s listening — not everybody, goodness, I delude myself! — but a lot of people are listening quite hard for nuances. But of course when you’re speaking in the public register and nuance is difficult to get, you get self-conscious. And I’m still struggling with that."

Williams speaks gently and intelligently, but often obscurely. His prose can be as difficult to unpick as other people’s poetry. Like his Lambeth Palace desk, which is strewn with near-toppling towers of paper, the Archbishop’s brain is crammed with facts, thoughts and ideas.

He has a photographic memory, and can recall whole pages of Russian literature or early theology. Russia is a passion for him: his mantelpiece is covered with icons, and he enjoys showing me a photo of himself with a group of Russian Orthodox patriarchs. “The battle of the beards,” he jokes. “And they have much better hats.” Not all his audiences, however, are as clever or well-versed as he. Williams has been criticised for using unnecessarily arcane language. But I thought perhaps he had been trying harder in the past few weeks. After all, his sermon celebrating the tenth anniversary of the ordination of women was a model of clarity. “I just wondered . . . ” I begin.

“Why I can’t write like that all the time?” He finishes the question for me and laughs. “It’s not that I’ve been trying in the past few weeks. I’ve been trying for the past 20 years or so and it doesn’t seem to get any easier. I really have to struggle on some levels to say just what I want to say, and yes, I know, I know, I know it’s very clotted. And when it is, it’s partly having to try to formulate something quickly and partly that sometimes the subject matter isn’t wrestled to the ground very easily.”

There seems to be a lot of “struggling” and “wrestling” in Williams’s life — which must be hard for a man who is by nature mild and sensitive. Until he became Archbishop of Canterbury he had never encountered the sheer levels of vitriol that mark the warring sides of the Anglican Communion. He is also battling against an enormous weight of public expectation. Williams says he used to warn his clergy in Wales about dealing with people’s expectation and projection, which intensifies the more senior you become in the Church. He called it “the danger of living other people's dreams”.

Their disappointment, too, must be difficult to handle. "I think that comes with the territory. And again, even when I was Archbishop of Wales and working with new bishops, I used to say, not realising quite how true it was, ‘One of the things you will do as a bishop is disappoint people’."

Williams concedes that people might be disappointed with how slowly things have changed since he became head of the Church of England. “There’s bound to be an expectation that new archbishops make a difference rapidly. But because you’re not the elected leader of a new government with a manifesto to implement and a structure designed to do that for you, the rate of change is bound to be slow. And I’ve said from the start that my job isn’t to be a kind of government leader, to impose a line.

“It can be a slow process, it can be a frustrating process but I think that’s partly the way Christian leadership anyway is set up and very much the way in which Anglicans have tended to do the job.” He laughs: the Anglican Communion, unlike the Roman Catholic Church, has always been notoriously difficult to lead. But disappointment has been felt more widely by liberals in the Church, who had assumed that he would be on their side in the arguments over homosexuality. Personally he shares their views, and his appointment last summer of the gay (but celibate) Jeffrey John as Bishop of Reading seemed to confirm their expectations. Then Williams lost his nerve in the face of intense opposition to the appointment and asked John to withdraw. The Archbishop — visibly struggling again — said he felt obliged to separate his personal stance from the position he believes he has to hold as head of the Anglican Communion. And judging by what he said on the subject in this interview, liberals may have to gird themselves for more disappointment to come. Williams is clearly not going to force conservatives in the Church simply to accept gay bishops and blessings of gay relationships in America and Britain.

For a start, he is notably sympathetic to the predicament of the Church in Africa, working in a culture that sees homosexuality as corrupt and degenerate. Anglicans there have themselves been cast as corrupt, particularly by Muslims, because of their sister churches’ actions in the West.

Does that mean, then, that the Anglican Communion will always have to move at the pace of its slowest member? “It’s never just done that. For the Communion as a whole, where it wants to move on this issue is still formally an open question, I think. You can’t assume it will go one way. Let’s take, say, the ordination of women. Actions in certain provinces brought others along.”

But as soon as that possibility is raised, he casts doubt on it. “For whatever reason, though, that wasn’t seen by many people as a matter affecting the authority of the Bible in quite the way this is. Nor did it have quite the same cultural intensity that this seems to have."

So does that mean the “alternative oversight” model, which has allowed parishes that oppose women priests to have their own flying bishop, couldn’t simply be modified to apply to the gay issue too? “I don’t know at the moment. I really don’t know. The American Church is trying to find its way on this at the moment. We’ll learn something from that.”

Another possibility, which could allow liberal churches in the West more freedom, is what is known as a Lutheran federation, a much looser structure than the current Communion. Williams concedes that this “has practical attractions. The question is whether it’s cutting the Gordian knot. Trying to be in communion . . . is a big investment in being together, and it’s a high-risk one. I think it’s worth trying that high-risk enterprise because it seems to me to go a bit closer to the heart of the New Testament than just a slightly shoulder-shrugging coexistence.” So is unity more important than anything else? “You mean more important than truth?” he asks. That’s exactly what I mean.

“People sometimes talk a little bit easily about sacrificing unity to truth or truth to unity. I suppose Christians are supposed to believe that unity has something to do with truth, that the work of holding together is itself a converting and transforming thing. To try to work for the sake of unity is not to say,

‘Anything for a quiet life’, because it isn’t in the least quiet. In fact, it’s a recipe for what can be quite a tension-ridden and difficult relation. But I do feel that federation, loose parallel processes, are less than we’ve got, less than we could have and, in the very long run, less than what God wants in the Church.” It might be better, however, than a complete split? “It might be. We’ll see. But what I’m really trying to set out is what I think the priority has to be, the desired priority in terms of unity.”

If unity is the priority, then, who will have to be sacrificed? Will it be gay believers and priests and would-be bishops, and their supporters? Quite probably. “Whatever solution we come to is going to cost somebody and it has been said that the interesting moral decisions are not about whether anyone gets hurt but who gets hurt, which is a very painful thing. Very. And whatever shape the unity takes, there’s going to be cost.”

I point out that it is he who is going to have to decide who gets hurt, and he agrees. “I’m going to have a very large role in doing it, yes.” More struggle and pain ahead, I fear.

When Williams was appointed, he spoke about the need for the Church to capture the imagination of the culture. Isn’t that hard to do when, on this matter at least, the Church has become so counter-cultural? To wider British society, the Church seems rather old-fashioned in its inability to resolve an issue that most people outside have already come to terms with.

“Whether something is old-fashioned or not doesn’t resolve the question of whether it’s true or not,” he retorts. “I can see the temptation of simply thinking, ‘Well, there’s a cultural mainstream which flows neatly in one direction. You just align with it’. And that really won’t do.”

Yet the cultural mainstream is right now in the process of deciding to allow gay couples, through civil partnerships, more or less the same rights as married ones. So what will happen when the first of his (many) gay priests decides to enter into a civil partnership? “Oh,” says the Archbishop, with a groan. “Pass!” He laughs. A pause follows. “Hmmmm . . . ” is the best elucidation he can offer after that. It’s bound to happen, though, isn ’t it? “Bound to happen,” he concurs.

Time to move on to politics. A few weeks ago Williams gave a sermon denouncing the Government over Iraq. Perhaps he is starting to see himself as a de facto opposition? “No. Truthfully, not at all. An opposition is defined by what’s coming at you. I don’t think the Church has any business letting itself be boxed in to that sort of job.”

But he does see part of his job as to comment critically and constructively on politics and public life? “Yes, of course. I think the Christian gospel is bound to be putting questions as to how we organise our society, how we make our political decisions.” He claims to be well aware of the burden that decision-makers carry, although his criticisms of Tony Blair and the war in Iraq seemed a tad naive. I point out that he, like the Prime Minister, is also going to have to make some messy compromises. “And people are undoubtedly going to give me a very hard time,” he laughs.

The Archbishop’s latest crusade is on prison policy. “There’s a huge, huge agenda to be followed up in terms of the way we treat our prisoners, given that we’ve got a penal system that isn’t actually making us safer or more crime-free at the moment.” Williams is concerned that the prison population has doubled in the past ten or 15 years, making the system “dysfunctional” and “horribly overcrowded”.

Ministers, he says, have been very receptive to his arguments. But political will to reform prisons still seems to him to be meagre. “Inevitably, with all parties, the point comes where the election looms on the horizon and governments don’t get elected on prison reform policies.”

What worries him about people’s personal lives? “It’s what some people call a portfolio approach to identity. You build up short-term jobs and achievements, you don’t look for the job for life any longer and most people of a younger generation assume that’s how life is likely to be. And that’s a social trend that has to do with all kinds of things like the break-up of classical patterns of employment.

“And one of the results of it is a sort of fuzziness about personal identity and personal integrity. It’s often said — I think with some truth — that the short-term job and the short-term relationship go together. The short-term job and the short span of attention go together. How do you actually build, long term, a life that has three dimensions, which has interiority and resonance? You don’t do it just by bolting on little bits of spirituality to the edges. You have to think about the taking of time, how we understand time, the time we’re given, the time of our lives.”

Time is a theme he often refers to in his writings: the need to take time for thought, for silence, for spirituality. We need time to be as well as to do. And too much of our lives are spent racing about doing things.

“That’s not saying we need to go back to going down the mines at 16 and staying there until 65. People were rightly glad to get away from the oppressiveness of that. But I just think we need to recognise that that’s a problem. Look hard at what it is that works with interiority, the inner chamber where things have time to echo.”

Williams wants to play his part in that. He enjoys engaging with wider society. Recently, he has taken part in a series on Channel 4 on contemporary issues and a public discussion with the atheist author Philip Pullman. And despite his unworldly appearance he is fully au fait with modern life and culture, helped by having two school-aged children (his young son Pip’s bike, complete with stabilisers, brings a touch of normality to the grand entrance hall of Lambeth Palace).

One of the Archbishop’s measures of success when he retires will be “whether I’ve managed to persuade anybody out there that the Christian religion is worth taking seriously, intellectually and imaginatively and spiritually, pushing it back a little bit towards the cultural mainstream. Or maybe even drawing the cultural mainstream back towards Christianity.”

This will be quite a task. I tell him how shocked a friend of mine was recently when I told her that I believed in God.

“Yes,” he quips: “What’s a nice girl like you doing in a religion like this! There’s a lot of that, and reading some of the opinion-forming literature — the weeklies, the broadsheets — I don’t at all subscribe to the idea that there’s some kind of secularist conspiracy out there, but there is just that assumption that this really is not worth thinking about, and it surfaces only as a set of problems: the religious Right, say.” So how would he counteract that? “One of the things that interests me a lot is how we get to talk about the lives of religious people in a way that doesn’t instantly reduce them to cliché and stereotype.

I’ve just been dipping into the journals of Etty Hillesum, the Dutch Jewish writer who died in the concentration camps. Now, a life like that, it seems to me, says, ‘This is what religious faith might be’. Don't assume it’s either just a conventional worshipping pattern or a rather repressive and monochrome set of practices. Look at how it’s lived.” He repeats it for emphasis: “Look at how it’s lived.”

Looking at the Archbishop himself struggling through his religious life and duties, I venture to ask him whether he is happy. There is a very long pause — and Williams is famously good at epic silences. “Hmmmm . . . ” he ponders. Finally, the answer comes: “Fundamentally content. Happy in the sense of going round feeling beamingly optimistic about things most days, no. Life isn’t like that. Accepting gratefully where I am, yes.”

So how would he like his tenure to be judged? “Mercifully!” He laughs again.

END