#spufford

The HPtFtU [Human Propensity to F things Up] is bad news, and like all bad news is not very welcome, especially if you let yourself take seriously the implication that we actually want the destructive things we do, that they are not just an accident that keeps happening to poor little us, but part of our nature; that we are truly cruel as well as truly tender, truly loving and at the same time truly likely to take a quick nasty little pleasure in wasting or breaking love, scorching it knowingly up as the fuel for some hotter or more exciting feeling.

Unapologetic by Francis Spufford

In different times and places, different parts of the Christian repertoire come to the fore. To different people, Christianity has seemed to suggest, or endorse, or demand, very different political movements. Christian Socialism in nineteenth-century England and Christian democracy in post-Second World War Italy and West Germany; fervent religious nationalism in Ireland and Poland and fervent religious imperialism in Russia; Marxism in Central America in the 1980s and self-help small-business ownership in Peru and Brazil in the 2000s; the 'social gospel' of black churches in the US and the vehement right-wing Republicanism of white 'values voters' there. And absolutely all of these are intelligible developments of the gospel. None of them are illegitimate and none of them are compulsory. For again, you are free to decide for yourself. Whatever the 'Christian conservatives' in America say, there is no one set of rightful opinions that follow on automatically from your belief. If you have signed up for the redeeming love of God, you don't -- you really don't -- have to sign up too for low taxes, creationism, gun ownership, the death penalty, closing abortion clinics, climate change denial and grotesque economic inequality. You are entirely at liberty to believe that the kingdom would be better served by social justice, redistributive taxation, feminism, gay rights, and excellent public transport. You won't have the authoritative sanction of the gospel for believing in those things either, of course. But you can. Manifestos can be built on Christianity, but Christianity itself is not a manifesto. On the other hand, what you can't do, no matter how tempting, is to push wholly away from you those who do their Christianity very differently. You can't say: no kin of mine.

And yes, of course you can be 'good without God'. I suppose from a philosophical point of view Christians tend to believe that all successful goodness is a remote reflection of God's. But where motive is concerned, where adherence to a view of the world is concerned, there's obviously no necessary connection at all between belief in God and virtue. The place is stuffed with atheists and agnostics doing devotedly benign things, acting on ideals of compassion and dignity and mutual aid, relieving suffering, working to save or improve the planet. There are a lot of paths to virtue, mercifully, and absolutely no way there could be a religious or Christian monopoly on it. The point of Christianity is not that it produces virtue. It does, I suppose, have one advantage when it comes to doing good, in that your advance certainty, as a Christian, that you're going to fail at goodness provides a kind of assurance that goodness is worth trying independently of results. It helps a little, therefore, with being good in circumstances where doing good can do no good as far as making progress is concerned. Where things just won't get better, in measurable terms, for all the devotion you pour in. Virtuous and idealistic atheists are at work all over the place, but it is observable that surprisingly large number of believers are to be found among those who volunteer to work with the dying, the demented, the addicted, the institutionalised and the very impaired and afflicted, where the best that can be done is to love for the sake of it, and to keep sorrow company.

Our destructiveness is a truth about us just as basic as our capacity for love. Our loves are always going to be checked, complicated, limited, compromised, corrupted, undermined, reversed by the rest of what we are. If you accept this, the refusal to admit it in contemporary culture starts to look silly, and worse than silly. It locks us collectively into a cycle of indulgence and surprise. Most of the time, there's the fingers-in-ears denial that anything could ever be wrong, periodically interrupted by stagy astonishment when something goes so wrong it can't be ignored. We have to keep numbing ourselves up with nonsense. St Augustine's 'cruel optimism' rules, cynically abetted by the sharp minds in the marketing department, who know that nothing stimulates anxiety and unhappiness and therefore spending like images of perfection.

And grace, you come to recognise, never stops, whether you presently feel it or not. You never stop doubting -- how could you? -- but you learn to live with doubt and faith unresolved, because unresolvable. So you don't keep digging the relationship up to see how its roots are doing. You may have crises of faith but you don't, on the whole, as it it to account for itself philosophically from first principles every morning, any more than you subject your relations with your significant other to daily cost-benefit analysis. You accept it as one of the givens of your life. You learn from it the slow rewards of fidelity. You watch as the repitition of Christmases and Easters, births and deaths and resurrections, scratches on the linear time of your life a rough little model of his permanence. You discover that repitition itself, curiously, is not the enemy of spontaneity, but maybe even its enabler. Saying the same prayers again and again, pacing your body again and again through the set movements of faith, somehow helps keep the door ajar through which He may come. The words may strike you as ecclesiastical blah nine times in ten, or ninety-nine times in a hundred, and then by transformed, and then have the huge fresh wind blowing through them into your little closed room. And meanwhile you make faith your vantage point, your habitual place to stand. And you get used to the way the human landscape looks from there: reorientated, reorganised, different.

Forgiveness has no price we need to pay, but it exposes our illusions of control. Forgiveness is not flattering. Forgiveness reminds us that our masks are masks. Forgiveness starts something, if we let it. Forgiveness comes with an invitation to find out what else we may become that we hadn't suspected. Forgiveness carries you into new territory. Forgiveness is disconcerting.