Tag: Francis Spufford (page 1 of 1)

I was brought up in the church, back in the old days before the deluge when church-going, confirmation and so on were ordinary landmarks of life, but lost touch with it for twenty years, like almost all of my generation. I came to real belief as an adult, after a practical demonstration of God’s mercy at work in my life. I’m at the liberal end of the Christian spectrum, I suppose, in that I support the ordination of women, with full authority, to all three of the historic orders of priesthood; and I’ve come around, slightly to my surprise, to thinking that same-sex marriage is something we should be bringing within the Christian vision of a faithful, monogamous union. But though these things matter a lot to me as justice issues, they are not central to me as a Christian. If I’m a liberal, I’m a liberal saved by the blood of the Lamb. It is Christ that makes me a Christian, and the story of redemption and resurrection with Him at its heart. I come from a parish setting where it would seem a crazy luxury to pick and choose between different styles or schools of faith, not to mention weirdly beside the point. Locally, Christians of all kinds co-operate as a matter of basic survival – beggars can’t be choosers – but that seems right to me theologically as well. God is bigger than our tastes, our divisions and our theories. In Him is neither slave nor free, neither Jew nor Greek, and neither liberal nor conservative either. We’re all brothers and sisters. We should behave like it.

— My friend Francis Spufford, who is standing for election to the Church of England’s House of Laity.

Another reason for the upsurge in writing about religion may lie in the failure of a convincing anti-capitalist discourse to emerge after the financial crisis. ‘One of the problems for a post-Christian age is what on earth to do with the figure of Jesus who – ha ha! – just won’t stay buried,’ Spufford says, unsure whether or not to be pleased with his pun. Even after we dispense with the miracles, the figure of Christ remains attractive because, as history has shown, he cannot be reduced to a single narrative account of what a person should be, but can be incorporated into several others. ‘Many consider him the last bit of demolition work that needs to be done [to rid Britain of religion], precisely because he is opposed to a utilitarian account of people: the figure of Jesus resists speaking in terms of prudence or cost-benefit analysis about individuals of limitless value.’

That music you hear in the distance? It’s St Augustine, St Teresa, Teilhard de Chardin, Pascal, Kierkegaard and Simone Weil all singing together, and what they are singing is that, as Christ commanded, we are supposed to love God with our minds, as well as with our hearts and our souls and our strength. It is an illusion to think that there is any necessary conflict between a Christian commitment and free, adventurous thinking. No-one ever does their thinking on a blank sheet of paper. Every intellectual of every kind is in a conversation with some set of ideas, doctrines, ways of seeing the world, and that’s what makes their own thinking serious. The Christian conversation with Christian ideas, and with every other kind of idea, need not be defensive or imprisoning. Why is there a stereotype that says you have to choose between faith and thought?

Her most personal book, Celebration, came out in 1989, shortly before Bridget died at 22. It is a tough, clear meditation on illness and suffering in the light of her faith in God. Margaret itemised without flinching the cruelties she had discovered in creation, in her daughter’s life and on the wards at Great Ormond Street, where she once reached out to stroke a crying child’s face and was stopped by a nurse who told her that the slightest touch could break the child’s bones. She could reconcile none of these things with the idea of a loving and benevolent God and she made no attempt to do so. Instead, she was convinced that God shared in the sufferings of his creation and that through the symbolic recreation of Jesus’s acceptance of death in the eucharist it could somehow, sometimes, be made bearable.

Apologetics, after all, is a literature of the imagination. Its cousins are the memoir, the literary essay, even the travel book. Like the memoir it turns the private tissue of life into convertible coin, like an essay it makes the line of an explanation as concretely felt as it can be, like travel writing it delivers the sensations and incidents of a journey: all to accomplish for a reader on the outside of belief what an insider does not, strictly, need. (Though it’s always a pleasure for a believing reader to see our own half-lit, half-understood experience more perfectly articulated than we could manage ourselves.) The apologist is trying, above all, to convey the body of a truth. For a believer of course truth already has a body, in several ways, ‘body’ being the site of one of Christianity’s profound puns. Our truth is a body, the body of the incarnated Lord, and it makes us a body, the body of Christ which is the church, every time we eat the bread which is also the body of Christ. But more routinely, truth also has a body for us as believers in the sense that it is carnally present to us all the time, in bodily habit and bodily movement; in the lived shapes of a life. But if you’re on the outside, this kind of body is exactly what belief has not got. Apologetics is in the business of trying to create for the reader of goodwill a kind of temporary, virtual body for faith; one they can borrow and try out, so that they may have a concrete inkling of what it might be like to assent, long before they do.

What else? Oh yes: the swearing. Why do I swear so much, in what you are about to read? To make a tonal point: to suggest that religious sensibilities are not made of glass, do not need to hide themselves nervously from whole dimensions of human experience. To express a serious and appropriate judgement on human destructiveness, in the natural language of that destructiveness. But most of all, in order to help me nerve myself up for the foolishness, in my own setting, of what I am doing. To relieve my feelings as I inflict on myself an undignified self-ejection from the protections of irony. I am an Englishman writing about religion. Naturally I’m fucking embarrassed.

Early on in this I compared beginning to believe to falling in love, and the way that faith settles down in a life is also very like the way that the first dizzy-intense phase of attraction settles (if it does) into a relationship.  Rapture develops into routine, a process which keeps its customary doubleness where religion is concerned.  It’s both loss and gain together, with excitement dwindling and trust growing; like all human ties, it constricts at the same time as it supports, ruling out other choices by the very act of being a choice.  And so as with any commitment, there are times when you notice the limit on your theoretical freedom more than you feel what the attachment is giving you, and then it tends to be habit, or the awareness of a promise given, that keeps you trying.  God makes an elusive lover.  The unequivocal blaze of His presence may come rarely or not at all, for years and years – and in any case cannot be commanded, will not ever present itself tamely to order.  He-doesn’t-exist-the-bastard may be much more your daily experience than anything even faintly rapturous.  And yet, and yet.  He may come at any moment, when and how you least expect it, and that somehow slightly colours every moment in the mass of moments when he doesn’t come.  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, ask it to account for itself philosophically from first principles every morning, any more than you subject your relations with your human 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 repetition 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 repetition 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 be 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: re-oriented, re-organised, different.

Once I saw this guy on a bridge about to jump. I said, “Don’t do it!” He said, “Nobody loves me.” I said, “God loves you. Do you believe in God?”

He said, “Yes.” I said, “Are you a Christian or a Jew?” He said, “A Christian.” I said, “Me, too! Protestant or Catholic?” He said, “Protestant.” I said, “Me, too! What franchise?” He said, “Baptist.” I said, “Me, too! Northern Baptist or Southern Baptist?” He said, “Northern Baptist.” I said, “Me, too! Northern Conservative Baptist or Northern Liberal Baptist?”

He said, “Northern Conservative Baptist.” I said, “Me, too! Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region, or Northern Conservative Baptist Eastern Region?” He said, “Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region.” I said, “Me, too!”

Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1879, or Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912?“ He said, “Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912.” I said, “Die, heretic!” And I pushed him over.

— Emo Philips. I’m thinking of Emo’s famous joke as I’m reading the comments on my buddy Rod Dreher’s blog about Francis Spufford’s new book Unapologetic. The atheists are saying the things that atheists usually say in such contexts and so, alas, are the Christians, who are falling over themselves to condemn Spufford for failing to meet their very precise and utterly absolute theological standards.

They can’t pause for thirty seconds to think about the audience Spufford is trying to reach; they can’t be bothered to ask whether, not having read the whole book but only a newspaper excerpt from it, they have the whole story. They just see something they don’t like and sweep everything away in condemnation. Really, it’s no wonder people despise us and flee when they see us coming.

I’ve read the whole of Unapologetic and I think it’s a uniquely beautiful book. Of course, there is much in it that I don’t agree with, but you know what? Maybe in those areas Spufford is right and I am wrong. I need to consider that possibility. Moreover, there are surely many people who know nothing about Christianity, or who know little and want to know even less, who will be touched by Spufford’s approach in ways that they could never be touched by anything I write.

And there’s this too: Francis Spufford is and has been for many years a much-admired writer in England — rightly so — but his reputation will suffer because of his open embrace and warm defense of Christianity. Doors that had been open to him will close; reviewers who had commended his earlier work will henceforth look askance at it. He will pay a price for writing this book. And his brothers and sisters in Christ just sneer at what he has written, denounce the heretic, and turn away with smug self-satisfaction.

The funny thing is that, to me, it’s belief that involves the most uncompromising attention to the nature of things of which you are capable. Belief demands that you dispense with illusion after illusion, while contemporary common sense requires continual, fluffy pretending – pretending that might as well be systematic, it’s so thoroughly incentivised by our culture. Take the well-known slogan on the atheist bus in London. I know, I know, that’s an utterance by the hardcore hobbyists of unbelief, but in this particular case they’re pretty much stating the ordinary wisdom of everyday disbelief. The atheist bus says: “There’s probably no God. So stop worrying and enjoy your life.” All right: which word here is the questionable one, the aggressive one, the one that parts company with recognisable human experience so fast it doesn’t even have time to wave goodbye? It isn’t “probably”. New Atheists aren’t claiming anything outrageous when they say that there probably isn’t a God. In fact they aren’t claiming anything substantial at all, because, really, how would they know? It’s as much of a guess for them as it is for me. No, the word that offends against realism here is “enjoy”. I’m sorry – enjoy your life? I’m not making some kind of neo-puritan objection to enjoyment. Enjoyment is lovely. Enjoyment is great. The more enjoyment the better. But enjoyment is one emotion. To say that life is to be enjoyed (just enjoyed) is like saying that mountains should only have summits, or that all colours should be purple, or that all plays should be by Shakespeare. This really is a bizarre category error.

But not necessarily an innocent one. Not necessarily a piece of fluffy pretending that does no harm. The implication of the bus slogan is that enjoyment would be your natural state if you weren’t being “worried” by us believers and our hellfire preaching. Take away the malignant threat of God-talk, and you would revert to continuous pleasure, under cloudless skies. What’s so wrong with this, apart from it being total bollocks? Well, in the first place, that it buys a bill of goods, sight unseen, from modern marketing. Given that human life isn’t and can’t be made up of enjoyment, it is in effect accepting a picture of human life in which those pieces of living where easy enjoyment is more likely become the only pieces that are visible. If you based your knowledge of the human species exclusively on adverts, you’d think that the normal condition of humanity was to be a good-looking single person between 20 and 35, with excellent muscle-definition and/or an excellent figure, and a large disposable income. And you’d think the same thing if you got your information exclusively from the atheist bus, with the minor difference, in this case, that the man from the Gold Blend couple has a tiny wrinkle of concern on his handsome forehead, caused by the troublesome thought of God’s possible existence: a wrinkle about to be removed by one magic application of Reason™.

— Francis Spufford. This is from the first chapter of his remarkable new book, which Francis was kind enough to send to me in typescript a few months ago. It is an amazingly funny, insightful, honest, and moving book, and I hope everyone with even a passing interest in the realities of religious experience will read it.