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.
From Unapologetic, by Francis Spufford
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