Written down on a Sunday morning, and much thought about since sitting in the Anglican Cathedral yesterday.
On Sundays as a child I would always be taken to church. It was the rhythm and the ritual of then. And not a grand cathedral like this, though it was certainly formal and ceremonial enough for a liking of churches and this sitting and thinking in them to have stayed with me ever since, even though being any kind of believer in the divine left me some time in my teenage years.
Anyway, and aware this one might be coming across as a bit preachy, having been thought about in a church, let’s get on with it.
I’ve been thinking a lot about grace. Not specifically about that long ago Catholic boyhood, with regular Saturday evening confessions, Hail Marys and the grace I was taught they returned me to. But about the whole idea of grace and its near neighbour forgiveness. And of the various parts of our lives and societies where grace and forgiveness might help us out of some of the troubles we seem to have got ourselves into these days. Let me explain.
“We all make mistakes” is a cliché we’ll often come out with, often when discussing the misdemeanours of others. But in fact the “all” in the cliché means me and you too. And having muttered the cliché most of us are grudgingly happy to accept that none of us are personified by all of the things we’ve ever said or done in the whole of our lives. But you wouldn’t think so these days from the unforgiving pile-ons, polarising and relentless back-quoting of old news reports that are such features of social media and the modern day news reports that so lazily draw on it. Society, it often seems to me, having abandoned its former state of grace in favour of a self-righteous and ever present state of blame.
So I’ve been thinking a lot about grace. Which I think of as being in the same neighbourhood as words like hope, joy, gentleness, listening, conversation, peace, loving and, yes, utopia in our vocabulary. And none of these in the “soft and hopeless dreams” category where they’re too easily sent to by the more cynical of us. Instead I see them all as components of the basic utopian human urge, containing every child’s right to hope for better that I’ve been reading about all summer from Ruth Levitas1 and Ernst Bloch2. This utopian urge they both write about being essential in the creation and re-creation of what I, in my turn and in my own University writing, am calling the “better lives in better places” we’re not going to get to without giving more breathing space to these more hopeful aspects of our natures.
We’re none of us perfect then, let’s accept that. And when we err as we all do, I’m suggesting we need to be doing a better job than we are in ourselves and our societies at the moment, to find the grace to forgive ourselves and each other and move on to the better places we so need. Where less people are oppressed, discriminated against, starving and homeless, while so many others are richer than any human needs to be.
In my actual PhD, because this letter has for the first time on here started to talk about that, I’ll talk more about grace, Levitas, Bloch and the utopian differences between the secular and religious concepts of grace. Because there are some. But not sufficient to invalidate this Sunday morning suggestion that returning to a state of grace, graciousness and a willingness to forgive, by us all and for us all, might be more than a good thing.
And rather than end with that John Lennon quote, from a wall in Liverpool near the Cathedral, that you might have heard often enough to dismiss as a cliché, how about this late and sacred song about forgiveness and none of us being perfect from Gil Scott-Heron3 that I thought about while sitting there thinking about grace yesterday?
I did not become someone different that I did not want to be
But I'm new here will you show me around?
No matter how far wrong you've gone you can always turn aroundMet a woman in a bar, told her I was hard to get to know
And near impossible to forget
She said I had an ego on me the size of Texas
Well I'm new here and I forget, does that mean big or small?
No matter how far wrong you've gone You can always turn aroundAnd I'm shedding plates like a snake
And it may be crazy but I'm the closest thing I have
To a voice of reason
Turnaround turnaround turnaround
And you may come full circle and be new here again
No matter how far wrong you've gone You can always turn around
You can always turn around
Ruth Levitas “Utopia as Method”
Ernst Bloch “The Principle of Hope”
Gil Scott-Heron from his late life final album “I’m New Here”