33.
What amazes me most is to see that everyone is not amazed at their own weakness.
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I think most people feel that there's something wrong with themselves, and us collectively. Our moral, relational, and mental health seems pretty fragile. Consequently, our "weakness" is not a bad place to begin a conversation about God.
That is the strategy Francis Spufford uses in his book Unapologetic: Why, Despite Everything, Christianity Can Still Make Surprising Emotional Sense. Spufford begins his defense of Christianity with HPtFTU--the Human Propensity to F@#! Things Up. Spufford describes HPtFTU as "our active inclination to break stuff," our health, our happiness, our relationships, and our world.
We all, at some point, will come face to face with our weakness, our own HPtFTU. As Spufford writes:
Our appointment with realization often comes at one of the classic moments of adult failure: when a marriage ends, when a career stalls or crumbles, when a relationship fades away with a child seen only on Saturdays, when the supposedly recreational coke habit turns out to be exercising veto powers over every other hope and dream. It need not be dramatic, though. It can equally well just be the drifting into place of one more pleasant, indistinguishable little atom of wasted time, one more morning like all the others, which quietly discloses you to yourself. You’re lying in the bath and you notice that you’re thirty-nine, and you don’t have children and that the way your living bears scarcely any resemblance to what you think you’ve always wanted; yet you got here by choice, by a long series of choices for things which, at any one moment, temporarily outbid the things you say you wanted most. And as the water cools, and the light of Saturday morning in summer ripples heartlessly on the bathroom ceiling, you glimpse an unflattering vision of yourself as a being whose wants make no sense, don’t harmonize: whose desires, deep down, are discordantly arranged, so that you truly want to possess and you truly want not to, at the very same time. You’re equipped, you realize, for farce (or even tragedy) more than you are for happy endings. The HPtFtU dawns on you. You have, indeed, f---d things up. Of course you have. You’re human, and that’s where we live; that’s our normal experience.Maybe Pascal is right, maybe people are not amazed at their HPtFtU. If that were so, well, yes, I would find that to be amazing.
