Francis Spufford
Francis Spufford
Francis Spufford, FRSLis an English author...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionAuthor
advance allowances bear cannot despair disaster faith fingers hope lose love pray test
I think I have made allowances for the kind of despair which would test my faith, but you cannot know in advance what disaster to those you love would be too much to bear faithfully, and like everyone's, my faith is weakly conditional in some ways. I hope, I pray not to lose it. My fingers are crossed. Also my heart.
imagination
Self-awareness is not the same thing as self-approval, any more than imagination is the same thing as day-dreaming.
however perceive state
Why do I write? From selfishness. Because this state of liquefied, complex concentration, however faintly and dimly I'm able to perceive it, is the greatest pleasure I know.
anybody asked certainly christians enters hold promise radical repetition subject
Christians are as subject to complacency as anybody else, and we can certainly settle into repetition and forget that something radical and extraordinary is being asked of us as well - that we hold to an extraordinary promise about how, from moment to moment, something enters the world and enters us, after which everything is different.
absolutely bringing flight god mending mile next puncture repair suggest taking
What I absolutely want is to suggest that before it's anything else, redemption is God mending the bicycle of our souls; God bringing out the puncture repair kit, re-inflating the tires, taking off the rust, making us roadworthy once more. Not so that we can take flight into ecstasy, but so that we can do the next needful mile of our lives.
believing christian faith fancy human perceive struggle tells true truth
For a believer, Christian faith is true to the human heart, not in the sense that any old thing we fancy believing in will become conveniently true - but because the complicated truth about our hearts, as we struggle to perceive it, tells us what we are and where we are, and consequently what we need.
religious ordinary way
The emotions that sustain religious belief are all, in fact, deeply ordinary and deeply recognisable to anybody who has ever made their way across the common ground of human experience as an adult.
mother reading house
I can always tell when you're reading somewhere in the house,' my mother used to say. 'There's a special silence, a reading silence.
book tired half
When I'm tired and therefore indecisive, it can take half an hour to choose the book I am going to have with me while I brush my teeth.
book shapes inward
What follows is more about books than it is about me, but nonetheless it is my inward autobiography, for the words we take into ourselves help to shape us.
sides needs goodness
We are supposed to be on the side of goodness in the sense that we need it, not that we are it.
real loss shopping
Taking the things people do wrong seriously is part of taking them seriously. It’s part of letting their actions have weight. It’s part of letting their actions be actions rather than just indifferent shopping choices; of letting their lives tell a life-story, with consequences, and losses, and gains, rather than just be a flurry of events. It’s part of letting them be real enough to be worth loving, rather than just attractive or glamorous or pretty or charismatic or cool.
believe stuff fool
Emotions can certainly be misleading: they can fool you into believing stuff that is definitely, demonstrably untrue.
common-sense culture demand
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.