Gospel

Why couldn’t God simply have forgiven sinners? Precisely because sinners cannot be forgiven until they completely understand sin, with all its far reaching consequences, or before the wages of sin are paid.

I notice people, and passionately collect their stories. My favourite stories include those small cracks that allow one to peek inside another soul, those moments when their voice is almost imperceptibly altered, the eyes light up for a reason I do not know, and their gestures are unexpected.

Forgiveness is the central idea in Christianity that sets it apart from other religions.

God gave Christians a message to spread. The whole Bible talks about creation, about the fall of the world into sin, but also about the existence of a Saviour, in the person of Jesus Christ.

Plato may have been one of the first to think this way, but in modern sociology it was Walter Lippmann who made history with the idea that people do not have access to reality in all its complexity, but operate on images of that reality that they construct for themselves.

As we know all too well, life can be hard. Even in the best of times, life can be hard. But now this, a pandemic? How are we to cope?

We have trouble understanding and accepting the image of a loving God, as we have grown too familiar with the type of love that offers itself only when it finds in a person the qualities that make them easy to love.

We have become so accustomed to authors and researchers being highly specialised in niche fields, that we are tempted to be skeptical of works they produce outside of their accepted field of expertise. It seems bizarre therefore that an author of children's literature could also be a professor at Oxford and Cambridge and an expert on the medieval era.

Sartre may have been right when he said Hell is other people. Yet, for some, their first step toward Heaven is meeting the God who shelters in someone else's soul.