54 Quotes by Francis Spufford

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.

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.

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.

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.

Self-awareness is not the same thing as self-approval, any more than imagination is the same thing as day-dreaming.

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.

In a hundred years, Christianity will have mutated into something utterly unpredictable which, nevertheless, we'd recognize immediately. And same-sex marriage will be one of the fine old God-given traditions that conservatives leap to defend.

I am a fairly orthodox Christian. Every Sunday, I say and do my best to mean the whole of the Creed, which is a series of propositions. But it is still a mistake to suppose that it is assent to the propositions that makes you a believer. It is the feelings that are primary.

There have been low moments before, but Christianity is an incredibly adaptable organism, using different parts of its repertoire to mutate into new ecological niches, yet preserving intact its story of grace, of love improbably triumphant.