Column
Culture
Football
Humility
Sport
4 min read

We're pretty useless really

We all fail. Not just Southgate, Biden and Sunak.

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

A dejected looking football manager ponders his feet while standing beside a pitch.
Southgate contemplates.

The Book of Heroic Failures, published by Stephen Pile in 1979, records a story of the Welsh Dean of St Asaph, Daniel Price, in the late 17th century. Contemporary biographer John Aubrey noted that Price was a “mighty Pontificall proud man.” 

So proud that he declined to parade on foot outside his cathedral, but rather rode a mare in full vestments, reading from the Book of Common Prayer. Aubrey with precise economy describes what happened next: “A stallion happened to break loose, and smelled the mare, and ran and leapt her, and held the reverend dean all the time so hard in his embraces, that he could not get off till the horse had done his business.” 

Unsurprisingly, Aubrey records that the good Dean “would never ride in procession afterwards.” He had clearly learned a lesson in humility. And one that would not have been taught had his ride passed with pompous dignity. 

A question arises, pertinent for events today, as to whether we learn more from the indignity of failure than from the fruits of success. I’d like to suggest that we do, especially about the nature of our human condition. 

Humans are pretty useless really and our default position is error and falling short.

No one doubts that had England won the European Football Championship it would have been the crowning adornment to manager Gareth Southgate’s career. England failed to do that, though we failed less than any other team (Spain doesn’t count because they didn’t fail at all). Now that Southgate has resigned and has time to reflect at leisure, perhaps he will learn at least as much and possibly very much more about himself than if he had raised the trophy. 

US president Joe Biden would have had an altogether greater reckoning to face if he lost the election to Donald Trump than if he won it. Now he’s quit the race, arguably he has much more to learn from reflecting on his life and achievements. The Conservative Party has many lessons to learn about its 14 years in power from its abject defeat at the polls. Indeed, many parliamentary Tories believe that defeat was a requisite event for its reformation to proceed. 

None of this is to suggest that failure of itself is a virtue. Nor is it just a morality tale that enjoins us to meet triumph and disaster and “treat those two impostors just the same”. A failed marriage, or failing health, or moral failures of a wider variety, cause destructive pain and trauma. 

But it is to acknowledge that failure is part of the natural human condition. We’re in the territory of a flawed, fallen humanity here, one that theologians call postlapsarian, that is fallen from an ideal of perfection as dramatically portrayed in the Garden of Eden. Humans are pretty useless really and our default position is error and falling short. 

Loss of innocence, injustice and failure meet in unholy alliance at Golgotha.

This isn’t, or should not be, depressing. At least not for people of faith, because it reflects the nature of humanity. Failure, if you will, is a gift of God in a fallen creation. We learn more from our failures than our successes, which is either a biological determinism in evolution or a means through which we strive for a new perfection. There’s a version of that they may be reciting to the England football team right now. 

Christian faith sometimes concentrates too often on triumph over death and the idea of a heavenly kingdom where all is well, at the expense of recognising the reality of our world in which most things are very far indeed from well.  

We might recognise it in a congregational tendency to skip over Good Friday to Easter morning. If we do so, we neglect to notice what an abject failure the insurgent Jesus movement was on its short journey of break-up from Jerusalem to Calvary. It, literally, dies. 

Yes, we know what happens next. Or do we? The first witnesses to it certainly struggle to explain it in a manner that we might comprehend. But, in any event, loss of innocence, injustice and failure meet in unholy alliance at Golgotha. 

The theologian John Macquarrie asks what happens if we feel compelled to draw the bottom line under the cross: “Would that destroy the whole fabric of faith in Christ? I do not think so, for the two great distinctive Christian affirmations would remain untouched – God is love, and God is revealed in Jesus Christ. These two affirmations would stand even if there were no mysteries beyond Calvary.” 

No, our story doesn’t end there. But we can acknowledge that this is where we live in this world, at the foot of that cross. As the 17th-century French philosopher Blaise Pascal put it, the Christ “will be in agony until the end of the world.” 

Let’s not be too miserable, because we do have the “mysteries beyond Calvary”. And let’s celebrate our earthly successes. But let’s also learn to embrace our failures and receive them as a gift, from football to politics. 

Review
Books
Culture
Wildness
6 min read

My open letter to Sally Rooney: dilatasti cor meum

You enlarge my heart.
A book cover depicts a yellow and white chessboard with pieces casting shadows of people.

This is silly, I realize. You’ll never see this. But I’ve just finished Intermezzo and I’m not sure what else to do with the bright sadness upon finishing it.

I can’t imagine I am your anticipated reader. I have children your age, for heaven’s sake. You write from, and about, worlds that are, in some ways, a foreign country for me. Sometimes I read your novels like Lévi-Strauss’s field notes from his years with the Nambikwara, describing the practices and rituals and mores of some foreign tribe—except that tribe includes my own children and the students I encounter everyday. Sometimes this makes me feel very old, and tired, and a little bit sad. Not in a judgmental way. I can’t imagine how hard it is to be 23 years old today. I feel badly about the world we’ve bequeathed to the twenty- and thirtysomethings that populate your novels. Your novels give me a glimpse into how they experience it. Which is what I love about the best fiction—the way it is a technology of mindreading, teleporting us into another’s perspective.

I don’t know, maybe it’s weird and kinda creepy that an old man like me gobbles up a novel like Intermezzo. Like a kind of voyeurism. I hope not. Because, in the end, what you achieve is at once the construction and revelation of a human world. And as Terence said, nothing human is alien to me.

This will sound crazy, but from the very first pages of Intermezzo I found myself reading with a strange sort of ache in my heart. Not a pain as much as a held-breath sense of ekstasis, of being stretched and pulled out of myself. I think now I’d say I was responding to what I can only describe as the tenderness you show your characters. I don’t mean for a second that you shrink from portraying their brokenness, even their brutality at times. But only that as you track their mystery and monstrosity you situate all of it in their ineradicable humanity. And in contemporary fiction, that is rarer than some might think. It speaks to me of a fullness that characterizes the matrix of your imagination, from which these characters were born. You don’t let them escape judgment; but that judgment comes from their own social worlds, not the caustic condescension of you as the narrator. This is where your mastery of free indirect speech is so uncanny: you stay near your characters, you listen closely, but somehow in the alchemy of your prose even their own harsh self-judgment is portrayed with tenderness and understanding.

Honestly, it reminds me a lot of how the mystical tradition portrays God, that Creator of all creators, the Narrator who is in love with every feeble creature, every loathable antihero, which is to say every single one of us, protagonists in dramas we don’t realize. There’s this marvelous line in The Cloud of Unknowing where the medieval sage says, “It is not who you are or what you’ve been that God sees with his merciful eyes, but what you want to be.” This will make you cringe, but your narration echoes that. You see what Peter and Ivan want to be. And in so doing, you help me look at all the human beings around me with the same sort of eyes. Or at least I want to be that person.

OK, this is, like, crazy word association, but as I was reading Intermezzo a line of prayer kept coming to mind. You might know it. It’s from the Psalms. It’s part of Prime, the first hour of the Divine Office. St. Teresa of Ávila talks about it a lot. Dilatasti cor meumYou enlarge my heart. You dilate my heart. You widen the scope of what my heart can take in and absorb. This, in the end, is what Intermezzo does. For me, at least.

It’s funny, you know. I finished the second half of the novel while I was attending the annual conference of the Hegel Society. (I thought you’d get a chuckle out of that.) So in the margins of Intermezzo I have scribbled notes like: Recognition! Master/slave dialectic!3 But it’s really not so crazy, is it, because, like Hegel, you seem to intuit how much we long to be seen, to be recognized, and why that means passing through the crucible of forgiveness to achieve reconciliation. This is why I think you are attuned to a below-the-surface rumbling in your generation that, against all the forces of capital and Distraction, Inc. and just the bullshit of consumer nihilism, can’t quite shake a yearning, or at least a wondering, if there’s something more—something like “meaning” or significance we could feel pulled into. I love it that, in Intermezzo, this culminates in a vision of community. (I’m trying not to spoil anything here, since, ahem, my wife hasn’t been able to finish the book yet.) Being known, being seen, being forgiven, being loved. Belonging.

My aforementioned (long suffering, forgiving) wife loves a song by the Highwomen called “Crowded Table.” She plays it full blast in our kitchen when she’s preparing for dinners when she gathers beloveds near. “I want a house with a crowded table / and a place by the fire for everyone.” I thought of the bridge of the song at the end of Intermezzo.

Everyone’s a little broken
And everyone belongs.

I finished your book on a packed train from Boston to Philadelphia and decided not to be embarrassed that I was weeping. The older I get, the more paternal I become, I’m realizing. I don’t think that’s an expression of control or “paternalism” in the negative sense. At least I hope not. It’s more that the older our kids get, more of the world is filled with people who look like the children I love. I don’t mean that I infantilize them, either. I treasure the adults they’ve become.

I’m not describing this very well. What I’m trying to say is, I am just an inveterate dad. I can’t help it. So as much as I read your novel as a scholar or a philosopher or a fellow human, I couldn’t help reading it as a dad. And when I spent time with Peter and Ivan and Sylvia and Naomi, I just wanted for them what I want for my own children and their spouses—for them to know they are loved and held dear and for them to find their people. It’s silly and sappy, but I wanted to talk to Ivan and Peter and tell them: It’s possible. There is still love in the world. Even more incredibly: there is forgiveness. Intermezzo has the audacity to not only hope this but to portray it. I know it costs you something to do so in a literary world that prizes cynicism and distance.

Maybe I wept at the end of Intermezzo because it was as much a mirror as an icon. Despite the generational gap, you gave me occasion to see my own life reflected back to me. In the mirror is an us (“The that is we and the we that is I,” as Hegel put it). I look in the mirror of longing & hope that is your novel, and looking back I see my wife, Deanna, who has been forgiving me for over 35 years, letting me know I am beloved. And we’re surrounded by our children, the overflowing of our own love, these children who have become such dear friends, who have forgiven me more times than I can count. And in that mirror their spouses are alongside them, our dream come true—the beloveds they have found who forgive them and welcome them home over and over again. It’s a crowded table. And there’s always more room. Everybody’s a little broken, and everybody belongs.

I guess what I want to say is: I admire your courage to write a novel that tells the truth—that love gets the last word because it is the first word that speaks us all into being, the origin of the world.

Gratefully,

A reader

 

This article first appeared as a post on James K.A. Smith's Quid Amo Substack. Reproduced by kind permission.