21 levels of Self-Deception: THIRD EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

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reality. The narrative of the beloved community — the grace and beauty of particular people and place — is the alternative symbolic.

What then does it mean to be gracious — to be a ‘means of grace’? Like being humble, sincere or unselfconscious, graciousness is not something that can be achieved by trying. There is no strategy to be brought to bear or any action that we might take specifically to achieve this end. Because it is not really an end of any kind, it is rather a vulnerability. As Matthew Fox has urged us, we need to give up even our good intentions.

Human love — to reach maturity — needs to go from seeking to find pleasure to seeking to give pleasure. From taking to giving. (And, it has to be said, some of us don’t quite make it!) The same principle applies to desires in general — yes, there’s genuine desire. Yes, it can be about community and helping others. But no, it’s not simply about reciprocity. We need to be gifts — our pleasure, ultimately, is about gift-giving, not about exchange. Love is the ultimate gift.

Love is a difficult word in our culture. Whilst our other ideals remain abstract goals — and this is the position very much being challenged in this work — love is particularly awkward because the meaning of the word itself is far from clear. There is a flavour of a different kind of loving above as Jantzen describes immanence in beauty, pain and struggle and says of the beloved community that it is made up of ‘embodied suffering subjects’. Catherine Keller says: ‘To love is to bear with the chaos’. A broader description of this point is given by

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