In a recent book, The Story of Joy; from the bible to Late Romanticism, Adam Potkay ask 'Do we know joy?' and 'do we want to rejoice?' Margaret Thatcher wanted us to rejoice over victory in the Falklands, and there are various churches relentless urging us to rejoice' in a triumphalist way that many of us may resist. Potkay traces the modern concept of joy to Thoreau, and those moments when we understand, for a moment, that we - and always the plural 'we' - are forgiven and redeemed. In that moment joy is the emotion of gratitude, not only for our self, but for every other person. Pokay finds a modern example of this in American Beauty, Sam Mendes' 1999 film of Alan Ball's screenplay. At the end of his mid-life crisis, indeed at the end of his life, Lester Burnham recovers joy, not through sex or pot or the endorphins released by weight training, but by discovering "an intense joy .. in every single moment in my stupid little life". This moment of pure gratitude transforms Lester. The fact that he is killed a moment afterwards is immaterial - to him. But - and this is me talking now - such moments of grace ought to be the motive for transforming our society in ways that take seriously the redeemed nature of every one of us, and the socially transforming power of forgiveness. In those last moment of his life Lester has surely accepted forgiveness - and there was much to be forgiven for in his 'stupid little life' - but had also, surely, forgiven. The Church has always tried to hedge forgiveness, to make it conditional, and to be the gate-keeper. That was the position and power of the Temple in Jesus' time, and he confronted it with his unconditional gospel 'your sins are forgiven'. Two thousand years later we still struggle to even imagine what a society would look like if it was based on the reality of forgiveness and that unconditional love built into our universe by the Creator.
