At my wife’s 60th coming up to two years ago I met my first PPE - Oxford Philosophy, Politics and Economics graduate - who in arthritic agony engaged with me engagingly. A working class genius from a single parent family who ended up teaching head teachers, my wife being of that ilk. He knew we were ‘religious’. Every point he made I agreed with, which blew him away. Nicely frustrated him. Because it didn’t touch my ‘religion’. Because faith doesn’t trump rationality. Desire does. I was honest. Or so I thought. And I lie, because I HAD the adamantine, untouchable proof on top of desire, on top of I want it to be so; I had the Pericope Adulterae ( PA ). That to me WAS the towering proof of divine intelligence manifested in a human. I played that card and he played ‘It was made up by a priestly class’. I all but snorted in derision. We parted wishing for more and got it a year later. He’d got his hip fixed. I’d lost my proof. Because I set out to prove him wrong. And like any undergraduate theology student, or someone who reads the notes at the bottom of a study Bible, I discovered that the PA, the Woman Caught in Adultery appears four hundred years after the event, with hardly a trace. That gutted me. It seemed he was right. It’s taken another year to do another Heraclitean loop of partial recovery. The stream isn’t the same. I didn’t tell him any of this, we talked politics (Brexit) and eternity, in which I found an extreme postmodern limitation in him, which was disappointing and gratifying.
So it can be done.