All will be well.

 All will be well. 

“It’s become her mantra, that I worry too much. I should not. No! ‘All will be well and all will be well and every manner of thing will be well.’ Finally, when I’d had enough — where did it come from? I asked — she said, ‘Look it up!’” I was talking to Axel about my sister, Hannah, who seems to be calling every other day now she seems to have religion.
     “Did you?” he asked from behind his desk at Grace Church.
     “I did. Here’s the full quote.” I handed him the piece of paper— or I would have even five years ago, but now I handed him my cell phone with the screenshot:

Click to read.

He read it, looked up. “What I want to know,” I said, “is who said about sin that it was ‘inevitable but not necessary’? I tried to look that up but couldn’t find it. I thought I might have heard it from you, so . . . ?”
     “You may have. It sounds like Niebuhr, but I don’t know, to be honest.”
     “Well, whoever said it, it sounds right to me. We don’t have to screw up — it’s not in our very natures — but we will screw up. It's inevitable in the world we have made. Our life is like a busy intersection — maybe I heard that from you, too?”
     He shrugged. He swiveled in the chair, this way and that, this way and that, an inch to the right and back, an inch to the left and back. The chair didn’t squeak, but it was clearly thinking about complaining; so he stopped. “I don’t think so,” he said.
     “If everyone obeys the law and no one drives recklessly but rather with all the care he or she is capable of, all will be well. An accident is not necessary. But say it rains or snows, say the traffic light fails, inevitably . . . .”
     “Crash!”
     “Yes.” There were motes in the shaft of sunlight pushing through the window. Axel’s books were shedding.
     “Yes. I see,” he said.
     My mouth felt dry. “So, what is Dame Julian about, saying sin is necessary. Inevitable, yes, but necessary?”
     Axel was turning in his chair again. I was about to ask for a glass of water; I’d go get it, of course. He said, “Obviously she hadn’t read Niebuhr.”
     I opened my mouth as if I were going to reply though I wasn’t. Instead, I gave him that no-shit-sherlock look.

“Not that she would agree with him anyway,” he picked up the thread. “But it isn’t that. She’s using ‘necessary’ differently — in a different line of argument.” He paused, swiveled right and back to center. “I think. So don’t quote me. I only think, I don’t know.”
     “ . . . ”
     “In your damn blog. Don’t quote me.”
     “Of course not,” I said. 

So, I’m not. But what I understood him to say was this: As far as Dame Julian was concerned, it was in God’s wisdom that — it was in God’s plan for salvation that — there would be sin. What else could we be saved from? So, it was necessary —  by definition: if God planned it, it was to be, it was from the beginning part of the fabric of everything: there would be sin and there would be salvation. The fortunate fall shizzle.
     “I like inevitable but not necessary better, I think,” I told Axel.
     “I’m not sure that was Niebuhr,” he said. “Don’t quote me on that either: it just sounds like him. To me.”
     I shook my head. And sneezed. “Sorry,” I said. “What did you preach on yesterday?”
                                                                                                                                                                       to be continued
                                                                              02.13.23