The Heroic Stance

...its vehicle, slopification, and evil heroism.

If you ever had a sticky lock you might have struggled with it before it became easy. You learned the exact right sequence of motions and correct level of pressure to apply until opening it was routine and effortless.

Trying to verbally instruct someone else in how to open the same lock probably wouldn’t work very well. It would not be a question of imparting propositional knowledge, like a historical date. It wouldn’t be a technique that could be demonstrated and then reproduced. It would be a subtle kind of knowledge. A knack.

The religious knack is that of maintaining a heroic stance that makes life bearable and even joyful in the face of all of the shortcomings of the human condition.