Faith & Spirit Quote by Mason Cooley

Forgiveness, in Mason Cooley's hands, isn’t a haloed personality trait; it’s a maintenance job. The line has the clipped, cool logic of an aphorist who distrusts grand moral poses. By pairing forgiveness with faith, Cooley smuggles in a provocation: both are less about certainty than about relapse. You don’t arrive at them and stay there. You backslide. You doubt. You get petty again. Then you decide, again, to return.

The verb “reviving” does the real work. It implies something that naturally tends toward death: forgiveness as a thing that expires under the ordinary pressures of memory, pride, and the small daily re-injuries that accumulate interest. It also hints at something faintly artificial, even theatrical: resuscitation, a practiced intervention. That’s the subtextual sting. Forgiveness isn’t an authentic emotional state you wait to feel; it’s an action you perform before your feelings catch up, if they ever do.

Cooley wrote in a late-20th-century literary culture suspicious of confession and uplift, where moral language often felt like a sales pitch. His aphorisms prize clarity over comfort, and here the comfort is deliberately rationed. If forgiveness needs constant revival, then it’s not a final reconciliation or a tidy closure. It’s closer to a discipline, like showing up to a belief system when belief is inconvenient.

The line also quietly democratizes failure. If everyone has to “keep” reviving it, everyone is allowed to lose it. The ethic isn’t purity; it’s persistence.