"So many plusses, so many minuses"
About this Quote
“So many plusses, so many minuses” is a neat little piece of spiritual bookkeeping, and that’s exactly why it lands. Lionel Blue, a rabbi best known for his gentle, self-deprecating radio presence, isn’t offering a grand creed here; he’s sketching the texture of ordinary moral life. The phrase reads like a sigh with a smile: the world refuses to add up cleanly, and anyone claiming they’ve got the final tally is either selling something or hiding something.
The intent is pastoral more than philosophical. Blue’s clergyman’s eye is on the congregant stuck between gratitude and complaint, faith and doubt, love and resentment. “Plusses” and “minuses” are deliberately untheological words - the language of school reports, spreadsheets, pros-and-cons lists. That choice smuggles in the subtext: modern people often relate to their lives as a balance sheet, hoping the positives will “cover” the negatives. Blue doesn’t scold that impulse; he humanizes it.
The line also carries a quiet warning against moral scorekeeping. A religious vocation can tempt people into thinking virtue is a math problem: do enough good, cancel enough bad. Blue’s phrasing punctures that fantasy without turning harsh. It implies a mature faith that can tolerate mixed outcomes and mixed motives - the kind of wisdom that comes less from certainty than from surviving ambiguity.
Contextually, it fits a late-20th-century British religious voice trying to stay credible in a secular culture: modest, funny, emotionally exact. Not thunder from the pulpit - more like truth said under one’s breath, and trusted because it doesn’t pretend life is simple.
The intent is pastoral more than philosophical. Blue’s clergyman’s eye is on the congregant stuck between gratitude and complaint, faith and doubt, love and resentment. “Plusses” and “minuses” are deliberately untheological words - the language of school reports, spreadsheets, pros-and-cons lists. That choice smuggles in the subtext: modern people often relate to their lives as a balance sheet, hoping the positives will “cover” the negatives. Blue doesn’t scold that impulse; he humanizes it.
The line also carries a quiet warning against moral scorekeeping. A religious vocation can tempt people into thinking virtue is a math problem: do enough good, cancel enough bad. Blue’s phrasing punctures that fantasy without turning harsh. It implies a mature faith that can tolerate mixed outcomes and mixed motives - the kind of wisdom that comes less from certainty than from surviving ambiguity.
Contextually, it fits a late-20th-century British religious voice trying to stay credible in a secular culture: modest, funny, emotionally exact. Not thunder from the pulpit - more like truth said under one’s breath, and trusted because it doesn’t pretend life is simple.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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