an extension of grace

Whoa, lots of posts, all in a row.  I have a lot of time to think these days, and a lot of things to think about.

My friend Nicola is in Thailand right now.  She’s been blogging about her experiences and asking some tough questions similar to some of the stuff I’ve been thinking through about hope, which is great because its only through conversation that we are able to probe deeper into these mysterious concepts that elude simple explanation.

So a post she wrote called ‘Surprised by Grace’ got me thinking tonight.  The last essay I wrote for my university degree (just a few weeks ago) was on grace and redemption in the works of Flannery O’Connor.  And the ideas I explored in that essay have sort of been floating around in the back of my mind for awhile, lacking articulation and personal implication.

The essay concluded with these thoughts:

Though we fill our shelves with self-help books and spend millions of dollars on counsellors and therapy to try to understand our own suffering, it is not enough.  O’Connor is saying it’s not enough.  There is not enough of anything, nor could there be, for us to be truly happy and free of suffering.  At the end of the day, like every one of O’Connor’s characters, we need to cry out to a god and say I’m suffering.

In this way, faith has moved from being belief in a set of tenants or dogma to belief in our own humanness and fragility.

Now, I’m sure there will be those who disagree (and please do through commenting or email or conversation), but let me try to explain myself.  I do not think this shift in how we (or perhaps just I) view faith is a negative thing in any sense.  It allows me to throw my hands in the air and say “I don’t know.”  Maybe even “we can’t ever really know.”  And by ‘know’, I mean with the exact, scientific certainty we know so many things about our human experience.  (And yet here too, there are flaws.  When I was a kid Pluto was a planet, now science tells me otherwise).

And in admitting we don’t, can’t, won’t ever have all the answers, we are free to finally say “I am broken.”  Free to accept our humanness and fragility and the fact that we can’t really seem to fix it on our own.

May I digress for a moment?  I’m sure some of you caught the above use of ‘a god’ as opposed to ‘God,’ and this was not without reason.   Many Christians would argue that what we ultimately need is to cry out to ‘God’.  And they might be right.  (This is a question I admittedly am still asking myself.)  But my point is that we are all crying out to some god or another, whether or not they be healthy, helpful choices in all cases.  I am not speaking about religion here, I am speaking about the multitude of ways that we seek to sooth our own pain – shopping, alcohol, mind-numbing entertainment, casual sex, etc. etc. etc.  We consume and consume and consume with false hope that x will somehow alleviate our feelings of emptiness and loneliness.  But maybe that’s what O’Connor is trying to show us.  As a devout Catholic she would certainly argue that apart from God, nothing will offer the redemption we seek.

In fact, God may be the only answer to our humanness, by which I mean our brokenness.  (But which God, or in what form, oh dear…)

The important thing for O’Connor, and what I think I am slowly beginning to understand, is that grace that is somehow ‘earned’ is no grace at all.  And when we begin to believe we understand how and to whom God chooses to extend grace, we miss the boat entirely.

Sure, no one would try to argue that God would extent grace to the hurting, the poor, the lonely, right?

Would God extend grace to the perpetrator of injustice?  To the human trafficker?  O’Connor says yes.  Not yes, if he repented.  Not yes, if he changed his ways.  Not yes, if and only if, he somehow earned it.  O’Connor just says yes.  But I am still on the fence.  Because I think it is easier to believe in a God who is ‘on my side’, who punishes the evil [people] and rewards the good [people].

I came across this verse the other day, Matt. 3:12, “His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor, gathering his wheat into the barn and burning up the chaff with unquenchable fire.”  I was brought up in a church culture that told me that the correct interpretation of that verse meant that some people would go to heaven when they die and some people would go to hell.

But I think we are all a little bit evil and a little bit good.  Maybe some of us exercise one more often than the other.  But we all have capacities for both within ourselves.  And maybe its not evil people that God wants to ‘burn up’, but the evil in us all.  Afterall, the wheat and the chaff are both parts of the same plant.

I think that is a better view of justice.  One that, rather than be driven by hatred of ‘evil people’ and despair at what we have managed to destroy, chooses to be driven by hope in humanity and our potential for good.  And I am reminded once again of Gandhi’s words:

“When I despair, I remember that all through history the ways of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants, and murderers, and for a time they can seem invincible, but in the end they always fall. Think of it–always.”

a grace.

I moved into a new room today.  I have bookcases now and more shelving and I rescued a dying plant abandoned on the windowsill which I plan on attempting to nurture back to life.  Kairos and I will settle in fine I’m sure.  It’s funny the things you find when you move into a room that has been used over and over but never fully cleaned out.  A few bags of clothing (not sure who they belong to), a stack of cds, old candies that are long past resembling anything edible, a broken lamp, and a discarded prayer, fallen behind the dresser.  I’d like to think the prayer was here by something more than chance.

It’s in the everyday ordinariness of life here that I find grace.