Everyday Grace
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Grace is one of those words whose meaning has been diffused by so many strands of religious tradition that it is hard to use without confusion. Grace joins other terms like faith, evil, salvation— words which themselves have been twisted into knots and overloaded with multiple meanings.
Approaching grace, my seminary texts offer up variants like common grace and special grace, free grace and cheap grace, irresistible and habitual grace, and a good selection of more obscure variations that keep the theologians busy.
I like the fourth century theologian Augustine’s confession about grace; he asks, “What is grace?—I know until you ask me; when you ask me, I do not know.” That’s a bit more like it. At least a bit more like where I’m at with grace.
But this word can have meaning for us Unitarian Universalists. The great midcentury modern Christian theologian Paul Tillich wrote, “Grace does not mean that we suddenly believe that God exists, or that Jesus is the Savior, or that the Bible contains the truth . To believe that something is, is almost contrary to the meaning of grace.”
To Tillich, grace is active, something that addresses us directly. “Grace strikes us when we are in great pain and restlessness. It strikes us when we walk through the dark valley of a meaningless and empty life.”
Grace offers the possibility of sudden transformation—an awakening, not unlike what Zen Buddhists might seek through a practice of considering koans, those paradoxical anecdotes or riddles that can lead one to enlightenment.
Islamic mystics, particularly Sufis, understood this kind of transformation, too. Thirteenth century Persian poet Jalaluddin Rumi, here translated by Coleman Barks, tells us:
This is how a human being can change:
There’s a worm addicted to eating grape leaves
Suddenly he wakes up, call it grace, whatever, something
wakes him and he’s no longer a worm
He’s the entire vineyard
and the orchard, too, the fruit, the trunks
a growing wisdom and joy
that doesn’t need to devour.
As spiritual seekers, we may long to experience the grace that can offer such massive transformation. But grace may also come in small ways. Grace may appear in those small gifts, surprises, moments of good fortune that happen to us and around us if we only pay attention. Grace may come to us in the everyday through events called synchronicity, which is another of those terms whose original meaning is hard to discern.
I’ve heard many people talk about synchronicity in their lives, and I’ve always understood them to be talking about some kind of divine intervention by God or the universe, an intervention that lines up life events so they go click, click, click, like the tumblers in a safe’s lock.
It’s a lovely concept, and I don’t want to quibble with them, since most of the time the synchronous events they talk about are joyful ones. Someone loses their job, and suddenly gets an out-of-the-blue offer for a better one. A chance encounter in the grocery store leads to a friendship or a relationship. Drop a greenback in the Salvation Army bucket and an unexpected insurance refund check appears in the mailbox.
But synchronicity has a deeper and more interesting meaning. Carl Jung invented the term to describe events that happen at the same time, not because they necessarily have a related cause, but rather because they have related meaning.
Jung first used “synchronicity” to describe a coincidental event that happened to him as he was working with a psychotherapy patient. This patient was particularly resistant to Jung’s invitation to explore her unconscious, but she had had a dream in which a golden scarab beetle appeared. Just as she was describing the dream, a real beetle banged against the inside of his cabinet window. Jung caught it, and discovered it was a golden scarab beetle, unusual for that locale and season. He showed it to the patient, and the event helped her break through and make progress in therapy. Jung concluded that events are synchronous because we see them that way; we connect them together and thereby find greater meaning, as he was able to do with his patient.
I find this approach to synchronicity much more satisfying than my earlier understanding. It’s not the universe— or God—running around behind my back making things happen with spooky simultaneity. Rather, it’s how I perceive and connect the events that happen around me, and then come to a greater understanding of the universe by noticing their synchronicity.
In his classic book, The Road Less Traveled, M. Scott Peck describes grace as “a powerful force that exists outside human consciousness and nurtures the spiritual growth of human beings.” Indeed, this spiritual development is part of our purpose in the universe. We are eyes and ears and rational intelligences of the universe, and we are becoming a spiritual intelligence in the universe. We are the universe coming to understand itself.
But what of the highest aspect of our evolution, the part that drives us to grow and develop as spiritual beings? Peck gives this creative spiritual drive a name: Love. He says,
It is through love that we elevate ourselves. And it is through love for others that we assist others to elevate themselves. Love, the extension of the self, is the very act of evolu tion. It is evolution in progress. The evolutionary force, present in all of life, manifests itself in [humankind] as human love. Among humanity love is the miraculous force that defies the natural law of entropy.
This love is a gift of the universe, or of whomever or whatever created the universe and its laws and conditions. It is nurtured through grace and difficult to put into words. Of all those who understand and try to describe this love, I find Sufi Muslim mystics, in loose translation by Western poets, to be most clear and vivid and true.
The fourteenth century Persian poet Shams-du-din Mohammad Hafiz, here translated by Daniel Ladinsky, offers this:
We have not come here to take prisoners,
But to surrender ever more deeply To freedom and joy.
We have not come into this exquisite world
To hold ourselves hostage from love.
We have a duty to befriend
Those aspects of obedience
That stand outside of our house
And shout to our reason
“O please, O please, Come out and play.”
For we have not come here to take prisoners
Or to confine our wondrous spirits,
But to experience ever and ever more deeply
Our divine courage, freedom and Light!
Could not grace, source of that nurturing love, be calling to us, “O please, come out and play”? Could not grace, breaking in on and transforming us, carry us away in abandon to freedom and joy?
Rumi tells us:
On a day when the wind is perfect, the sail just needs to open and the world is full of beauty. On a day when the wind is perfect, the sail just needs to open and the love starts. Today is such a day. Grace breaks through. Grace fills the open sail, and brings transforming love. Grace is not so amazing. Grace is not so rare. Grace is everyday. Today is such a day.
finds himself working on the theology and ecclesiology of regionalization. Ministry is a second career for Matt, following a past life as an engineer and manager in telecom and internet
companies. He lives with his wife Liz Hill, a writer and spiritual director, in Liberty, Ohio.
- Everyday Grace - June 1, 2015
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