Amazing Grace
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Amazing grace, how sweet the sound
that saved a wretch like me.
I once was lost, but now am found, was blind,
but now I see.
This must be the most popular song in the American religious canon. I’ve sung it in church and with friends at funky old pianos. I’ve sung it at funerals both public and private. I’ve sung it at campfires and with a couple hundred strangers. I’ve sung versions with problematic words edited out, and I’ve done some impromptu editing myself. (Try starting with “amazing grapes” and see where you end up.)
I’ve also substituted in other words for “wretch” (our hymnbook suggests “soul” if you want an alternative), and I’ve sung it as is, but winced a bit. And then I learned the story behind the song. Perhaps you know it. John Newton, the author of the words, was an Englishman who made his living as a ship’s captain, transporting slaves from Africa to America. Apparently he was given to rather rough living—drinking, gambling—the details aren’t clear. Sometime during his slave trading years he had a conversion experience and became a Christian, which may have tidied up his life a bit, but didn’t stop him from continuing to traffic in human beings. He found the job somewhat unpleasant, but assumed it to be his lot in life.
A few years later, however, an illness prevented Newton from embarking on his usual slave-trading voyage, and it was apparently during this relatively idle time that he realized the evil of slavery and his participation in it. As part of this deeper conversion experience he took responsibility for his actions and not only gave up the slave trade for the ministry, but also provided information that eventually led, shortly before his death, to the act of parliament ending British participation in the slave trade.
“Oh,” said I, “this puts things in a whole different light.” What I had assumed to be a kind of Calvinist assertion of human lowliness and lack of worth (unless redeemed by the salvation of Christ) turned out to be something very different—one man’s humble, joyful and disarmingly straightforward description of how his life had been transformed. When he wrote “How sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me,” he really meant me, himself. If being in charge of a vessel which kidnaps people from their homes and transports them, stacked like firewood, to be sold as the property of other men is not wretched, I don’t know what is. But, as John Newton’s life and song assert, there is something in the universe, or something in the human heart, or both, which has the power to turn even a slave trader toward justice.
John Newton, of course, is not the only one with this experience. A story comes to mind of the Klansman who, through the gentle persistence of a Jewish man he was persecuting, came to renounce his anti-Semitism and embrace this Jewish man as a friend. I think also of the man who was a recruiter for the white-supremacist Aryan Nation—until he had a child born with a cleft palate who was deemed unacceptable and condemned to death. In realizing what the Aryan Nation was going to do to his child, this man suddenly understood what it was that the skinheads wanted to do to everyone whom they labeled unacceptable: Jews, Blacks and gays as well as his disabled child.
And so this man chose love and acceptance over prejudice, hate and fear. Instead of recruiting for the Aryan Nation, he now spends that time sharing what he knows with audiences around the country, so that the job of recruitment will be harder for those who continue to spread hate. Perhaps the Universalists are right, and the divine power of love is such that no person is, ultimately, unredeemable.
Of course, the fact that John Newton and some other wretches turned their lives around by some mysterious process which Newton called grace doesn’t mean that we fine, upstanding folks ought to call ourselves wretches. Surely we have no need to be saved by grace. We don’t need what sounds like some kind of a holy superhero—Amazing Grace, a Wonder Woman in white—to swoop down out of the sky and save us. But I wonder….
I wonder how many of us are complete strangers to wretchedness. How many of us have never lain awake at night, wondering if there might be a way to undo what we have done, unsay what we have said? How many of us have never, if only for a moment, given up on life, felt ourselves and everything around us to be utterly without worth? How many of us have never faced the heart-wrenching realization of just how fragile life is, how any of us or those we love could be gone in a matter of moments? How many of us have failed to notice that our very world and all of its living beings could be annihilated quickly in a nuclear war or over decades of environmental degradation?
Wretchedness, it seems to me, is not the sole property of a few of “them” out there. And neither is grace. I don’t have a quick, absolute definition of grace, or perhaps anything that could be called a definition at all. But perhaps I can manage a description. Grace, it seems to me, has to do with the giftedness of life. It comes not from the self, but through the self. I think of being in a state of grace as akin to following the Tao, the path, moving with the flow of the river rather than against it. The river, the current of life, keeps flowing, regardless of our choices. But we can choose to step into the current and float, and sometimes the river even catches us from behind and carries us, whether we have chosen to move in its direction or not.
Many years ago, during one of the most wretched periods of my life, I moved to Berkeley, leaving behind my community, my boring job, a failed relationship, and most of my sense of who I was or what I was doing with my life. I spent a lot of time staring out the window of my room in my sister’s house. Just outside my window was a fuchsia bush that bloomed continually in the California sun, and numerous hummingbirds, glinting green backs and ruby throats, would come to feed on its flowers. There was no voice that spoke to me out of that bush, telling me what to do to get my life back on track, let alone doing it for me. But those hummingbirds were, for me, an act of grace, a promise of life and its fulfillment. That scene was a gift, given and received day after day. Somehow what emerged from those empty days of watching the hummingbirds was a call to ministry, the sense of a path opening before me, and the will to follow.
Grace is the light that comes, not when you expect it, but when you need it. It’s the sudden hug from the toddler who’s been driving you nuts with incessant, whiny demands. It’s the sight of fog streaming over the hills at the end of a long day. It’s remembering that your spouse or your dog or your brother loves you absolutely, in spite of the fact that you made a hash of things at work. As Mary Oliver famously wrote in her poem “Wild Geese”:
the world offers itself to your imagination calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting— over and over announcing your place in the family of things.
In those moments when I refuse to listen to that call, I endanger myself and the rest of the world as well. To refuse grace—to refuse to acknowledge that my place in life is a gift I neither create nor earn—is to be lost to what Christians have traditionally called pride, the deadliest of the seven deadly sins. The Greeks referred to the same thing as hubris, and placed it at the center of all the great tragedies. The pride that led to the downfall of both Lucifer and the Greek heroes is that of putting yourself in the place of God or the gods, assuming that you can control the course of life, or that the world revolves around you.
This is not to be confused with what we generally consider pride, as in “I’m so proud of you,” or self-esteem in the form of pride in work well done, or a conviction that we can change the world through our actions. Self-esteem provides us with the capacity to receive the gifts of grace, to enjoy our place in the world. Hubris denies our place in the world. Sometimes it takes the form of arrogance, assuming that the world and all its creatures exist simply as “resources,” things to be used for our pleasure and convenience, with no regard for their existence separate from ourselves. The same arrogance frames friends as “contacts” and socializing as “networking,” as if other people existed only for the purpose of one’s own career advancement.
The opposite of hubris might seem to be cynicism and despair, but they are two sides of the same coin, both ways to refuse grace. To believe that life is meaningless, without worth, is to defy the gift of creation. Despair contends that the creative wonder of billions of years of evolution can be set aside on the strength of one person’s inability or refusal to participate in the ongoing dance of life.
But more often our pride emerges in small ways, as we get caught up in the busyness of our lives, in all the details and things that need to be done, so that the moments of grace simply get missed as we walk by with blinders on. Annie Dillard writes: “We are here to abet creation and to witness to it, to notice each other’s beautiful face and complex nature so that creation need not play to an empty house.” Grace offers us the chance to witness creation, to take our place in that crowded theater. But all too often we are too self-absorbed, too taken up with the manufactured importance of our deadlines and duties to look toward the lighted stage, let alone recognize that we ourselves are part of the drama. We lose our capacity to witness and wonder at creation, and then complain that so much of our lives are filled with drudgery.
And yet, through the distractions of busyness, through the moments of despair or selfish pride, grace manages to break through with a gift of wonder and the opportunity to float, if only for a moment, with the current of the river. If only for a moment, the illusion of our separateness is broken and our eyes are opened to the part we play in the shared drama of life. We hear the world calling to us, over and over announcing our place in the family of things, and, like the wild geese, we join our companions in the long journey toward home.
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