Grace Happens
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Back when I was practicing law, I used to spend my days negotiating loan documents for clients. I would sit down with the lawyers from the bank and talk about repayment terms, insurance clauses in mortgages, and who would be responsible for doing what if there was a flood or a fire.Most of our negotiations were based on “what if” scenarios that assumed something would go wrong in the relationship between the bank and my client. What if the property wasn’t properly maintained? What if my client rented to a tenant of questionable character? What if my client missed a payment on the loan?
This last point was obviously of concern to both parties, so with every loan we negotiated the terms of a “grace period,” which gave both the bank and the client a little wiggle room on the deadline for meeting any particular obligation under the loan. Usually, the grace period language also contained a provision that the bank would extend its grace only a certain number of times over the life of the loan. (This would protect the bank against a perpetually delinquent borrower.)
Now that I’m a minister rather than a lawyer, the term “grace period” takes on a whole new meaning. The idea of negotiating a period of “grace” sounds rather absurd. So does limiting the number of grace periods we’re allowed in our lifetimes. Grace is no longer something to be bartered for, nor is it something to be handed out with expectations attached to it. Grace is a gift freely given. It is never earned and it’s often undeserved. As the bumper sticker explains, “Grace Happens.”
What is grace, anyway? Bonnie Bruno, author of When God Steps In: Stories of Everyday Grace, tells her own story of grace. It happened when she was two years old. Her family was driving across the desert Southwest on a long, lonely road in the middle of nowhere. She sat in the back seat, wedged between her two sleeping brothers, and her mother sat in the front, next to her father who was driving. When her mother fell asleep, Bonnie grabbed her mother’s purse, reached inside and began eating the “mints” that she kept in a little bottle.
Only these weren’t mints. It was her mother’s thyroid medication. When her mother woke and saw that Bonnie had her purse, and she saw how pale Bonnie looked, she knew immediately what had happened. Her mother panicked and ordered her father to pull over. Not knowing what else to do, they prayed to God for help. Within minutes, a lone car appeared on the road. Stopping by the family’s car on the side of the road, the driver asked what was wrong. When he learned of Bonnie’s poisoning, he told them he was a doctor and he rushed Bonnie to the emergency room of a local hospital and administered treatment that saved her life. Several months later, when they’d yet to receive a bill from the doctor or the hospital, Bonnie’s parents contacted the hospital. They were told that no one had seen that doctor since Bonnie’s ER visit and they’d never received a bill.
According to Bonnie Bruno’s theology, she is alive today by the grace of God. In her moment of need, God intervened, sending the mysterious physician to her at just the moment she needed him. As Bruno says, “Coincidence? I don’t think so. God stepped in with a sacred embrace and a helping hand. That’s why I’m alive today.”
Tales like this, tales of miracle and mystery abound. But if you’re like me, you read them with a healthy dose of skepticism. We think to ourselves: “Coincidence? Sure!” Or we explain by speculating that Bruno’s parents, over the years, embellished the story so that by the time she was old enough to tell the tale herself it had become a piece of family lore or mythology. The notion that some divine being would actively intervene in our lives in some tangible way doesn’t sit well with many of us, especially when it takes the form of mysterious strangers appearing out of nowhere to come to our rescue.
To be sure, I am not dismissing this possibility, nor am I demeaning those for whom this story resonates. I am merely acknowledging that many Unitarian Universalists, including myself, struggle with this particular conception of grace, a notion that God sends in angels at just the moment we need them most. For me, the savior in the classic movie It’s a Wonderful Life is George Bailey’s wife Mary, not Clarence the angel.
As Unitarian Universalists, we claim that we may discover truth from, and come to know the holy through, a variety of sources. Our UU principles validate our own “direct experiences of transcending mystery and wonder.” Grace is just one of those experiences. But like love, the concept of grace is an elusive one. It’s almost an “I’ll know it when I see it” kind of thing. But I think we can begin to define grace by its attributes.
The first characteristic of grace is that it’s unexpected. We may pray for it and yearn for it. We may wait for a moment of grace and wish it to become true. We may even bargain for it, like I did for my clients with their banks. But the truth is that, unlike in Bruno’s case, it rarely materializes in those times. Like a long-lost friend who one day shows up on our doorstep unannounced, grace catches us unawares. When grace moves in our lives, it is usually at times when we’re not looking. But to say that we’re not looking doesn’t mean we’re not paying attention. Because if we’re not attentive, a “grace period” can easily be missed.
In her book An Altar in the World, Barbara Brown Taylor tells the story of taking out the trash one evening. It was just about sunset, and the bag was heavy. As she struggled to get it from her back door to the garage, she passed by her garden. Glancing through the gate, she noticed that the light was hitting the garden just so and, she said, she got “the whole dose of loveliness at once” as the setting sun turned the scene golden. But she felt she had to dump the trash first, and when she went back just a few moments later, the light had changed and the garden had returned to normal. Taylor had noticed this moment of grace, but she passed it by.
That’s another characteristic of grace: it’s fleeting. So we not only need to pay attention and be open to the possibility of a grace-filled moment arriving on our doorstep, but we also need to put down the metaphorical trash when it happens. Otherwise we might miss “the whole dose of loveliness.”
Noticing grace requires us to be ready to set aside the everyday business and busy-ness of our lives, to be willing to be a little late to a meeting, to not answer that ringing cell phone in our pocket, or simply to pull over to the side of the road when grace makes an appearance. If we don’t, we may catch a glimpse of grace, but we’ll miss out on the experience.
Another characteristic of grace is that it is transformative. I guess this is more about what grace does than what it is, but we can know a moment of grace by the effect it has on us. After grace has settled on our shoulder, if even for just an instant, we are usually not the same as we were before. Something inside of us shifts. We look at the world, and our place in it, just a little differently. Grace opens us up to possibility. It grounds us and reconnects us with our center. It shows us that what we see is not necessarily all that is. Grace lifts a veil and parts a curtain, offering us a view of another reality, a new way of being. Granted, the transformation may not be dramatic—an experience of grace may be a small tremor that precedes a seismic shift. It can be a portent of things to come.
Finally, and here’s the really good news—grace happens. It happens not just to those who pray or to those who believe in angels or just to those who believe in God. Grace is universal in its reach and scope. It doesn’t discriminate. Anyone and everyone is eligible to receive it without negotiation. And we’re not limited to a certain number of grace periods during our lifetime. As I’ve said, we might miss a moment of grace if we’re not paying attention, and we might not recognize it when it erupts in our lives, but it’s out there for us—all of us—nonetheless.
Grace, by definition, comes unbidden. But that doesn’t mean we can’t cultivate the conditions for its arrival. One of those conditions, as I’ve mentioned above, is attentiveness. Another is to seek the sacred in the mundane. Author Kent Nerburn, in his book of the same name, urges us to notice and name the Small Graces of our everyday lives. He reminds us that we are sometimes so consumed in seeking or praying for the great and grand “a-ha!” experiences, those moments when we are completely transformed, that we miss out on the small graces.
There is, too, one more way that we can prepare the path for grace to enter our lives. And that is to learn to trust that it will. To have the faith that the universe is so ordered that, in the words of mystic Paul Coehlo, “it conspires to meet our needs.” We cannot rely on the fact that grace will show up when we call it. But we are called to trust that it will show up when we need it.
I would like to close with a story of one of my own “grace periods.” It was many years ago that my father was diagnosed with prostate cancer. He was recovering from surgery at Mary Hitchcock Medical Center in Hanover, New Hampshire, and I had gone to visit him in the hospital. I was at the time struggling with clinical depression, a condition that despite medication and therapy had plagued me for several years. After spending time with my father and learning that his prognosis was good, I left to drive back to Maine. Route 93 winds through the hills, and it was late afternoon. The sun was behind me as I came around a long, sweeping curve that opened up on a wide panorama. As I made this turn, I was struck by how the sun was hitting the trees and the hills, and I was overcome by the beauty of the scene.
And then I was overcome by the fact that I was able to notice and appreciate the beauty, that a bit of color had crept into my world— a world that, for years, had been so full only of shades of gray. It had been years since anything looked beautiful. And it was at that moment that a curtain parted, just a little, and I glimpsed a hint of hope amidst my despair. I was transformed by that moment of grace, and it was in that moment that I began my long journey out of the depths.
We give thanks for moments of grace—unbidden and fleeting, perhaps, but transformative and trustworthy—those times in our lives when love arrives to cast out fear and doubt. May we all keep our eyes open to the possibility of graces great and small, and appreciate them when they appear.
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