Reconsidering Grace

"For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free."

--Wendell Berry

I am not much of a theologian, either, being neither logical enough nor systematic enough to follow most theological arguments through to their inevitable conclusions. (It could be that I am lazy, too.)

Like Holmes, these days I am drawn more to poetry than theology. Poetry, more than any other literary genre, offers moments of insight, flashes of inspiration, and, dare I say it, glimpses of grace? And as my old college English professor Carroll Terrell used to say, "All great literature is religious."

Let's, for the moment, forget what the theologians say about grace. I've tried, and, for the most part, failed to understand what they mean.

Among many definitions of grace, the Oxford English Dictionary has these: "something that imparts beauty" and "a mark of divine favor."

Of several "distinctions" of grace mentioned in the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, my favorite is "Actual Grace," defined as "A certain motion of the soul, bestowed by God ad hoc for the production of some good act." It notes that "[Actual Grace] may exist in the unbaptized." (I'm not sure whether it's the "ad hoc" or the "unbaptized" aspect of "Actual Grace" which appeals to me the most!)

Perhaps the most famous example of "Actual Grace" is that described by the famous hymn "Amazing Grace." It tells the story of the Englishman John Newton, a slave-trader converted from his terrible occupation by an experience of grace:

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.

'Twas grace that taught my heart to fear,
And grace my fears relieved;
How precious did that grace appear
The hour I first believed!

I would offer Emerson's famous "bare common" passage from Nature as an experience of grace:

Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhiliration. I am glad to the brink of fear.

Nearing home on a fog-bound April day,
On gray roads with gray rain falling
On still gray trees,
Listening to NPR,
I felt my soul bending over in grimness--
Until a swath of green grace
There on the south slope
Of the West Newbury hillside
Struck me deep again, as it has
For seventeen springs.

This one pasture,
A long beautiful clearing near the top of the ridge,
Invisible most of the year, hidden by leaves
In summer and unnoticed in winter--
Opens itself to the first coming of spring sun
Before anything else around it;
It warms into a soft velvet emerald green
Knowable for miles in the foggy valley.

The great promises of redemption and deliverance,
Of eternal renewal of life and delight,
Are once again unconcealed in this green earth,
In beauty that is only for a while
Hidden and forgotten.

The kinds of experience described by the word "grace" would seem to be of a relatively common religious type. As David Blanchard noted in the morning's reading ["Amazing"], most of us know something about spiritual transformation. We could call those experiences serendipity, or coincidence, or the consequence of our synapses, but why not call them grace?

Wendell Berry, in his lovely and familiar poem "The Peace of Wild Things," writes

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

The woods is shining this morning.
Red, gold, and green, the leaves
lie on the ground, or fall,
or hang full of light in the air still.
Perfect in its rise and in its fall, it takes
the place it has been coming to forever.
It has not hastened here, or lagged.
See how surely it has sought itself,
its roots passing lordly through the earth.
See how without confusion it is
all that it is, and how flawless
its grace is. Running or walking, the way
is the same. Be still. Be still.
"He moves your bones, and the way is clear."

Whether it is God's grace, or the world's, makes little difference to me. Too often in the past, we Unitarian Universalists have relinquished religious language to those who would codify and dogmatize and literalize it. We gave it up to those without any poetry. For years, we would not sing "Amazing Grace," for fear of-- who knows what? Magic and superstition? Confession of our shortcomings? Divine favor? Thankfully, those days are gone, and we can reclaim that language for ourselves. So what if we take poetic license with some of it? I know "sin" when I see it. And, besides, it is the poets who know best, who touch us most deeply, and who show us what the theologians ultimately fail to explain.

One poem can tell us more of life and death and humor and religion and grace than all the theologians can or ever could. Almost any poem will do. I choose Stephen Dunne's "At the Smithville Methodist Church":

It was supposed to be Arts & Crafts for a week,
but when she came home
with the "Jesus Saves" button, we knew what art
was up, what ancient craft.

She liked her little friends. She liked the songs
they sang when they weren't
twisting and folding paper into dolls.
What could be so bad?

Jesus had been a good man, and putting faith
in good men was what
we had to do to stay this side of cynicism,
that other sadness.

O.K., we said. One week. But when she came home
singing "Jesus loves me,
the Bible tells me so," it was time to talk.
Could we say Jesus

doesn't love you? Could I tell her the Bible
is a great book certain people use
to make you feel bad? We sent her back
without a word.

It had been so long since we believed, so long
since we needed Jesus
as our nemesis and friend, that we thought he was
sufficiently dead

that our children would think of him like Lincoln
or Thomas Jefferson.
Soon it became clear to us: you can't teach disbelief
to a child,

only wonderful stories, and we hadn't a story
nearly as good.
On parent's night there were the Arts & Crafts
all spread out

like appetizers. Then we took our seats in the church
and the children sang a song about the Ark,
and Hallelujah
and one in which they had to jump up and down for Jesus.
I can't remember ever feeling so uncertain
about what's comic, what's serious.

Evolution is magical but devoid of heroes.
You can't say to your child
"Evolution loves you." The story stinks
of extinction and nothing

exciting happens for centuries. I didn't have
a wonderful story for my child
and she was beaming. All the way home in the car
she sang the songs,

occasionally standing up for Jesus.
There was nothing to do
but drive, ride it out, sing along
in silence.

I, too, would rather hear a good story. I, too, yearn to sing along, even if only in silence. I, too, pray for peace which passes understanding. May it ever be so, till "grace shall lead me home."

The Rev. Harold E. Babcock