The Brinksmanship of Grace
Hello again, brothers and sisters. How is your risk appetite? 💣
If you spend all your life looking for stability you’ll never taste grace. That’s it. The essay is over, the rest is needless elaboration. But I couldn’t be more serious. Stability is a culturally enshrined virtue and grace is so misapprehended and misdefined as to be almost an unknown frontier for rediscovery. Maybe there is room for explanation, after all. Grace is utterly fleeting, balanced on a razor’s edge. If you don’t know what to look for, or if you’re afraid of the ideal conditions, you’ll miss it. Since missing grace leads to branching pathways of misery and suffering, it seems wise to devote time to prevention. Grace is an inescapably religious and a uniquely Christian concept. So as we tend to do, we will need to start at the central tree of theology and follow the spreading, branching tendrils until they wrap around our present and future concerns. And here we have an essay, after all.
Grace properly defined begins with the understanding of richly deserved consequences replaced by staggering extravagance at immense cost to another, freely offered. This is probably technically incorrect in several ways but at least it gets us closer to an understanding of the truth than the vapid t-shirt slogans that have coopted the concept. All of the components are necessary. Good things are not necessarily grace, and even every undeserved good I receive does not qualify. To use the shortened definition that my children learn, “Justice is getting what you deserve. Mercy is not getting what you deserve. Grace is getting what you could never deserve.” And the beauty of grace is that it enables an impossible bubble of flourishing when it is humbly received. Persistence in grace creates literal miracles. It undoes natural laws and flouts universal principals. But only as long as we refuse to seek the antigrace of logically comprehensive stability.
Asserted: Grace Breaks the World
There is an intrinsic reason that faith and reason are often (falsely) perceived as conflicting opposites. Although never irrational, faith requires the acceptance of tension between clusters of independently cohesive truths. “God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” is a sentence containing several logical tensions and alluding to several more. So we are perpetually reminded by legions of freshly minted philosophical pedants. This statement offers no proofs or rationalizations, simply a stunning claim demanding your active acceptance or denial. But this is exactly the radiantly explosive glorious point. In a dull world of predictable legal and natural consequences that assuage the anxiety of the joyless moralist and the joyless hedonist alike, the God of grace smashes the foundations of quantum mechanics and chuckles uproariously as time spins backwards and consequences are unmade. The board is reset with new pieces and new squares and the Law of Love has replaced all else. Unsustainable and without guarantee, each moment from the point at which the soul accepts the illogical offer of free grace is wrapped up in the completely free and uncompelled decision to choose happy submission. And the promise of another identical opportunity, should you fail.
Asserted: Grace Embodies Contradictions
This is exactly where the scandal of the Christian faith encounters the most fierce resistance, both from without and within. The only viable path to know God is a terribly exhilarating shot for the heavens in a gifted rocket that we cannot steer or reverse engineer and which we are completely free to exit at all times. Every church is an impossibly unstable collection of broken volunteer rocket pilots, themselves incubators for a tiny individual engine of Grace that threatens at any second to fly out of control. It is so much easier to accept moralism (There are Only Rules, and I am Made Arbiter) or libertinism (Do What Thou Wilt, to the Extent of your Body’s Full Capacity). Grace says “You must obey, and My love has made it possible. Go and sin no more.” There are no guarantees, except your own personal capacity for engineering spectacular failures. You know it well, especially in your quietest moments of introspectively honest despair. It’s all within a moment of disaster at all times. The path is narrow because it requires humility to accept your inability to do any good at all apart from Grace. And because once your inability is accepted, you’re supposed to try. It would be despicably unfair except that it’s gloriously unfair instead.
The perpetual motion machine continues to propel us forward despite its humanly impossible nature. The correct feeling when exposed to grace is identical to the feeling every parent has upon buckling their newborn into the car on the way home from the hospital - “Why am I allowed to have this?” We are a society of pundits and accountants, seeking formulae and bulleted lists while God cheerfully showers us in impossibly delicate spiritual artistry. To say that this means Christianity is irrational is no more accurate than saying sexual love is irrational because it primarily does not consist of diagrammatic system and schema. While anyone can so reduce it, and probably someone should just so the explanations exist for handy reference, that is not what the grand endeavor is for.
Resolved: To Reject the Stability of Death
I’m not afraid to apply these thoughts to things less lofty than eternal salvation, since theologians explain to us that God’s Common Grace also exists throughout our world, sown on the just and unjust alike for the simple pleasure of our enjoyment. The Problem of Good is just as vexing as its more well-known counterpart. In all this vast world, why should there be hidden beauties beyond human capacity to describe and often literally beyond sight for generations at a time?
If you wait until you can completely control every variable and manage every contingency, then you have already slain the motive power that you hoped to harness. According to your faith, it will be. Now, faith is not a cosmic alignment of good vibes that prospers regardless of intention or object. It is every and only submitting to the power of God and floating inside of the riptide of His will. But that will is the literal force that maintains atomic alignment and spins galaxies. Stop asking why things fail and start asking yourself why anything, anything at all, ever comes true? Why does web3, which seems to all observers essentially a collection of human hopes enshrined in completely mutable code maintained by flawed humans, work? Because the best things in the world are hidden in bubbles of impossibility to build our faith. Because the truth is foolish to confound the wise. It’s all just practice for the moment when He will ask us to take the only step that ever really mattered. You worry too much, friend. Let go of the rope and the map and your arrogant pretensions while we’re at it. Who said it was going to be safe and make sense? It’s so much better. It’s true.
WGMI 😎
So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord. ~ Wendell Berry, "The Mad Farmer Liberation Front" Ask for the bleeding charity. Everything is here for the asking and absolutely nothing can be bought. ~ C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce
For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast. ~ Ephesians 2:8-9
Thank you. It’s as if you wrote this for me. I have reflected a lot on this word and just when I think it’s within reach it flutters away. You helped rein it in so I can better see its properties.
Incredible piece. I'd never really considered the concept of Grace or what it is, though this piece ties up a lot of ideas I've been thinking about lately, of the irrationality of the world, of beliefs, faith, intentions, what I can only attribute in a material sense to quantum mechanics, and the implausible occurences of life, in a collection of words that I would never have formulated myself. Bravo