Grace
Most of us here probably have had at least one time in life when we came to that depth of despair, when we pondered the existential question, the deepest question that I believe all religion must address: Am I willing to live?
I asked that question once.
It had been a year of grief. In a situation of broken love, I chose to have an abortion. I felt it was the only thing I could do, but I was haunted by the loss of that surrendered child. My grief deepened as days passed. Time was not healing my sorrow, and I spiraled into deeper and deeper despair. By day I would dutifully, and to all appearances cheerfully, perform my responsibilities as the minister of a small and vibrant congregation. At night I couldn’t sleep. I’d rise, pace the empty halls of the oversized, old parsonage, and wail.
My sorrow, despair, and isolation came to a crisis one night. I was past living one day at a time, or even one hour at a time, and was down to the question of whether I was willing to continue to live at all. In the depths of that sadness, I stopped pacing the hall. It was past midnight. I left my house and walked down the hill to Lake Union. The city was quiet. My face was wet with tears as I set my course toward the water’s edge. I was determined to walk into the lake’s cold darkness and find there the consolation that I could not find within myself.
At the bottom of the hill, the street ended and the lake-side park began. I walked across the wet grass and climbed the last rise before the final descent to the water’s edge. As I crested the rise, to my surprise, I discovered that between me and the shore there was a line of dark objects, stretching the whole length of the field, a barricade I was going to have to cross to get to the water.
I didn’t remember this barricade being there before, and it was so dark I couldn’t tell what I was seeing. But as I edged closer, I discovered it was a line of human beings, hunched over some strange looking, spindly and bulky equipment. Telescopes!
It was the Seattle Astronomy Club. A whole club of amateur scientists, up and alert in the middle of the night, because the sky was clear and the planets were near.
In order to make my way to my death, I had to get past an enthusiast in tennis shoes. He assumed I had come to look at the stars. “Here. Let me show you…” he said, and began to explain the star cluster his telescope was focused on. I had to brush the tears from my eyes in order to look through his telescope. There it was! I could see it! A red-orange spiral galaxy! Then he focused it on Jupiter and I peered through to see the giant, glowing planet. I could not bring myself to continue my journey. In a world where people get up in the middle of the night to look at the stars, I could not end my life.
I know there is grace, because my life was saved by the Seattle Astronomy Club, by those human beings that night who held fast to the desire to see the beauty of the universe, in spite of the cold or the late hour. I was saved by the human capacity to love the world and the distant reaches of the unknown. I was saved by one particular human being who assumed I shared a desire to see the stars. I was saved by being met, right in the pathway of my despair, by one—actually one hundred—who wouldn’t let me go that way. I was saved by the stars, by the cool green grass under my feet, by the earth, the cosmos, its presence, which won me over and persuaded me to stay.
We must doubt our doubt that there is no grace. We must open ourselves to the possibility that there are sources beyond ourselves that sustain us, transform us, save us, that hold us tight in the arms of life. I believe that we must open ourselves to the possibility that this grace is already here, that it has been given, is being given, and will be given. There is grace. We are helped by love, by the earth, by the stars, and by that spirit inside of us that is moved by beauty, or curiosity, or surprise, when we thought life was not worth living. It is as James Agee said, “Sure, on this shining night, with star-made shadows round, I weep for wonder.”
Survival
In my dreams over the past twenty years, the recurring images of the world after a war: a city in smoking ruins at twilight, fire-bombed to ashes. In the aftermath of apocalypse the religious enterprise can be imagined as a kind of salvage work, recognizing the resources that sustain and restore life. Resources that are in our midst and ready at hand, not located in some distant promised land. After the apocalypse, we accept our dependence on sources of life greater than ourselves and open our hearts to receive survival knowledge from those who have already found restoration. We know ourselves to be living in a time of breakdown and breakthrough, chaos and creativity, fragmentation and resourcefulness, pain and grace. Our task includes tending to injury in ourselves and others, collecting resources buried in the rubble, and constructing shelters for body and spirit, family and community.
We must sift through the rubble and salvage what needs to be saved, identifying useable resources for the spirit contained in the wisdom of the world’s religions. We need the Sabbath candles, the house of study, the bread of communion, the silence of sitting, the teachings of Jesus, the poetry of Rumi, the dance of Sufis, the water of baptism, the body-rhythm of gospel singing, the word of prayer, the images of hell, the narratives of the soul’s dark night, the cross, the ox-herding pictures.
We must see that the work of salvaging involves creating communities that shelter and protect religious tradition, and with generous hospitality make these resources available to a world in ruins. In a post-apocalyptic world guidance is needed from those who have moved beyond grief, victimization, denial, and paralysis, and who have learned how to survive. We must look to the witness of those who have found a way to live lives of dignity, depth, honesty, creativity, and activism in the midst of the world’s disrespect, superficiality, duplicity, violent redundancy, and passivity. We must take counsel from survivors, resistors, and truth tellers. Sources such as African-American women’s literature, the experiences of lesbians, gays, bisexual, and transgender people, and those people who have recovered from addiction. The guides we should heed are those whom William James called “twice-born”: people who have grappled with suffering, loss, and oppression and found a way to survive.
In our time, hope means not running away from the icy, hard ground of suffering, violence, injustice, and deceit. It also means not walking past the color purple. It means savoring the sweetness of human love, lighting the Sabbath candles, smelling the spices, and opening your heart to the sources of refreshment and grace that are given to us. Survival means working to reconstruct from the ruins we are in, a world of hospitality and peace. It means livings as one of those who, as Adrienne Rich says, “with no apparent power, reconstitutes the world.”
Reverence
Our society is currently guided by a worldview that is insufficiently grounded in reverence. Religiously, it is a world view that regards the earth itself as trash—a planet that God is soon going to discard in a plan to wipe this world away and create a new one. Economically, the dominant world view regards human beings as self-interested individuals, motivated only by their personal desire to consume. And scientifically, it sees existence as devoid of value, atomistic, disconnected, and mechanistic. Such inadequate views are tearing our world to tatters by lack of regard for the communal character of life.
We must learn again to live with reverence. Reverence is a form of love, a response to life that falls on its knees before the rising sun and bows down before the mountains. It puts its palms together in the presence of the night sky and the myriad galaxies and recognizes, as poet Langston Hughes tells us, “beautiful are the stars, beautiful are the faces of my people.” Reverence greets all humanity as sacred. It genuflects before the splendor of the grass and the magnificence of the trees. It respects the complexity, the beauty, and the magnitude of creation and does not presume to undo its intricate miracles. Instead, it gives life reverent attention, seeking to know, understand, and cooperate with life’s ways.
Reverence for life has to be learned. It is not just a feeling; it is a way of life that is manifested in more than an isolated moment of appreciation for nature or awe before its destructive or creative power. Reverence involves full-fledged devotion enacted in deeds of care and responsibility. It involves knowledge, study, and attention.
Paradise
A few summers ago, Rita Nakashima Brock and I joined my brother’s family for a week long backpacking trip into the Ansel Adams wilderness in the Sierras. To get to the trailhead, we took a forest service bus with other climbers, hikers, and fisherfolk. While the bus switchbacked up the narrow road through the pine forest up to the meadows, my seat mate and I began to talk. He’d overheard my brother talking to me and Rita about our theological work and wanted to know what we’d written. A question any author likes to hear, I told him about our book, Proverbs of Ashes, that exposes how Christian ideas that the death of Jesus saved humanity have sanctioned domestic violence, sexual abuse, racism, homophobia, and war. He said he had been raised Catholic and that his wife was the daughter of a Methodist minister. Church was important to him.
“But I can’t believe all those old doctrines,” he said, “And I never was comfortable with the bloody crucifix hanging over the altar. I couldn’t understand why we would be worshipping it. But I learned a way of life from the church that I have not rejected.”
“What is that way of life?” I asked
“Oh, it’s simple,” he said. “Love your neighbor as yourself. Try to help, not harm. Do what you can to make a difference.” He went on, “We do foster care for kids.” He said it was heart breaking to see some of the violence, abuse, and deprivation the kids have experienced. But he and his wife welcomed them into their home and did what they could. “Not even love can repair the damage sometimes,” he said.
“I know,” I replied.
“What is the book you are working on now about?” He asked.
“Paradise,” I said.
“Paradise,” he mused, and looked out the window of the bus for a few moments at the bright sky, the deep green pine forests, the alpine meadows coming into view. And rising above them the sharp peaks of the Minarets. “Do you mean paradise like where we are right now?”
“Yes,” I said. “Like where we are right now.”
We both gazed out the window for a few moments, breathing the pungent, fresh air. “This is enough,” he said.
“You know that because you help kids,” I said.
A cloud of thoughtfulness passed over his face.
“Yes,” he said, “that’s right.”
Reprinted with permission from Blessing the World, Skinner House Books, Boston 2006.
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