When I said I was deeply Christian, I wasn’t just saying that. Grace is the number one reason. Most of my life, I have been captivated by the phenomenon of grace in the Christian story. Maybe it’s because I was a guilty child, but maybe it’s because grace is a revolution in thinking for all of us. Maybe we are just built to be big containers for grace. When you drink from that well, a big reservoir opens up inside you and grace is the only thing.
It is just the most beautiful story. You could write many, many words about grace and still not fully capture the beauty and breadth of it. The Ragamuffin Gospel by Brennan Manning is a good book about it. If you want to understand grace, maybe also just read the story of The Prodigal. It is mind-blowing. Grace doesn’t make sense, which is part of what makes it so great.
Still I don’t think we understand the depth or the reach of grace. We tend to think of it as a transaction: you’ve done some bad things and God is going to forgive you and let you into heaven. He even paid the price for you. That is a great story and may be technically true, but I don’t think it’s the whole story. Grace is more pervasive than that. Every molecule of this universe is dripping with it.
I was thinking about the story of Noah one day. God tells Noah to build the ark to save himself and a few other people because God saw that people (other than Noah) were evil and their hearts were evil, too. I mean it sounds like people were pretty bad, but it kind of also seems like God was being quite cruel wiping out the whole earth except for a few people and animals. It didn’t work – people were still evil and violent after that – and God said he wouldn’t flood the earth anymore.
But here’s the grace: think about how many times God hasn’t wiped out people. I mean people have done some pretty heinous things: the Holocaust, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the enslavement of African people, the slaughtering of Native Americans. I needn’t go on, though I could. For a while. When you think about even just one of those things, it is enough to think maybe God should have done or should do something to punish those people or punish us. And he didn’t. And he doesn’t, as far as I can tell. We all do things that we probably deserve to be punished for and God goes on accepting us and working with us. He is also somehow bringing good out of those things.
God is not only letting us into heaven, he is also putting up with us. That may not sound like the sexiest version of love, but I just think it is amazing. It is the best way you can be loved. My wife forgives me (the transaction) when I do something stupid, but she also just puts up with me. There’s a lot of give in her love for me. She is that way because she has her eye on what we are building together. I don’t even think she thinks in terms of right and wrong and needing to forgive (the transactional view). She accepts me and absorbs all of my demandingness and selfishness because she wants the relationship and she knows there is something better.
Forgive the language, but God is absorbing and allowing a lot of crazy shit, too, and I think he still thinks he can make something good out of it. I think a lot maybe this world isn’t going to be just dispensed with and God is bringing about a new heaven and a new earth here and now. This is the process. If you take that view, grace could also be defined as infinite patience. He is putting up with us because he knows something better is coming, in and with all the evil and sin. I’m still obviously wrapping my mind and heart around the depth and breadth of that grace.