Janathan Grace Reflections   This is my journey of self discovery shared with you

Right now, at this very moment, I feel at peace.  It is a precarious feeling.  I’m fairly sure it won’t last long, but I am okay with that.  I can savor it for what it is.

“Grace is that force that infuses our lives, that keeps letting us off the hook. It is unearned and gratuitous love; the love that goes before, that greets us on the way. It’s the help you receive when you have no bright ideas left, when you are empty and desperate and have discovered that your best thinking and most charming charm have failed you; grace is the light or electricity or juice or breeze that takes you from that isolated place and puts you with others who are as startled and embarrassed and eventually grateful as you are to be there. Everything feels crazy, but on small patches of earth all over, I can see just as much messy grace as ever… It meets us where we are but does not leave us where it found us.’” Anne Lamont (from “Plan B”)

My wife and I were watching the local news last night, and I commented, “I like that guy [the commentator].  He’s nice.  I wish I were nice like him.”  He reminds me of the folks on the Today Show–you feel safe with them.  You are sure they would never say or think anything mean about you.  I like nice people.  I want to be with them.  I need them in my life in a big way.  I was drawn to my best friend in college and later my first and last girlfriend, Kimberly, primarily because they were nice.

I want to be like these people, to be sweet and safe, and deep down I feel ashamed and guilty that I am not like them.  It is not who I am.  I am not a nice person.  If someone asked my friends and acquaintances for a one word description of me, “nice” would simply not occur to them as a possibility.  I’m not trashing myself–I think I do have some good attributes, and these same friends might say that I am intelligent or genuine or determined.  The opposite of nice is not necessarily mean.  I have something really important to contribute to others, something that nice people usually don’t have, namely challenge.  And challenge often makes people feel uncomfortable and perhaps unsafe, but it’s hard to grow personally or relationally without some challenge.  I am very, very grateful for those folks who are naturally sweet and gentle from birth, by personality.  I am not one of them.  So I need to learn to accept myself for who I am and not shame myself for who I am not.  I want to grow more gentle and patient, empathetic and accepting, but I will never be Mr. Rogers.  I don’t know that I would like a world full of only nice people.  Still, I struggle often with the shame of not being soft and safe and find it hard to accept myself for who I am and who I was designed to be.  My eyes fill up with tears just thinking about it. 

What a sad thing not to be who you wish you were, and who, at some deep level, you feel you should be.  I can imagine nice people feeling ashamed that they don’t have the gumption or courage or whatever it is they see and covet in me.  My heart goes out to each of you who, like me, feel ashamed of who you are even at your best, who struggle desperately to be someone he or she is not.  May we learn to delight in others’ gifts without it sparking a sense of our own inadequacy.

Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are quite naturally impatient in everything
to reach the end without delay.
We should like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on the way
to something unknown,
something new.
Yet it is the law of all progress that is made
by passing through some stages of instability
and that may take a very long time.

And so I think it is with you.
Your ideas mature gradually. Let them grow.
Let them shape themselves without undue haste.
Do not try to force them on
as though you could be today what time
—that is to say, grace—
and circumstances
acting on your own good will
will make you tomorrow.
Only God could say what this new Spirit
gradually forming in you will be.

Give our Lord the benefit of believing
that his hand is leading you,
and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself
in suspense and incomplete.
Above all, trust in the slow work of God,
our loving vine-dresser.

–Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

[thanks to my cousin, Em]

“Every moment and every event of every man’s life on earth plants something in his soul.  For just as the wind carries thousands of invisible and visible winged seeds, so the stream of time brings with it germs of spiritual vitality that come to rest imperceptibly in the minds and wills of men.  Most of these unnumbered seeds perish and are lost, because men are not prepared to receive them.”  –Thomas Merton

I would be interested to hear your thoughts and feelings about this quote.

After my last post, I thought I would pick an excerpt from my book to share:

            When I think that grace leads to sin, I have been deluded into a common misunderstanding that confuses grace for tolerance or permissiveness.  Such laxity is the opposite of grace, because grace is the embodiment of care and concern.  If a wife doesn’t care when her husband comes home, or if he comes home, doesn’t give a rip if he gets drunk or beats the kids, we should not call her gracious, but indifferent, cold, uncaring.  If her husband says, “Mind if I leave for a month with my secretary?” and his wife answers, “Whatever,” then sin is certainly being encouraged, but not by grace.  That woman is the epitome of ungrace.  “Whatever” is freedom offered from a heart empty of love.  “Sure, go anywhere.  Go to hell for all I care.”

            Freedom which is the result of an uncaring relationship loses all its glory, its joy and celebration, its power, its benefit.  Such freedom is a terrible burden–a freedom from the concern of anyone but myself, absolutely alone in the universe.  Relationship demands some restriction of freedom.  It is impossible without this, for if I alone am the single consideration in every choice I make, relationship ceases to exist.  Then others simply become my environment. Grace is not laxity, but love.

I’m not very good at grace, either receiving it or giving it.  My wife and I took the last name “Grace,” because we wanted it to be the foundation of our personal lives and relationships–but it will always be more of a goal than a descriptor.  Some months back, I read some excerpts from my self-published book “Overwhelmed by Grace” that lay untouched for several years.  I authored it while restructuring my whole worldview, which had been dashed to bits by a tidalwave of truth.  Grace was still fairly theoretical and cognitive for me at that time… it had not sifted down into my way of being and perceiving and sharing.  In retrospect, my book on grace seems to be more stark and challenging than gracious in presentation, revealing the battle I was waging inside myself.  I have grown into grace so much more since then, and a great deal of the credit goes to my wife, Kimberly, but grace still struggles to gain ascendance in my soul.  It is such a very long and arduous journey, and progress seems so slow.  I lose patience and want to force myself to grow faster, but grace has its own pace and rhythm and cannot be hurried without tainting its nature.  Patience with myself (and with God) is one of the toughest lessons of grace to embrace, especially in the face of others’ impatience.  In spite of its reputation, grace has not come easy for me–not easy, but richly rewarding.  So I am deeply grateful for every bit that has found its way into my life.

“Our suffering itself may become a form of prayer, if we can learn to let submission and love, even praise, ascend to God through it.  It is a wonderful and awesome thing when in the grip of severe pain or sorrow to look up into the face of God and say: “I bring You this–now; accept it for the sake of the Lord Jesus.”  It may not be the sacrifice we would choose to bring, but if pain is what God has given us, and pain is all we have, we may offer it up to Him as a sacrifice of praise and He will both accept it and hallow it.  Such an offering may be one of the purest forms of worship known to the spirit of man.”  Margaret Clarkson

For the last few days I have been reading a book that is overbearingly optimistic.  There is very little room in the author’s world for emotions that don’t feel good: sadness is something to be cured, not indulged.  When I feel that some part of my life is unwelcome to another, I feel devalued, invalidated.  I don’t feel safe around someone who needs me to disguise my true feelings to make him or her comfortable. 

I realize, of course, that the same can be said for a melancholic who tries to suppress the cheerful, but the American culture, including the church, weighs in heavily on the side of optimism.  Although some forms of Christianity through history have more quickly associated spirituality with melancholy, this is not the American way. 

It seems to me a dangerous assumption to equate faith with pleasant feelings, leaving unpleasant feelings to be associated with doubt.  I have discovered in my own life that it takes a great deal of faith to allow myself to fully experience, acknowledge, and even welcome my own “negative” feelings and that those experiences often bring about greater growth than the pleasant ones.

So why do I read this oppressively optimistic book?  Because I need the encouragement of sunny thoughts… as long as I can receive them in the amount and with the emphasis that builds up my soul.  If optimism is excessive (for me), far from helping, it depresses me more.  I feel isolated, I feel the other person cannot understand or appreciate my experience.  However, if I value and validate my own experience of melancholy first, I can then welcome cheerful words to encourage me rather than shame me.  It is confusing for the optimist to hear, but I find more comfort when folks accept my melancholy than when they try to cheer me up.  I think we all have a long way to grow in learning to embrace our differences.

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves. Do not now seek the answers which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them and the point is to live everything. Live the questions now.  Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer” Rainer Maria Rilke

From first grade everyone knows the goal is to find answers, and failing to find the right answer is the great failure.  Far more anguish comes from this sense of unsatisfied obligation than from not knowing.  Rilke’s quotation suggests that if I cannot find the answers, it is not my fault, that too earnestly looking for the answer may be irresponsible.  This perspective might give me relief if I could live in the faith that answers are gifts rather than the reward of sweat and tears, that questions are themselves answers in their own right and not just blanks that need filling in.

But without answers, how does one know how to live, make decisions, respond to the world on a daily basis?  Are today’s choices simply made at random, haphazardly, without basis?  That is to say, if I get no answers, am I to assume that all (reasonable) paths are equal, that each will work out comparably well?  In particular, what job do I try to land when my future is so open-ended?  How much effort do I put into each direction?  Or do I just sit at home till I get an answer?  What does it mean to “live the question”?

Perhaps the questions drive me back to listening more carefully to my own heart… but then am I not looking for answers again, just answers for different questions?  Confusion.  Confusion is a terrible place to live.  Why is it so hard for me there?  Life feels much safer if I have some control over it, but I cannot steer if I am blind.  One might appeal to the thrill of adventure into the unknown, but rollercoasters are only exciting as long as they are firmly set on rails.  The one who has been in a disastrous wreck, as I was in Calcutta, can feel only terror in uncertainty.  Questions are incomparably harder to live than answers… any answers.