Archive for the ‘grace’ Tag
I grew up believing that proper English distinguishes the educated, the ones smart enough to be heard. The clarity and precision of that judgment fit neatly into my outlook on life: there is a right and wrong, choose the right and all will be well. For me, English is a standard, a measure of value; for Kimberly, English is a function, a measure of clarity. In other words, she values communication as a basis for understanding and relationship. What needs to be accurate is the meaning, not the grammar. She has little patience for my pokes at poor writing since she has regard only for the content, not the wrapping paper. Are the words sincere and true, clear and meaningful? If so, how can they be poor? They are rich and powerful.
I fought a noble fight for years, but I knew I could never win because she refused the correctness argument I spun and made it all about grace. Yesterday I finally conceded. It is one thing to recognize a culture’s values and accommodate them so as to reduce barriers in our interactions–good grammar appeals to Americans, especially educated Americans. But it is an entirely different thing to accept those values as my own. I have had an elitist, unchristian outlook, and I apologize.
The true spiritual journey leads into the depths of our hearts, an excavation, really, since it is a constant breaking through to new levels of realization. That effort takes great courage in facing the intense fear and pain that have held us back, keeping us blind to our true selves. Each new layer of self-realization opens wounds that have been hidden safely away by our mind’s defensive strategies, but we must drop our guard and feel the sharp edges of our suffering if we want our bruised hearts to be truly embraced. The path of growth is strewn with the barbs of truth that pierce our feet each step of our journey home.
Here is where self-compassion rather than self-blame is crucial in working our way through. Healthy transformation is always grounded in grace. Nowhere is grace more needed than at this point of freshly acknowledging our brokenness. This is not avoiding responsibility, but embracing responsibility, since our primary duty at this stage is receiving grace, a bedrock belief that we are loved unconditionally by our heavenly Father. There will come a time to focus on giving others grace–of understanding and forgiving the wounds they have inflicted–but this is a second step. We can only give what we have first received.
To give others grace before it has settled into our own hearts is to try to pour water from an empty pitcher. You will lose sight of your own suffering if you jump too quickly into defending others, which is a reaction forced on you by guilt or obligation rather than a gift offered to others freely from an overflow of grace in your heart. This shortcut is unsustainable and will lead to a cycle repeated over and over of wounding, reaction, and return to the status quo. This quick fix is often accompanied by “forgiveness” or compromise, but the underlying issues are never resolved and so they keep returning without leading to deeper mutual understanding and acceptance. True forgiveness springs from grace, not obligation–ask any child forced to apologize–and grace must first be received before it can be given: “We love because He first loved us” (1 Jn. 4:19).
Self-compassion is nothing more than seeing ourselves as God sees us, agreeing with Him that we are deeply and fully and unshakably loved. When we open to, welcome, embrace, trust, relish this love of God for us, we are living by faith, faith in God’s grace and love. We live in the reality that we are supremely loveable because God himself declares us to be, and none of our failings makes Him value us less than his own eternal and perfect Son.
But so many Christians fear grace, caution against its freedom, worry that self-love will lead to spiritual neglect or self-indulgence by those who think their screw-ups no longer matter. In fact they matter even more because the relationship we now damage is one of supreme value and importance to us, our life-sustenance. If true value comes from God, then our relationship with Him is our vital force. Imagine a deep-sea diver saying, “Well, now that I know my oxygen comes to me regardless of how I behave, I can cut my own hose and it won’t matter.” God does not turn off His grace towards us or close His heart to us when we turn from Him–the oxygen keeps flowing–but we can no longer access that vital source. He wants to grace our relationships, but when we take advantage of others, He is blocked from gracing that relationship until we turn again to His loving way. When we neglect or belittle others, when we are greedy and demanding, His grace is restricted from flowing into our daily interactions, and life sours around us and in our hearts, which are now being overgrown with the deadly effects of godlessness (having less of God). Grace is the door into life and relationship with God, not an escape hatch from all that is good and beneficial. If we seek for life by pushing God and His truth away in “selfishness”, it is rather an act of self-abuse–like a drug fix. This does not spring from too much self-compassion, but too little; it springs from a doubt in God’s love, not a confidence in it. Everything that leads us away from the supreme beauty and goodness of God into our own self-destructive way is self-hatred, not self-love.
Every year Christmas is a cultural blitzkrieg of celebration, carrying many along in its triumphal sweep while capsizing in its wake those who cannot keep up with its jubilant spirit. Be happy or be left out. In our chipper American culture, that is the flavor of the year, as Ella Wheeler Wilcox so aptly described it:
Laugh, and the world laughs with you;
Weep, and you weep alone;
For the sad old earth must borrow its mirth,
But has trouble enough of its own.
Even those who are forgiven for a downcast spirit on an average day are expected to step up to the occasion when the band starts playing, which it does ceaselessly from Thanksgiving till the last relative shambles out the door and the long, bleak, cold winter blows inside.
I’m no sour-puss. I like celebrating Christmas if I can bring all of myself to the party–the sad parts as well as the hopeful parts, the tears and smiles, winces and hugs, serious and silly words. When my uncomfortable emotions are welcomed, my winsome emotions have room to express themselves genuinely rather than as a pretense. Let me weep freely with you, and the laughter you hear will be deep-hearted as well. My soul is chilled when I’m pressured to be false to myself, to express inflated or deflated feelings to please others who care more for an acceptable presence than a true presence. Of course some contexts call for safe, superficial connections, and in that sense every office party is a masked ball, but then everyone enjoys it for what it is–play acting–and does not confuse it for genuine connection.
But even “genuine” can be a canny facade. Many folks who think they are being real are so cut off from their own heart that they are simply reacting, sharing the surface emotions they feel in the moment that serve to disguise–even to themselves–the deeper underlying emotional currents, the submerged rip-tides that are too threatening to acknowledge. Under the intense pressure of Christmas conformity, these can burst out suddenly and without warning. Anger can cover for shame, tears can hide anger, cheerfulness can mask fear. The underlying emotions which are unacceptable or painful are transmuted into acceptable or comfortable feelings. The intensity of those feelings may wake us to some deep lying issues but will fog up our skills for interpreting them.
The inflated expectations of the holidays is not a safe harbor to dry-dock the soul and begin to scrape away decades of clinging barnacles. Sometimes the best any of us can do is try to ride out the storm of cross-current conflicts that arise. But these family gatherings are rich with telltale signs of underlying issues, and once we get enough distance to look back with compassion and insight, we may be filled with fresh personal discovery. Next year we can bring more of our true selves to the party and welcome the true selves of others as we grow into the grace of understanding and accepting ourselves and others more fully.
“I’m sorry for being impatient with you Sunday night,” I told Forest, one of my student workers, as he sat down at the circulation desk. “You were doing your best, and that is all I can ask of anyone.” I am not a patient man, with myself or with others. I “came by it honestly” as my mother would say since Dad was highly committed to efficiency and raised us on the double: if it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing quicker. “What took you so long?” was cliched into the moral soundscape of our lives, a diagnostic metronome to gauge our pace in life. I never earned my efficiency badge, so it became an obsession of sorts as I chased after the qualifying time that kept eluding me. Life was a race and I was losing, but instead of quitting, I just ran harder.
My hopped up need for hustle exalts efficiency over more Scriptural values like patience, and even when I demote it, it still mucks up the works by prodding me to bark at consequences instead of intentions. That is, if you get in my way, I’ll get hot whether it’s your fault or not. Forest is diligent, but learns slowly. Impatience (if ever legitimate) must burn at his negligence, not at his learning curve, over which he has little control. Scolding a slow person for being slow is abusive, and the first step down that harmful path is expecting too much of others… which usually springs from demanding too much of myself.
So the cure, ironically enough, begins with grace towards myself, even about my abusive impatience towards others. I cannot in any healthy way scold myself into virtue. Being patient with myself is not at all the same as excusing myself or minimizing my fault. Rather, it is fully admitting my faults, but seeking a cure in God’s greater grace rather than my greater effort. Divine grace is key not only because it forgives me, but because it creates a whole context of grace, a circle big enough for all our failings, mine and Forest’s both. Excuses, far from being an expression of grace, are a rejection of it. They are a claim to need no grace since no wrong has been done–I only need your understanding, not your forgiveness. Excusing myself closes the door to grace just as surely as loathing myself. Self-justification and self-condemnation are both blockades to grace–in the first I am too good for grace and in the second I am too bad for it, but both express a legalistic worldview. and trying to validate them by calling them “righteousness” and “contrition” respectively will not change their antagonism to grace.
I scolded Forest shortly before we closed Sunday, and I was already feeling guilty by the time I walked out the door. I wrestled with it on the way home, refusing to play the devil’s song of shame in my head, but embracing my failings and the grace I needed to relieve my shame. Instead of spending the two days till his next shift beating myself–a common habit of mine that is so personally and relationally destructive–I settled into the relief of God’s all-encompassing grace, and when I apologized to Forest on Tuesday, it was not from a shame-induced defensiveness or groveling, but as a fellow recipient of grace. We both fail, we both need grace. May we all learn to grace ourselves and one another more freely.
I’ve been missing lately from my blog because I’ve been mysteriously content of late, and I’m doing all I can to step gingerly and avoid jostling anything that might splash unwanted bits on my day, a very closely managed contentment! It is like having a badly burned part of my body–my most recent bout with serious depression–that is painless as long as I don’t move, and stings a warning if I take any chances… enforced relaxation… sort of like prison… like hiding in the bushes from a stalking bear and bating my breath to avoid detection… very much like that since I don’t know when and from where a new round of aggressive depression might pounce.
A harsh word, a guilty memory, a snub, a glimpse of an unfinished project and depression gets in a quick slap. I feel it, and I will myself to breathe deeply, relax, let it go. At other times it is the slow, almost undetectable drips of growing emotional dis-ease, when I go two days without exercising, for instance, or I avoid dealing with a niggling problem. I can always feel it brushing past in the dark, know that I have a very thin emotional barrier protecting me. Perhaps the clearest evidence is that even though I don’t currently feel bad, I have very little energy to take steps to enhance my life, and pushing myself past my energy level is sure to tip over my precarious detente with depression.
Certain things seem to keep me steady–walking daily for two hours, going to work each evening, talking through stuff with Kimberly, loving on my dogs–and my hope is that over time a steady pace will yield more stability. There are hopeful signs. I am finding some comfort in books as I have not in years, and I catch myself whistling or singing snatches of verse. But all those gradual gains could be swallowed up overnight, without warning, and without explanation. So for today, let me just breathe steady, walk slowly, and hope for the best.
I was walking in the misting rain today, the dogs pulling eagerly at their leashes to sniff out delights tucked into the roadside weeds, and I was thinking about my long journey back to myself. At the age of 40 I realized I’d been fast-marching down the wrong road, chasing my false self–the self I thought I should be and could be with a little more effort. It was not a journey of discovering myself and blossoming into that person God created me to be, but a suppression of my true self and imposition of duty-bound goals. And as I grew ever farther from my true self, I had only a fabricated self to share with others.
So many of us are like bumper cars trying to connect, but instead deflecting. “Hi, how are you?” bump, bump. “Fine, thanks.” bump, bump. “I had a rough night, but I won’t bother you with that!” smile, bump, bump. It’s a dangerous place to be without a bumper, so we cushion ourselves well and keep at a safe distance. As protection, I used tight self-discipline to outshine others, to prove my worth, to earn their respect, and to safely pad the vulnerable parts of my soul from access to others. If you hide long enough, you lose your orientation and eventually lose yourself.
Who am I really? Am I a naturally disciplined, organized person, or am I a naturally spontaneous, creative person who has wrapped himself tightly in this cloak of spiritual conformity? Am I essentially easy-going and relational, or am I hard-driving and goal oriented? Would I make a better therapist or lawyer? I worked so long and tirelessly to become the person I thought God demanded, suppressing my true inclinations, desires, and gifts, that I struggle now to recognize the real me. For the last 14 years I’ve been finding my way back, sloughing off layer upon layer of spiritual accretions that suffocated my spirit and that carefully buffered my friendships. I still have a long way to go, but at least I’m on the road back to my true self shared in genuine relationships.
I often wonder where I would be now if my true self had been embraced and celebrated and my path had been the natural opening of my heart to a God full of grace and welcome.
Perhaps that’s only possible in an unscarred world.
Early this summer I dragged out a cardboard box from my closet, blew off years of dust, and opening it, pulled out a stack of notecards. Each card held a quotation, insights that inspired and challenged me, scribbled down from a decade of reading, and I planned to transcribe them to my computer. For two months I couldn’t muster the energy, but last week I finally plunked them down in my lap and started flipping through for some encouragement to share on Facebook. I read through ten cards… and then ten more, pulling them randomly from the pile, and discovered that what I meticulously recorded and saved was toxic. They were snippets of a mindset that dragged me into darkness and despair, a spirituality that was intense and genuine… and deeply flawed.
One of those treasured nuggets read, “A really humble man would rather let another say that he is contemptible and worth nothing than say so himself…. He believes it himself and is glad that others should share his opinion.” Another famous divine wrote, “Strive always to choose not that which is easiest, but that which is most difficult; not that which is most delectable, but that which is most unpleasing; not that which gives most pleasure, but that which gives least; not that which is restful, but that which is wearisome; not that which gives consolation, but rather that which makes disconsolate.”
“HUMILITY CONSISTS IN THE CONTEMPT OF OUR EXCELLENCE”
Even when the quotations were “positive,” they crushed me with their impossible standard, like this prayer: “Grant that every word I speak may be fit for you to hear; that every plan I make be fit for you to bless; that every deed I do may be fit for you to share” –flawless speech and thought and action daily. I was a very committed young man. If this was the measure of true spirituality, then I was determined to reach it. With all my heart I drove myself to meet this standard, redoubling my efforts when I fell short, and finally I despaired.
In my brokenness, the grace of God found me. In my years of striving I would have looked on such a free gift as “cheap grace,” as taking advantage of God’s goodness, as spiritual lukewarmness like the church of Laodicea. But once I despaired of myself, grace was the only hope left to me. We cripples cannot earn our keep. It must be given to us.
For years after stumbling into the light of grace, I blamed myself for that twilight of wandering, of waste, of wounds to myself and others, but that murky stretch of my journey may have been inevitable, even necessary, since only the destitute embrace grace. Moses spent four decades in the backside of the desert herding sheep. David spent years running from Saul, sleeping in caves, being tagged a traitor. Demolition sets the groundwork for re-creation, so that the very strength and success of the unbroken stunts their souls. So let me, like Paul, brag about my weaknesses and magnify the grace of God.
I’ve been staying with dad for 10 days, keeping an eye on him while his wife is in Australia. Dad is a man of habit, finding comfort in a daily routine. I think he would call it discipline. Each morning he gets up, makes a cup of coffee, and takes it into his office where he has a long-established pattern of devotions: singing old hymns, reading the Bible, and praying through his list of requests. I expect he would feel discombobulated all day if that pattern was knocked loose.
Each morning here I go for a walk along the Broad River Walkway. At first I was taking along Barney, their border collie mix with long, thick, uncontrollable hair, but he kept falling behind, so I started walking alone. The solitude crowded my head with thoughts, mostly reflections on childhood and its repercussions.
Broad River Walk
This morning, prompted by the choruses I sang with dad last night, I headed out to walk with the old hymnbook tucked under my arm. The red cover was warn smooth and dark from years of family devotions, the ancient supportive tape on the corners blending seamlessly. As I stood and watched the water cascade over the spillway that stretches between the banks, I flipped the book open and the pages divided at “Nearer My God to Thee.” Those words dusted off cob-webbed memories of my deeply religious youth when I was “sold out to God” as we called it. I spent hours in prayer and Bible reading, I listened to sermons and worship on the radio, on tape, and at church. I read Christian authors and talked with Christian friends.
All this effort was to reach an oasis, relief for my parched soul, but the God I sought was a mirage. The farther into the desert I pushed myself, year after year, the more lost I became, until I was crawling through the sand towards water that wasn’t there, and I finally collapsed. Every step in the direction of a misconceived God is a step away from the true God.
I worshiped a God who was harsh and judgmental, and based on these assumptions, all my Bible reading and prayer and devotion simply drove me deeper into this skewed faith. I read verses about God’s wrath and judgment that negated for me any verses about His gentleness and love. Sermons about God’s kindness came across to me as soft and insubstantial, as merely a carrot to get me to work harder at being good so God would accept me. The more I sang “Holy, Holy, Holy” the more unworthy and rejected I felt–who could ever measure up to absolute perfection? I worked to strengthen my faith, but it was faith in God’s power and omniscience and righteousness that were scrubbed of any scent of His patience and mercy and grace. That is, his power and omniscience and righteousness were frightening, not encouraging, the basis for his condemning me, not his rescuing me.
Love was there, but it was not foundational as these other attributes were. Fundamentally, God was pissed off at me and could only be mollified by the death of his son. Jesus kind of forced God into accepting me against his better judgment, bought God off so to speak. The harder I worked to be the person God wanted me to be, the more I realized how far short I fell. I heard Amy Grant’s song “My Father’s Eyes” and knew the look in those eyes: eternal disappointment.
This was not the kind of error that I could tweak my way out of. It was fundamental, all encompassing. It was not until my worldview, my belief system, crushed me beyond recovery that I was able to let go and discover the God in whom I now believe, a God of infinite grace. It has taken many years to unlearn, discard, loosen my fearful grip from my long held false securities and to cling stubbornly to my new faith, my new God, my new life and relationships… and even a new Bible and hymnbook. Nearer my God to thee.
It was the last straw. Pastor Rick had already cancelled the men’s group, just because, and it was the only reason I was attending his church, the one touch of real grace. Without that solace, I found myself struggling to survive the Sunday service, trying to keep my soul intact under a less than gentle preacher. Then last month he cried out, “I can’t STAND negative people! I won’t have anything to do with them!” That flash of accidental irony pushed me out the door. I can’t listen to a preacher who hates others, publicly, in a sermon… especially when his contempt may be directed at depressives like me. That was not a slip of his tongue, like dropping an F-bomb, but a slip of his mindset spilling out in the open, a thought so comfortable that he didn’t flinch to hear himself say it, out loud, in the pulpit. Perhaps I’m too sensitive… but if so, I need to stand up for that vulnerable part of myself.
This morning I sat in a different worship service and felt the singing stir my emotions, but I ducked tightly inside myself like a threatened turtle. In the stadium or theater, my emotions splash out with abandon, so why does it feel unsafe in church? Because my feelings about basketball are incidental, but my feelings about God are deep and core and private. In the genteel South of my upbringing, only real friends were invited from the living room into the kitchen, but God alone got into the bedroom. Shared intimacy requires safety, because the deeper in you go, the more power you wield for good or harm.
I realize that many folks have a public persona to protect their true hearts from danger: polite banter, chumminess, faux cheerfulness and interest. They invite you so warmly into the yard in order to divert you from the house. But I was born with a glass facade–you can see everything from the yard. If I don’t feel safe with you, I will give you a tight smile and a polite nod before averting my eyes because I’m no good at using politeness as a shield. I can go for about three sentences before tripping into a genuine heart issue.
However, the real vulnerability for me comes not from reporting about my feelings, but actually showing my feelings. I can emotionally keep folks at arms length while talking all about my feelings, but to express my feelings directly is the real risk, allowing them to react to my heart rather than my words and thoughts, which are my own protective layer against the harshness of others. For me intellectual validity has always been an escape, but emotional validity a pitfall. If you invalidate my ideas, I made a mistake, but if you invalidate my emotions, I AM a mistake. Showing my feelings invites you into my heart, and once you’re inside, I’m no longer safe. A new church is a new challenge emotionally, especially for those of us who aren’t good at shallow connections.
A week ago I was sitting at the library reference desk and one of my student workers was talking to a couple of friends. We allow this for a couple of minutes, but they kept jabbering. When there was a pause in the conversation I said, “If you want to keep having this discussion, why don’t you take it elsewhere.” The visiting students were clearly embarrassed and immediately apologized and headed out the door. The student worker continued with her shift, but at the end of her hour she got up and left in complete silence. I’m not deaf to social cues and guessed she was upset with me. Sadly, I can come across as more harsh than I feel… something in the tone of my voice, the look in my eyes, the cock of my brows.
I know this because Kimberly regularly yanks my chain about what I have said or done with others that seems completely tame to me–I was not barking, I was not even growling. Apparently my perception of “normal” is skewed towards blunt and angry. I take umbrage easily. I lack grace. And even when I manage to have a gracious mindset, my frown lines still crease–my mom was right: making ugly faces does stick. I have improved a great deal, but Kimberly keeps wincing, so I’ve clearly got a ways to go.
Every plain statement comes with assumptions, context, implications, connotation… in short, the unspoken part of our message is often more powerful and important than the spoken part. This is true not only because we can give it more weight, even unintentionally, but because the unspoken has unusual advantages, being unseen it easily slips past all our defenses.
- It’s often felt, but not identified consciously, so the person falls under its influence without a chance to examine and question it.
- It’s hard to call out because it can easily be refuted with “that’s not what I said” or “that’s not what I meant.”
- The person reacting has no “proof” so he doubts himself and may not even understand why he is reacting as he is, even blaming himself for feeling blamed, a double whammy.
When dad says, “That was a great science project. Next year you’ll probably get first place,” his words are floating in a relational stew. The boy knows his father, knows what he thinks about science versus sports, knows how he weighs second place versus first, knows how he values his son’s achievements compared to his job or favorite sitcom or other kid’s accomplishments. The father’s sentiments override everything else, and his actual words are powerless in such a competition. We are all born intuitively perceptive, remarkably so, even if we cannot put it into words or rational explanations.
No amount of care in choosing my words or facial expressions is going to change the experience others have of me, except in the most superficial interactions. My only hope is to grow more into a gracious heart, for the heart always comes leaking out between and around all my words, my polite behavior, my planned smiles. The truth has an inevitability, even when I try to suppress it, even when I’m blind to it in myself. Sometimes people know me better than I know myself. So I listen to them, even when it sounds like poppycock 😉 .
Janathan Grace Reflections 