Life is a gift, even when it is unpleasant. We feel the warmth of the sun, the splash of water on our hands, the taste of a ripe peach, the comfort of another hand on mine. We see beauty all around us, we smell it, we taste it, we feel it. It is a comfort when things threaten to overwhelm, and it adds to our celebration when things go well. And yet, we are more than mere bodily life. We take stock of ourselves, we plan, we dream, we laugh, we care for one another. Human life seems, to us at least, far richer than plant life, horse life, even monkey life. We have the ability to make life even better than how we find it. We overcome disease, keep ourselves clean, and find endless ways to increase the pleasure of life in taste, smell, touch, hearing, and site. We cultivate, making beauty. In this, we taste the possibility of a more complete human life, often just beyond our grasp. We have moments of being taken out of the rut of our existence, ecstatic moments of peace, of joy, of pleasure. In these moments, beauty extends us beyond ourselves. We discover who we are in the company of others. We feel an affinity for others that intensifies as we learn the other’s uniqueness. Love takes root. Love draws us together into a unity that is more than cooperation. It is family. Yet, this love and these glimpses of beauty point beyond us, and we feel it pointing us to a connection with the whole, to a loving, beautiful presence beyond anything that we grasp, one that encompasses the whole. Love awakens prayer. It also awakens us to the fact that we have only just begun to live life as it could be lived. We realize with Augustine that we were created for God, to be one with God, and there is a driving restlessness that spurs us on until we attain what we cannot possibly attain: union with God. Every step of this we recognize as a gift, and no one step requires the next. We find ourselves a most precious gift of God, and every moment with God an additional, undeserved bestowal, a grace.
When I say, “moment with God”, I should clarify what I mean, or rather what this means in a Christian sense. God is not a thing, not even a personal thing, that we can be with. Christianity, like Judaism before it, rejects applying the name “God” to any of the powers that we can demarcate, understand, and thus manipulate. The name God pushes beyond any singular event in life to point to a reality that underlies everything. To be with God is to be grasped by the moments of beauty and love that I spoke of before. To be with God is to feel the joy of life. To find comfort in suffering, to find the aroma of warm food, the rich taste of a food that fills a need, the caress of life that makes us fully alive in our skin. To be with God is to feel the friendly face of the universe. It is to realize that we are loved and supported. This is one of the root meanings of the word χάρις, which we translate as “grace”. It is a relationship to life in which we benefit. It is a quality which gives joy and happiness. Some translations have the angel Gabriel greeting Mary with the words “Greetings, favored one!”, while the traditional language is “Hail, full of grace!” These mean the same thing.
Understanding grace, and who we are as human beings, requires an additional step into the mystery of God. You may have noticed when I said that God is not a personal thing, that in some sense he is. He is the individual person Jesus, who had a life and is still that same flesh and blood person he was then. In that sense, God is a person we can be with. It is important to understand, though, that this is only one dimension of God, in technical language one person of the triune God. Though we could not have deduced the fullness of this mystery had God not acted to show us, now that we know it, we can recognize the triune face of God in the experiences I described. The God we experience cannot be reduced to anything we can grasp. He is the beyond, the one revealed as Father, who is at once father and mother, yet not limited by what we understand as father and mother, this God is at once creator, redeemer, sanctifier, sustainer, yet these words, though true, still do not grasp the mystery that is the Father. However, in the experience, the Father comes to us in and through creation. The world itself is both the image of God and the way in which God comes to us. The image of the Father, the Word of the Father is active, spoken, in every creature. The beauty and love that we feel, touch, smell, taste, all point to the union of creation and God that is Jesus. And he is touched, smelled, tasted, and heard in these things that reflect him. There is more to the experience, though. The Father is encountered in the Son, but there is something that moves within us that awakens us to the divine presence. Our eyes are given the ability to see the beauty as divine beauty, our ears are given the harmonies of the angels in the croaking of frogs on a hot, humid night, our noses the scent of divine power in baking bread, our skin the gentle touch of the divine lover in the caress of another. Our spirit comes alive because God is at work within it. This Holy Spirit fills us as we experience the Son and the Father. When we speak of grace, we are speaking of this triune action in which God is not only there before us but also fully within us and at the same time beyond everything.
All is not rosy though. The restlessness that moves us is a companion of affliction. We have glimpses of God, but we are well aware how far short we fall of living up to this. We long for the love of others, but our fear and our pain drive us to protect ourselves, driving others away in the same movement in which we seek to love them. We seek joy but we are woefully incapable of finding it. Everything we do, it seems, drives us further away from others and from the joys that life can offer. Every time we seek pleasure, the meager pleasure we get lives us further dry and empty. If God is the joy of life, then our incapacity to attain it suggests that the problem is our fault. Indeed, even as we blame everyone and every power we can think of for our own misery, we recognize, if we are honest, that it did not have to be this way, that the slights we feel from others ultimately originate from us. Along with the experience of grace, we have the experience of falling short, of sin. The experience of grace, then, is also an experience of redemption, of salvation.
A theology of grace explores these issues. It looks at what it means to be human, what sin does and has done to us, and fundamentally what the love of God poured out on the cross does in healing us and lifting us to union with the Trinity. If you would like to journey this path with me, subscribe and continue to follow these posts about grace. If you want a deeper experience, become a paid subscriber and have access to my detailed lectures.