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Amazing Grace! The energy of God’s loving! The Word made flesh living amongst us. Could we work with a more amazing theme than this? Probably not. It has been the inspiration of the Christian view of faith and life, hope and mission from the beginning. Many of Jesus’ parables and stories along with his life, death and resurrection centre around the wonderful grace of God. “What he’s doing, God is doing.” says Archbishop Rowan Williams.1 John Newton, in witnessing to this decisive action in his life as a slave ship captain, wrote one of the most memorable and enduring hymns of grace, Amazing Grace.
God’s grace first taught my heart to fear, His grace my fears relieved; How precious did that grace appear The hour I first believed.
Through every danger, trial and snare I have already come;
His grace has
brought me safe thus far, Most eras of the last 2000 years have had their theologians of grace: St Paul in the first century, St Augustine in the 4th, Luther and Calvin in the 16th century, Karl Barth and Karl Rahner in the 20th among many others. We look back at most of them and wonder how there could be such a mix of fresh vision and understanding of grace alongside the limitations, attitudes and actions of their day. I found a stimulating sermon title on the net while looking for the source of a Luther quote: Broken Vessels, Amazing Grace: or, Why We Can Still Sing With Luther and Other Scoundrels.3 It’s because they are our brothers and sisters in the faith, because of grace, because of forgiveness, because of our own sinfulness and brokenness and because we too are people of our time. The Luther quote I was looking for is his famous (or is it infamous?) comment to Philip Melancthon, “Sin and sin boldly! But let your trust in Christ be stronger still, and rejoice in Christ who is the victor over sin, death and the world.”4 Now we don’t want this issue of Refresh to be seen as encouraging our sinning but rather to see afresh how radical the notion of God’s free grace is. Every age of the faith wants to limit it, contain it, control it – but no one can do that to God’s burgeoning giftfulness among us. As we encounter this lavish grace that can’t be contained or controlled, the natural tendency is to find ways to limit the explosion of light that infuses every dark crevice of the psyche. Our ability to manufacture ways of doing this is remarkable. Often they express a need to earn it, work for it, deserve it and, of course, control it. We are control freaks before grace – it’s too potent, to freeing, too out of left field, too risky, too challenging in its burgeoning energy of loving and recreating. And yet how we desire it and yearn for it. Thank God Jesus came among us as grace and truth, and that in him we find grace upon grace upon grace. Philip Yancey has served our generation well with his fresh look at grace.5 What strikes me about his book is that he doesn’t offer definitions of grace. He tells stories of people’s discoveries and his own. Many of them push the boundaries beyond our comfort zones as they paint another brush stroke into the canvas of life. A friend said to me when I told him about this issue of Refresh, “Tell it in stories”. That’s what Jesus did so often. And that’s because stories of experiences of grace do much more for us than words about it. It’s like we have to meet grace again and again for the first time to keep grasping it. We’re also wanting to suggest that contemplative spirituality rests both comfortably in God’s grace and mercy and most uncomfortably in anything that proscribes and limits understanding and application of grace in life. Anyway, here’s our offering for this issue. It goes out with our prayer that you will find rich things here that will entice you out of the safe places and into fresh discoveries of “the unforced rhythms of grace” (Matt 11:28. The Message).
1 Diocesan Newsletter, Easter 1995, in Rupert Shortt. Rowan Williams – An Introduction. DLT 2003. 60. 2 Amazing Grace by John Newton. (1725-1807) Hymns For Today’s Chruch. Hodder 1988. No. 28, verses 2 and 3. 3 David L. Johns. Earlham School of Religion. 26.10.2001. http://esr.earlham.edu/vocal ministry/broken vessels.html 4 Luther to Melancthon, no 99 (1 August 1521) 5 Philip Yancey. What’s So Amazing About Grace? Zondervan. 1997.
Grace is not a thing, but its essential significance is simply God himself in His goodwill towards (people). The grace of God is not something separable from God, but is the personal relationship which God establishes (with people). F. Baudraz in von Allmen’s Vocabulary of the Bible. Lutterworth 1966. 157. . . . . . . . . . . Grace is favour, the free and undeserved help that God gives us to respond to his call to become children of God … partakers of the divine nature and of eternal life. Grace is participation in the life of God. Catechism of the Catholic Church. St Pauls. 1994. 483. . . . . . . . . . . Grace is an outrageous concept. It is by definition a gift to the undeserving. Anything you deserve has become a fair reward: grace is unmerited favour. Sounds of Grace CD. See Resources below. . . . . . . . . . . Christianity is not about learning how to live within the lines. Christianity is about the joy of colouring. The grace of God is preposterous enough to accept as beautiful a colouring that anyone else would reject as ugly. The grace of God sees beyond the scribbling to the heart of the scribbler. Michael Yaconelli – Dangerous Wonder. NavPress. 1999. P124. . . . . . . . . . .
Gracious Gardener, Joyce Rupp. Prayers to Sophia. Innisfree Press. 2000. 62 . . . . . . . . . . The grace of God is dangerous. It’s lavish, excessive, outrageous, and scandalous. God’s grace is ridiculously inclusive. Apparently God doesn’t care who He loves. He is not very careful about the people He calls His friends or the people He calls His church. Exactly. Yaconelli – op. cit. 126. . . . . . . . . . . Charis always demands the answer eucharista (that is, grace always demands the answer of gratitude). Grace and gratitude belong together like heaven and earth. Grace evokes gratitude like the voice an echo. Gratitude follows grace as thunder follows lightning. Karl Barth. Church Dogmatics IV/1, 41. . . . . . . . . . . Since the Spirit blows where it will, one must be on the lookout, ready to be surprised by grace. God’s glory is creation and the human community fully alive – enjoying God, each other and the earth. God’s grace is everywhere. Elizabeth Dreyer. Manifestations of Grace. Michael Glazier Inc. 1980. 240. . . . . . . . . . . We praise God not to celebrate our own faith but to give thanks for the faith God has in us. To let ourselves look at God, and let God look back at us. And to laugh, and sing, and be delighted because God has called us his own. Kathleen Norris. Amazing Grace – a Vocabulary of Faith. Riverhead Books NY. 1998. 151.
IS IT "TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE"? GRACE IN THE GOSPELS by Sheila Pritchard “Full of grace and truth” - that’s John’s description of Jesus1. But how on earth did Jesus make them work together? Grace implies generosity, loving kindness and unconditional acceptance. But truth brings a shiver of anxiety as we think of the ugly stuff that is there to be revealed about us. Couldn’t we have grace without the truth? Wouldn’t that be nicer? When I think about how Jesus demonstrated grace, two gospel passages immediately come to mind. One is a story Jesus told and the other is an actual encounter. One has a man as the key character, the other a woman. You’ve probably guessed! Yes, the prodigal son and the woman caught in adultery. If these were the only two scraps of Scripture someone found from a torn up Bible, I venture to say it would be enough! Here is the most marvellous picture of what God is like. Here is the gospel in action. Here is Jesus bringing grace and truth together and leaving the man and the woman feeling loved, freed and set on a new path. Looking at the two stories we might be tempted to think it is too good to be true! That’s the trouble with grace – it is so “over the top” that some part of us finds it hard to believe. We want to tone it down a bit and say, “God will be gracious to me if…” And that’s exactly why we need grace and truth to be in these stories. We need Jesus to show us that the worst truth in the world doesn’t impede grace. In fact grace doesn’t really come into play unless there is some “undeserving truth” somewhere! If we deserved God’s goodness it wouldn’t be a matter of grace! Take the prodigal son for example2. The whole point of Jesus’ story is that the son had done just about everything imaginable to reject his father, waste his inheritance and live in a way that ‘thumbed his nose’ at everything the father would have valued. When he finally crept home humiliated and bedraggled, he probably expected rejection and was prepared to beg for a servant role if it meant food and shelter. If “creeping and begging” describe the way you sometimes approach God, get inside this story! Not a word of rebuke was uttered. The son was not told to clean himself up, shape up or promise to do better from now on. His full apology wasn’t even necessary. He was instantly swept up in the arms of ecstatic love and celebrated like a prince. The truth of his profligate lifestyle was plain for all to see and it was met by the grace of a father who saw only the son he had always loved. At this point you are either overwhelmed with the wonder of this expression of God’s grace or still trying to tone it down a bit with niggling doubts like: “But it’s only a story. Surely in real life it isn’t that good.” Or: “Yes but he did repent. Don’t forget that repentance is the pre-requisite for being offered grace.” If so, hold those questions while we look at the encounter of Jesus with the woman caught in adultery.3 This is real life! Real life in a society that was stringent about living a good moral life according to the law of Moses. Being law-abiding and of good moral standing are values we would affirm in our society today. We too might wish more people kept within those boundaries. Those who wanted to uphold law and morality brought (dragged?) this woman to Jesus. Please note: it wasn’t her initiative! “Sexual immorality has consequences!” they said. “If you, Jesus, are really on God’s side then prove it by meting out the appropriate punishment.” (Death by stoning, no less.) How were grace and truth to come together here? Well you probably know the story as well as I do. Jesus skillfully shifted the focus from the truth of the woman’s sin to the accusers’ own. When they rather shamefacedly withdrew, Jesus had a chance to relate to the woman personally with grace and truth. Grace came first. “Neither do I condemn you,” must have been words in the “too good to be true” category for that woman. The charge against her was accurate. She had been “caught in the act of adultery”. How could she possibly not be condemned? It just didn’t make sense in the world-view of devoted Judaism. And Jesus was a Jewish Rabbi. What’s more, we know, even if she didn’t, that Jesus did not hold back from condemning her because of his own sin. If anyone had the right to condemn Jesus did. So why didn’t he? Because condemnation is the antithesis of grace. There is no room for condemnation in a love that sees to the heart - a love that sees beneath and beyond all our brokenness and shame. When love like that is expressed we call it grace. Jesus loved this woman for who she truly was – a person of dignity and potential. For that reason he didn’t fudge the truth in offering her grace. He knew that if she was to accept this love and let it transform her she had to turn away from all that had demeaned her. “Go now and leave your life of sin” conveyed so much in a few words. It told the woman that Jesus knew her history. It told her that he knew she could begin again from this point of grace and live differently. ‘Sin’ is one of those words that carries so much baggage that this statement of Jesus can sound like a judgemental postscript tacked on to the grace-filled encounter. I don’t think so. I’ve come to think of sin as anything that turns us away from God’s love. From that perspective Jesus was saying: “Go now and leave behind anything that would keep you from experiencing the fullness of grace.” It’s interesting isn’t it that this woman didn’t choose to come to Jesus. She didn’t ask for anything. She didn’t repent and beg for mercy. She unexpectedly encountered the amazing, unbelievably generous grace of Jesus. The truth was not denied or swept under the carpet but in the light of grace she was given the freedom to live a whole new life from this moment on. When grace and truth come together nothing is left hidden – nothing about us and nothing about the way God loves. Jesus makes it abundantly clear that when our truth meets God’s love we are embraced by a grace that takes our breath away. As John says about Jesus: “From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace.”4 All that’s left for us to do is live in the light of it. That of course is the key! God’s grace is poured out for all who will receive it. The gospel accounts don’t tell us what the son or the woman in these stories did when they were “surprised by grace”. But the prodigal’s older brother tells us that not everyone lives in the light of what is freely available. The grace Jesus offers is not “too good to be true” unless we make it so.
1 John 1:14 2 Luke 15:11-32 3 John 8:1-11 4 John 1:16
THE RADICALITY OF GRACE by David Grant Grace – an elusive virtue not at all within our control. Not like its sister, Truth, which can be accumulated, stored, transported, manipulated, managed, and meted out, withheld or distorted, even shaped into weapons of warfare and used to maim another. That is why grace is around, to keep an eye on truth and to stop it becoming hard and unyielding. We need truth, but truth with grace acting as its minder, for a truth run community becomes inhumane and Gospel denying. (The flip side of truth without grace is grace without truth. That would require a different perspective from that addressed in this article. Unruly grace can easily degenerate into the soft, undemanding, undisciplined meanderings of narcissism and self-centredness masquerading as freedom of choice. Grace without the anchor points of truth easily becomes ahistorical, un-storied, un-texted, and we draw only on our own meagre experience of life). Grace – the fundamental dynamic in God’s move toward humankind, the prime colour in the theological spectrum, the controlling metaphor in the range of metaphors available to us as we contemplate God’s character. Of all God’s behaviours toward us, grace is the one we could well learn to mimic. However, it takes insight to recognise it, and it takes a yielding of control to discover its power. The Biblical text contains a rich array of metaphors, which trace the lines of grace; here are three: 1 By a gracious outpouring of love we are called children of God (Hosea 11:1; Isaiah 1:2; John 1:12). We are no longer called orphans being motherless or fatherless (see Deuteronomy 32:18), or slaves with no rights in the household. We are now emancipated with all the freedoms and risky-ness that status brings. Not only that, but the former orphan and the former slave now have siblings and fellow emancipates to enjoy and act responsibly with. 2 Through God’s gracious move we are called friends. That is not a new concept for God – see Isaiah 41:8, where Abraham is counted as a friend of God. Jesus takes on that same hazardous move when he calls all his followers friends (John 15:15), and Jesus places the friendship category in opposition to the slave category, where the slave is always kept in ignorance of the sovereign’s intention. A consequence of being called a friend of Jesus is, we are part of a friendship group where we did not choose the membership (John 15:16). 3 In implementing a surprising employment policy God enlists each follower as a servant (Mark 10:43-44; Isaiah 42:1-4). The Union protocol is that servants do not raise their voice against fellow servants (Isaiah 42:2), nor do they seek ascendancy over their fellows (Mark 10:41ff). Further, employment conditions are in the hands of the firm’s owner, not in the hands of the employees (Matthew 20:1ff). God’s gracious initiatives gift us with the status of child, friend, and servant, and as we take on these three, we recognise certain limitations and freedoms, which we would not have, except for God’s grace. The freedoms are, we are no longer orphans, abandoned, not belonging with no history nor future, but we are children, adopted, chosen, loved, and placed in the care of a supportive parent. We are no longer lonely strangers, unrecognised foreigners, faceless refugees, with no rights or vocabulary of hope, but we are friends, invited to the table, hearing the significant conversations, enjoying the intimate companionship of our fellows. We are no longer independent operators, autonomous individuals where we demand or expect that the world will fulfil our needs, but we are servants who take on the costly task of tending to the hopes of other people. We have no right to be a child, a friend, a servant of the living God; it is all gifted to us. We have no right to parental embrace, or inclusion in the conversation, or employment in God’s counter-revolution for the world; it is all freely granted because of God’s love affair with the world. We could take advantage of that, and some of us do, and all of us do some of the time. But when we do we invite death. God won’t be mocked even by the best of us, and this God is not at our disposal. Ezekiel 36:22ff makes it clear that God will act in life-giving ways, but not because we have earned God’s attention. It is because of God’s own character bias that God comes across with life. Israel may then be shamed into life. One reading of the parable of the dishonest manager (Luke 16:1-9) is that the manager took advantage of the known character of the business owner, who would not act out of character. Best not to push God like that. The limitations of being designated child, friend, servant, are, we no longer generate the initiatives. Such is the nature of grace, that it is generated from beyond us, and we are the recipients of its extraordinary favour. The child is on a journey toward maturity; the friend is becoming the intimate confidant; the servant is given more and more responsibility on their path towards costly, healing humility. We are all on the way, and no one can claim precedence or exclusive truth. Self-impressed people violate the protocols of grace by treating fellow travellers, fellow human beings, as though they were disenfranchised orphans, alien strangers, or disobedient disconnected individuals. Grace-bearers will dismantle the claims of pre-eminence both for themselves, and for the fellowship to which they belong. So how would a community of grace bearers act? My guess is by mimicking the graciousness of God that brought it into being. That means adopting a stance of generous giving. Since most issues end up on a chosen bottom line of economics, let’s start there. A friend of mine – a minister – has argued successfully with his Session that if anyone asks for the use of the Church or Church property, they get it for free. He calls it a grace model of being. He has discovered that the ‘no strings attached’ approach evokes a generosity, which out-gives paying customers. They are not customers; they are friends. He extends the grace model into his own personal life – no fees for anything he might offer to people who walk through the door. Someone talked once about it being better to give rather than receive (Acts 20:35). The grace model goes far beyond economics. Most of our fellowships are embroiled in an ‘us versus them’ on a number of issues, in direct violation of the protocols of grace. Truth, respectable as it is, becomes the armoury and the ammunition to fight the war, so much so that truth is getting a bad name in the common conversation of the nation, a conversation characterised by contention, discord, and dissent. The refreshing humility of servant hood, the healing tenderness of friendship, and the nurturing strength of sisterhood/brotherhood is lost in the conversation, and lost to all of us who seek to be faithful to the Christ who calls us. We become lost indeed. So what might we do? Mute the loud clamour, and give away the quest for control, the central temptation at the core of every one of us. Let conservatives be conservatives and liberals be liberals, orthodox be orthodox, evangelicals be evangelicals, charismatics be charismatics, and each give generous blessing to the other in their quest for faithful obedience. And if there are any other camps, let them be generous too, and loosen their tent pegs so that each one’s vision is expanded. The protocols of grace invite us to relinquish control, and invite us to live the life of the maturing child along with other children, to become the intimate confidant with God and all God’s creatures, and to practise being the obedient servant who has the nerve to pay the cost of healing humility. Easter 2 2005 The seminal idea of the metaphors of child, friend, and servant come from Walter Brueggemann in a chapter in Interpretation and Obedience – From Faithful Reading to Faithful Living, Fortress Press, 1991. The chapter (pp 161-183) is titled ‘The Transformative Agenda of the Pastoral Office’.
GRACE AND ITS EXPECTATIONS: OFFERING UP OUR CRUMPLED 'AMEN' by Murray Rae The nineteenth century Danish theologian Søren Kierkegaard spent much of his life lamenting the fact that his contemporaries had failed to understand the nature of God’s grace. Luther has taught us about grace, Kierkegaard said, but ‘the world is like a drunken peasant; if you help him up on one side of the horse, he falls off the other side.’1 Kierkegaard’s complaint was that his contemporaries had forgotten the need for works. Luther did not need to mention works, for his life expressed them, but now we have forgotten the demands, we have forgotten that our lives should be different as a result of God’s grace. So thought Søren Kierkegaard—and with good biblical reason. For the Bible makes clear again and again, that God’s grace calls us forth to new life. In Matthew18: 23-35, for instance, Jesus tells a story about a king who wished to settle the debts owed to him by his slaves. There was one slave who owed ten thousand talents (about fifteen year’s wages) and who had no chance of repaying the debt. As Jesus tells the story, the king responded to the slave’s anguished plea for mercy by cancelling the debt. That same slave went out, however, came upon one of his fellow slaves who owed him 100 denarii (one day’s wage), seized him by the throat and demanded that he pay. It was not that the slave was violating some rule, indeed the law was on his side—debts ought to be repaid, says the law—but he failed to see how life should be different in the light of the freedom that had been granted to him. Jesus concludes his story by urging his hearers to forgive one another from their hearts. That’s not a new law, nor is it something that ought to be done in order to earn God’s favour; it’s just a description of what new life looks like in the light of God’s grace. As for the one who had been forgiven his debts, when his master heard what had happened, he handed him over to be tortured until his entire debt had been repaid. That should not be construed as the undoing of grace. The parable simply makes clear that in refusing to act in the light of grace, the unforgiving slave is plunged back into captivity, back into that life of bondage from which he had been set free. Grace expects something of us; and what it expects is precisely what it also enables—new life! It remains for us only to let go of the old. The pattern of new life following grace is manifest also in the ten commandments, though I much prefer the Jewish description—the Decalogue, or the ‘ten words’. For there are not ten commands; there are ten words,2 and the first is the word of grace: ‘I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery’ (Exodus 20:2). That is the news of grace. God has delivered his people from bondage and set them free for new life in the land that he has provided (cf. Deuteronomy 6: 20-25). What follows then, in the remaining nine words, is a description of what that new life will look like. You shall have no other gods before me; you shall not build any idols; you shall not abuse God’s name, you shall keep the Sabbath holy, and so on... Of course! What else should we expect of the people whom God has set free? Their alternative is to live in captivity to idols once more, to abuse the one who is their deliverer, to refuse the Sabbath rest that he gives them, and to plunge themselves into bondage once more. But grace has made possible a new life. Why should they return to the old? And yet they do! The motley crowd who straggled out of Egypt turned to grumbling when the milk and honey didn’t flow straight away (Exodus 16:2). Freedom, the kind of freedom granted by God’s grace, involves a long faithfulness, but the people delivered from bondage got tired of that freedom just six weeks in. And pretty soon after that, they were back to their idols again (Exodus 32). This is not only Israel’s story. It’s our story too. We struggle with God’s grace because the new life it enables is the hard option; it is a life in which grudges are not borne and revenge is not sought. It is a life of gratitude and praise rather than of grumbling. It is a life lived after the pattern of God’s beloved son. Most of us walk falteringly on that road, hesitant to trust the grace that has delivered us from bondage and that promises abundant life in its place. And so we walk uncertainly; we stumble; we look back over our shoulders at the old life left behind and wonder whether there is not a more secure life to be had back in the land of Egypt. Why that should be is not clear; there is an inexplicability about it, that in the light of God’s grace we should prefer the darkness and turn back from a life made new. But often enough, indeed too often, we do just that! God, however, has made provision for our failing. ‘My grace is sufficient for you,’ God says, ‘my power is made perfect in weakness’ (2 Corinthians 12:9). The requirement has been met! Not in our own strength shall we be able to live the new life, but in the strength of God’s grace. It is through the nudging and enabling, the comforting and the prompting of God’s Spirit who comes as gently as a dove, that we human beings, beloved of God, are restored again and again to new life. Any talk of finding favour with God, therefore, any talk of strings being attached to God’s grace is a refusal to hear that grace is sufficient. It plunges us back into bondage and fails to recognise that God has set us free. Equally, however, any talk of sinning all the more that grace may abound (Romans 6:1), and any refusal of the new life to which God calls us is a failure to hear what grace is for—precisely, new life in reconciled relation with God and with our neighbour. Refusal of this new life, manifest in the work that we do, is what Kierkegaard complained of. He complained of a failure to hear what grace is for; he complained that life for his contemporaries—from whose company he did not exclude himself—went on just as it was before. Revenge was still sought, grudges were still born, and, for all the talk of grace, it was as if the saviour had never lived. Kierkegaard did not expect perfection, but he expected honesty. He expected an honest admission that grace demands something of us, and he expected repentance in the face of our failure to meet that demand. Kierkegaard’s own life is nicely captured in a poem by R.S. Thomas who, acknowledging Kierkegaard’s suffering, writes,
Offering up ‘his crumpled amen’ is an epitaph of which Kierkegaard himself would approve, I think, and it describes well our human response to the grace of God. There is an inadequacy about all that we human beings may offer to God, and yet our response is accepted, nonetheless. The ‘Amen’, therefore, signifies a grateful assent—assent to God, assent to his forgiveness, assent to his acceptance of us whatever form our own crumpledness takes. And finally, the ‘Amen’ is our word of recognition that the immeasurable grace of God ‘demands my soul, my life, my all’.4
1 Søren Kierkegaard, For Self-Examination and Judge for Yourself! Ed and trans Howard V. Hong & Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990) p.24. 2 The church has made various attempts to find ten commands in the remaining nine ‘words’, most commonly by dividing the last command into two so that coveting one’s neighbour’s house is a distinct command, followed by another against coveting wives, slaves, animals etc., That seems unduly contrived, however. We do better, I think, to recognise that we are given ten words and only nine of them are commands. 3 R.S.Thomas, ‘Kierkegaard ’ in Selected Poems1946-1968 (Newcastle Upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 1986) 86. 4 Isaac Watts, ‘When I Survey the Wondrous Cross
RAHNER'S THEOLOGY OF GRACE by Mark F. Fischer An old friend and colleague, a seminary professor, said Mass in my parish on Trinity Sunday. He announced to the congregation that he was celebrating the 45th anniversary of his ordination. I was surprised and delighted to see him, because he preaches simply and deeply. My friend proclaimed the gospel from St. John, “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish, but have eternal life.” As he stepped down from the ambo to give the homily, I began to worry. The passage from St. John can mean many things. How would my friend interpret it? • Would he present God as acting from the outside on humanity’s behalf? • Would he interpret the gift of the Son in terms of God’s condescension? • My friend began his homily and these fears crowded my mind. Let me explain how they arose. Uncreated Grace For many years I have studied the theology of Karl Rahner, the German Jesuit who died in 1984. In 1976, he published his most comprehensive and systematic work, entitled Foundations of Christian Faith. In the book, Rahner treats the theology of grace in ways that might surprise a traditional Catholic. A traditional Catholic (raised, for example, under the influence of books like Father Ludwig Ott’s 1952 Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma) understood grace as God’s free gift. It is sanctifying and actual. Sanctifying grace is a constant quality of the soul that makes it pleasing to God. Actual grace is a temporary intervention by God which stirs us up to attain or preserve grace. In both, grace is something created by God. It is distinct from God’s own life. Rahner affirmed this traditional teaching but placed it in a deeper context. He reminded the Catholic world that, distinct from these created graces (sanctifying and actual), there is an uncreated grace. Such uncreated grace is none other than the true God, the God who exists from all eternity. In the act of creating graces, God communicates something more primordial – the divine life itself. This teaching is not new. The Church has always taught about uncreated grace. It speaks, for example, about the incarnation of the divine Word, about the God who dwells in the souls of the just, and about the beatific vision. Before Rahner, however, Catholics often overlooked uncreated grace. They focused on the created graces we call sanctifying and actual, more so than on God’s very life. Created graces are gifts of God, but they are not the divine giver. When I heard the words, “God so loved the world,” I fretted about how my friend would interpret them in his Trinity Sunday homily. Would he present the salvation of the world as something that God did on humanity’s behalf from the outside? Or would he show how God gave the divine life itself to human beings? The Gift of the Son By focusing on created graces, traditional Catholics tended to see the immense chasm between themselves and God. To them, God seemed timeless, awesome, and remote. To be sure, divinity could still touch humanity. But the Church usually understood this touch in images akin to Michelangelo’s creation of Adam on the Sistine Chapel Ceiling. God touched humanity by creating something that was not God. This is not, however, the full story. God gives – not just created things – but the divine life itself. The greatest instance of this is the incarnation of the divine Word in Jesus Christ. Theology speaks of the hypostatic union of two natures, of divinity fused with humanity. Today we would say that God did not just send an embassy to human beings. In Jesus Christ, the divine and the human were united. Catholics have traditionally understood this unity as a once-and-for-all achievement. In the language of Philippians, they emphasized the condescension of God, who “emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in human likeness.” In short, they tended to view Jesus Christ as a divine person, paying relatively little attention to his humanity. Christ was the one who acted on our behalf, more so than the one who stood with us in the solidarity of human nature. For Karl Rahner, however, an emphasis on the divine condescension will not suffice. Such a narrow focus tends to mute something that Christians ought to broadly proclaim, namely, the humanity of Jesus. In Jesus Christ, human nature was wholly united with God. Christ was not just the instrument through whom God worked. He was the one who realized union with God as the true destiny of human beings. Knowing this gave rise to my second anxiety on Trinity Sunday. I feared that my friend (expounding how God so loved the world) might overemphasize God’s condescension. I feared that he might neglect the humanity of Jesus. Faith as Life with God My third anxiety was about belief. Whoever believes in the Son shall not perish, says the gospel, but have eternal life. Traditional Catholics have understood belief in terms of faith. It is a theological virtue, infused at Baptism. For the traditional Catholic, faith refers to the habit of belief in the incomprehensible God, a God known by revelation, not by reason. This kind of theology poses a double threat to today’s Christian. First of all, it seems to identify revelation with an official body of Church teaching. God is revealed (so this theology goes) in an explicit deposit, i.e., the facts of salvation history. Second, faith can become mere assent to these facts. Believers accept them on the authority of the Church. Faith shrinks into a body of teaching that believers profess. The danger of this theological understanding, as Rahner pointed out, is its distortion of the very nature of revelation and faith. Under its influence, revelation can come to seem nothing more than facts, facts about God’s life in salvation history. Faith can seem to be merely a correct understanding of them. Rahner taught that faith is more than an assent to the official teachings of Catholic Christianity. It is a relationship with God. God reveals the divine self by constantly offering people choices about their lives. The Church is the sacrament, the effective sign of Christ that helps people understand God’s presence in the choices they make. They choose by hearing and obeying God, or by deafening themselves and disobeying. So what is belief today? On Trinity Sunday, I listened to the gospel affirm that whoever believes in the Son should not perish. I worried about how my friend would interpret this. Is belief merely assent to teachings about the incarnate Word? Or is it also an attentive listening to the Word who speaks in every human decision? God So Loved the World My friend began his homily. I knew that he was going to address the greatest mysteries of God and the Church. I worried about how he would present the incarnation that I cherished in Rahnerian terms. It was the decisive moment when God’s uncreated life became a human gift. It was the actualization of our destiny, when human nature would be united with God’s own. It was the consummation of a relationship between believers and the God who is present to them in their every decision. What would my friend say? “The most important words in this passage,” he said, “are the words, ‘God so loved the world.’” In this one assertion, my friend leapt over the obstacles that I feared might trip him up. He cut to the heart of the gospel and the celebration of the Trinity. That heart is grace of a loving God who reconciles human beings to the divine life by sharing that life with them.
GRACE IN JUDAISM by JoEllen Duckor We don’t really have a concept of Grace in Judaism. It is more of a character trait. It is one of the attributes of God. In our prayers for peace we ask for: chen, v’chesed,v’rachamim grace and love and mercy to descend upon us. So, I looked up Chen in the Lexicon. The Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew and English Lexicon describes Chen as “favour, grace, elegance, form, appearance, acceptance, beauty.” It is an inner glow, an inner beauty. The Lexicon says the first mention of Chen in the Torah is Genesis chapter 6 verse 8: “And Noah found chen favour/grace in Gods eyes.” Noah found grace. In Hebrew this reads: Noah matza Chen. Noah is spelled Nun Chet. (N, CH) Chen is spelled Chet Nun. (CH, N) Noah and Chen form a palindrome. What is this relationship between Noah and the grace with which God sees him? God regrets that he made humanity. He should not have created the world and He should definitely not have entrusted its fate to a creature such as a human being. He will blot out all the creatures of creation. This is actually the undoing of creation. Everything will be erased. All that lives will cease to live. Then abruptly the story takes a sharp turn: without any warning, UNEXPECTEDLY, ve noah matza chen beeinei adonoy. And Noah found grace in the eyes of God. How did Noah instantly become chosen by God? Noah is chosen because he finds favour in God’s eyes. He is saved because of the grace of God. He is beautiful to God. Perhaps because chen first appears in the Torah juxtaposed with its opposite, Noach, chen represents balance and symmetry. God sees in Noah that aspect of beauty which expresses itself as a graceful symmetry. The Talmud tells us that “Noah had a death sentence sealed against him. But he found favour in the eyes of God” (Sanhedrin 108a) Noah is no different from those who are doomed. He is included in God’s regret. It is God’s grace that changes Noah into Chen. Blu Greenberg says that God chooses Noah not because he has achieved significant wisdom or virtue, but because God seeks to convey to SOMEONE, the knowledge of Himself. She says that the story of Noah is a story about the transformation of the relationship between God and humanity. At first, God destroys, then perhaps out of a sense of loss and love, God promises to accept human beings with all of our flaws, and promises never to destroy them again. Perhaps God learns grace from us.
THE GRACE OF GOD IN ISLAMIC THINKING by Ahmed Zaoui Grace is central to our relationship to God and with each other, and touches every aspect of our daily lives. The grace of God is the core of any religion, and I am honoured to accept this invitation to discuss the grace of God in Islamic thinking. The topic is especially dear to my heart. To explain why, let me share a personal experience. While I was in Belgium, I used to converse with a priest who showed great regard for Islam. Once, he told me that when he saw Muslims praying and prostrating to God, he felt great respect for the way Muslims love God. I used to have gentle arguments with him about theological matters. One day, we talked about love and religion. He said to me that Islam, unlike Christianity, does not have a developed concept of love. I replied to him with an anecdote. I asked him, when you enjoy a dinner, what do you say? He said “J’aime manger”. Suppose a man wanted to say he loved his wife? He said, “J’aime ma femme”. And if you want to say you love God? “J’aime Dieu”. I then replied to him that in Arabic, there are eighty-four different words for love, and each has an appropriate usage - for example, a love of nature, towards family, or friends. Some words are so deep and emotional that they can only be used in reference to God. Love, grace, and mercy are central to Islamic discourse. Islam comes from salam which means peace and love. The familiar greeting salam aleikum illustrates the concern of Islam to spread this message of peace. It is said in the Koran that the mission of the Prophet Mohammed was to spread mercy, not just among believers but to all humanity. The Koran says “ …and we have not sent you (O Mohammed ), except as a mercy to the worlds” (21:107). The God that Muslims worship is a God for all humanity, not just for Muslims. There is no concept of ‘our God’, but rather the God of all. Every verse of the Koran starts with the description of God as “the most gracious, the most merciful”. In every act that a Muslim does in life, whether eating, or entering a home, he or she says bismillah rahman rahim - in the name of God, the most gracious, the most merciful. The closest Arabic translation for grace is al’rahman, a great mercy, but there are many other synonyms which are used in different contexts; for example al’madad (providing generously for need without reward), al’ghaouth (relief from suffering or hardship), al’manam (providing bountifully), among others. There are also numerous names for God in Islam, each of which reflects a particular aspect of His grace. For example, God is called al’hannan, meaning the loving and warm-hearted. In Islam, the grace of God is manifested in many ways. God’s grace is manifested in his gifts to humanity. God is described as al’atte, He who gives, which derives from the verb atta, to give. God created the universe – in its precision, balance, and harmony - and the created humanity. The Prophet said, as did Jesus, that human beings were created in God’s image. Man, being created in God’s image, is provided for by God’s grace in his creation and surroundings. “It is He who sends down rain from the sky; from it you drink and out of it (grows) the vegetation from which you feed your cattle. With it He causes to grow for you the crops, olives, palm trees, grapevines, and all the fruits. Indeed in that is a sign for thinking people. And He has subjected the night and day to his will for you, and the sun and moon, and the stars also. Indeed, in that are signs for people who reason” (16:10-12). God’s grace is also apparent in compassion between human beings and care for the natural environment. Islam calls for a positive engagement with the universe by not causing harm. The Koran commands humanity “…and cause not corruption upon the earth after it’s formation and invoke Him in fear and inspiration, indeed the mercy of Allah comes to the doers of kind deeds” (7:56). The Koran also says “ ... do good as Allah has done good to you, and desire not corruption in the land. Indeed, Allah does not like corrupters” (28:77). Harmony with the universe and harmony between people is a gift from God. As the Prophet says, one must protect this gift by removing obstacles one comes across that could impede others who come along the same path later. Another saying of the Prophet is that Allah created mercy in one hundred parts, and He retained with Him ninety-nine parts and sent down to the earth one part, from which emanates the compassion and mercy that all of creation exercises towards one another, so much so that an animal lifts its hoof over its young lest it should hurt it. Islam emphasises that the whole of humanity, created as it was from a single soul, suffers if one human being suffers. As well as compassion towards other human beings, Islam teaches us to be compassionate to animals in not cursing, beating, or unnecessarily burdening them. To illustrate, the Prophet instructs us not to use animals that we ride for travel as chairs to sit on when we stop! Similarly, hunting for sport, and the killing of pregnant animals, is prohibited in Islam. God also bestows grace by emphasising moderation in the practice of Islam. The Koran advocates ‘easiness’ in religious practice. “... Allah intends every facility for you; He does not want to put you to difficulties” (2:185). In Islam, exceptions can be made to religious edicts if circumstances require. For example, a Muslim is prohibited from drinking alcohol, but if he is stuck in the desert and the only drink available is alcoholic, it is his duty to drink it because the preservation of human life takes precedence over observing religious rules. One of the most significant manifestation of God’s grace is in the redemption of sins. The Koran says “Despair not of the Mercy of Allah: verily, Allah forgives all sins. Truly, He is Oft-Forgiving, Most Merciful” (39: 53). “And My Mercy embraces all things” (7:156). God is also called al’ghafur, the pardoner. With repentance, one’s bad intentions can be forgiven, and if those intentions were not carried out this can weigh strongly in one’s favour. Mohammed taught us this about the generosity of God’s grace, explaining that “He who intends to do an evil act and has not done it, then Allah records it for Himself as a full good deed.” At this point, I would like to make an observation about the redemption of sins in Islam which may be of interest to readers from other religions. In Islam, if one sins against God, one can seek forgiveness through prayer and be redeemed, no matter how grave the sin or how many times it is repeated. As well as that, if one sins against another but is forgiven by him, the transgressor is absolved of his sin without the involvement of God. This is because, in Islam, absolution is a right of human beings. It is not exclusively the right of God. Thus Islam actively encourages people to show mercy and resolve disputes between themselves. Islam focuses on good deeds rather than prayers alone. It is stated many times in the Koran that God does not need our worship, for God is free of need. Worship is not important for its own sake, but for encouraging good deeds and harmonious relationships. In fact, in Islam, the term ‘worship’ (al ibadah) includes much of what people do in their daily lives - all the little, ordinary things they do ‘in the name of God’. Elsewhere, it is said that Mohammed taught his followers that the believer who gets to know other people and is supportive of them is most beloved of others: “all mankind is the family of Allah, but the person who is loved most by God is he who does good for mankind.” Similarly, an outward appearance of regular worship and piety in which one is however merely going through the motions, is not enough. In the account that is kept of every person’s life, any evil deeds far outweigh paying lip service to worship. The Prophet once repeated thrice “By Allah, he is not a believer!”. When asked who that was, he replied “one whose neighbour does not feel safe from his evil”, a clear illustration that pious observance of religious rules may be wholly undermined by sinful deeds. The Prophet, in discussing a Muslim’s obligation to fast during Ramadan, said that “If one does not eschew lies and false conduct, Allah has no need that he should abstain from his food and his drink”. I would like to close by posing two questions, which I have tried to address in part. Firstly, how do we become entitled to God’s redemption? By faith, by good deeds, or by a combination of the two? Secondly, in our daily lives, how do we spread God’s grace, which all religions, including Islam, recognise and celebrate? My experiences in New Zealand have taught me many lessons, one of which I would like to share. I discovered that the Maori word for God, atua, meaning Giver, is very similar to one of the descriptions of God in Islam, al’atte, which bears the same meaning. Perhaps in the same way that words have flown around the world to enable us to find commonalities in the language of grace between a peaceful country in the South Pacific and the conflict-ravaged Middle East, God’s grace can be spread among peoples through compassion and tolerance. God’s grace is not limited, for God is unlimited and eternal. Nor is God’s grace limited to the pious. God’s grace is for all those who would weep for their fellow man. To illustrate that last point, I would like to end with a moving story. On seeing his grandson dying, the Prophet began to cry. One of his followers asked why he, as the Prophet, should cry. The Prophet replied, “It is compassion which Allah has placed in the hearts of his servants. Allah bestows His mercy on the merciful among his servants.”
“Costly grace” is the title of the opening chapter of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s book Nachfolge, in English The Cost of Discipleship. Translated into English in 1937 and published in 1949 it was quickly recognised as an important counter to cheap grace offered by state aligned churches such as his own Lutheran Church in Germany. Bonhoffer’s commitment to costly grace as a disciple of Jesus in Nazi Germany saw him join the movement to assassinate Hitler, for which he was hung in Flossenberg jail a few weeks before the end of the Second World War. Here’s what he wrote about cheap and costly grace: “Cheap grace is the deadly enemy of the Church. We are fighting today for costly grace. Cheap grace means grace sold on the market like cheapjacks’ wares. The sacraments, the forgiveness of sin, and the consolations of religion are thrown away at cut prices. Grace is represented as the Church’s inexhaustible treasury, from which she showers blessings with generous hands, without asking questions or fixing limits. Grace without price; grace without cost! … Cheap grace means grace as a doctrine, a principle, a system. It means forgiveness of sins proclaimed as general truth, the love of God taught as the Christian “conception” of God. … Cheap grace means the justification of sin without the justification of the sinner. Grace alone does everything, they say, and so everything can remain as it was. … Instead of following Christ, let the Christian enjoy the consolations of his grace! That is what we mean by cheap grace … Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession, absolution without personal confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate. Costly grace is the treasure hidden in the field; … It is the pearl of great price to buy which the merchant will sell all his goods. … it is the call of Jesus Christ at which the disciple leaves his nets and follows him. Costly grace is the gospel which must be sought again and again, the gift which must be asked for, the door at which a man must knock. Such grace is costly because it calls us to follow, and it is grace because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ. It is costly because it costs a man his life, and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life. It is costly because it condemns sin, grace because it justifies the sinner. Above all it is costly because it cost God the life of his Son: “ye were bought with a price,” and what has cost God much cannot be cheap for us. Above all, it is grace because God did not reckon his Son too dear a price to pay for our life, but delivered him up for us. Costly grace is the Incarnation of God. … … it is grace because Jesus says, ‘My yoke is easy and my burden is light.’” The Cost of Discipleship. MacMillan Publishing.1963. Selections from pp45-48.
LOOKING AFTER GRACE by Jeannie Cochrane Last year I had a personally significant dream in which I was given three children to look after. The children all had names, and as part of working with the dream I did some investigating to find out what the names meant. I was amazed to discover that all three children had names whose meanings were very relevant in terms of where I was in my journey with God at that time. One of these children was Grace. My Oxford Children’s Dictionary (very useful when you want a simple and straightforward definition!) lists one of the meanings of grace as “God’s loving mercy.” In turn, mercy is defined as “kindness and forgiveness towards someone you have the power to hurt or punish.” I began to contemplate what it might mean for me to “look after Grace.” The grace of God is something that has become more talked about in recent years with books such as Philip Yancey’s What’s So Amazing About Grace helping to bring this into focus. I have personally had some occasions when I have become particularly aware of God’s grace towards me and have soaked in that experience. These have been special times! Yes, God’s grace is amazing, but how does it work in the midst of my ordinary everyday life? Since having the dream I have become more aware of the times when I am hurting or punishing myself, not physically but by the thoughts I think, the negative self talk that goes on inside of my head. This is where I have found “looking after Grace” to be particularly significant. At those times I have the opportunity to take God’s grace and apply it to myself. For example, recently my husband John and I had a few days camping in the Kauaeranga Valley, near Thames. While there we did the tramp to the Pinnacles Hut which our tramping book indicated would take anywhere from two and a half to four hours one way. Now I enjoy tramping, but I only began a regular exercise programme four years ago and while I am much fitter than I used to be, I am still on the slow side comparatively. Because of this it took us five hours to get to the hut - including a number of stops while I caught my breath after climbing up yet another set of steps cut into the rock! Later that evening some younger people arrived at the hut and they had come from the car park to the top in just two hours! I began to hear my self talk: “You are so slow, you took even longer than the slowest time in the book, you held John up - he could go much faster on his own, you don’t do very well at this do you; maybe you should just give it up…” Yes, I definitely have the power to hurt and punish myself! But then above this noisy internal monologue I remembered I have been given Grace to look after! Now another level of self talk was available to me, involving words of kindness and forgiveness …” That was quite a challenging walk with so much of it uphill while carrying an overnight pack on my back, so I did really well to get here; it doesn’t matter how long it takes me, the important thing is to be out there and participating. John has told me he is quite happy to go at my pace so I choose to believe and accept that.” From this perspective I found myself free to acknowledge how refreshing and invigorating this walk had been and I felt thankful for the level of health and fitness that I do have, which makes participation in such outdoor activities a possibility for me. This is but one example of a number of occasions since having the dream where I have caught myself in negative self talk and I am learning to “look after Grace” at such times. The outcome when I do is always a move towards embracing more of the “life in all its fullness” which Jesus said he came to give us. Equally I can see that if I fail to “look after Grace” the result is likely to be an increasing withdrawal from engaging more fully with life and ultimately with God. The grace of God is an amazing gift. But unless I take steps to allow this kindness and forgiveness to affect the way I treat myself in my ordinary, everyday life it is somewhat like opening a gift from a friend and then admiring it from afar as it sits unused on a shelf. I want to continue to learn to “look after Grace” and consequently to live more fully the life that Jesus came to give me.
GRACE AND CONTEMPLATION by Andrew Dunn Antarctica is an overwhelming place. I was there in March, along the north eastern edge of the Antarctic Peninsula. My life-long interest in the great southern continent did little to prepare me for the reality of being there. We flew from Auckland to Buenos Aires and then down to Ushaia on the island of Tierra del Fuego and sailed across the Drake Passage in a Russian oceanographic research ship, the Akademik Ioffe. It was a comfortable and well-catered ship. Landfall was shortly after dawn on the third morning. We spent the days travelling from landing site to landing site, often penguin and seal colonies, or cruising around glacier edged bays and islands in zodiacs photographing icebergs, wild life, and the mountains of Antarctica. Some of the party slept out on a snow covered icy slope one night – in 10 below sleeping bags and bivvy sacks! I was overwhelmed by the size of everything, the extent of it, the beauty, the starkness and the awesome silence. I had never heard no sound till then! I realised after a couple of days that my sense of overwhelm came from my attempts to encompass it all, to photograph it all, to understand it all in a cerebral way – and I couldn’t. It was like an overload of the mind. I decided to set aside my need to get my head around it all and to switch on my contemplative faculty and see what happened. What a revelation! Entering it all with an open expectancy, delighting in the simple things (being there, stepping on to Antarctica each day, sitting with penguins, trusting our zodiac drivers to take us out and back safely each trip, enjoying the company, the exquisite play of light and shadow on ice and water) turned my difficulties into “wonder, love and praise”. They opened me to it all and it to me in a fresh way. I could be part of it and enjoy it for what it is, as it is and let it wash all over me and into me. It was like the time at Teschemakers (on Taipo Hill at sunset) when I discovered I was a participant in the universe rather than an observer of it. That cosmological shift altered my stance to life and creation and I needed to recover it out there among the sea ice and bergy bits at –4 degrees. What a change that shift made! I had a whale of a time, not least among the humpbacks and minkes, the seals and penguins, and all the birds. Even the “God spots”1, where the burst of sunlight through holes in the clouds lit up patches of sea ice or whatever they hit, took on special significance that left many of us gobsmacked. Signs of grace abounded for those with eyes and hearts to see them. Rowan Williams writes of “… the sober acknowledgement that we must let go of the control of conceptual analysis when we are touched by God and advance to a stage beyond the life of conscious ‘natural’ ability, closed in upon itself”2. Bingo! He’s talking about what happens when we meet God for the first time (and anytime later) and begin to do theology. Theology begins, he says, “in a kind of a shock to, a paralysing of, the intellect – not by propositions that offend the intellect, but by an encounter with what cannot be mastered…”3 Wow – has he been to Antarctica? We must come to this task recognising that we’re into deeper real things than we realise. It’s not about getting our heads around it; we can’t. It’s not simply about how nice our feelings and reactions are to an experience. Rather, we’re taken into deeper water than the intellect can measure; we’re drawn further along than our words can describe. We’re taken into the territory where words, ideas and images aren’t adequate to describe this place, these experiences. My comment above that I had never heard no sound until this trip is important here. The absence of sound in Antarctica is real, creating absolute silence. The total absence of sound on a calm day is stunning to those whose days are full of sound, and that’s most of us. For me it’s an illustration of the beginning of the apophatic, the deep truth that God can’t be fully known or described by any of our senses and that sometimes it’s better to say it’s not like this or that. For some, the longer we are in The Way the more we describe our faith like that. Yet the depth of the silence also has the affect of an acute sense of presence. So also in spirituality. Contemplating grace, as we’re discussing it here, opens us not only to switching off the analytical and switching on the contemplative faculty. It also moves us further along the pathway of discovery (some would say “illumination”). We begin to realise that we are being taken out of our normal ways of knowing God and grace to ways that are more silent, less cerebral, more empty of clutter, richer in relationship, and fuller into the love of the Trinity. I don’t like the notion of levels or heights or planes of spirituality because they suggest attainment. I prefer to talk about “further along” and “further into” as better depicting God’s gracious leading. Thus “moving further into” finds there is no end to the length and breadth and height and depth of the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. Williams also makes the cryptic point that this is not about individualistic experience but about how it is for all who travel this way. It’s not about me and mine but about us and ours (my words, not his). This is Body of Christ experience. It ought not to surprise us, therefore, when we meet people who are touching into apophaticality. They sense that things are changing from how they were when they first believed, or from the time of the big blessing, insight, experience. Favourite Scriptures go cold or empty. Worship can become tasteless. God moves away. The Spirit isn’t so readily turned on. What a relief to know that’s normal in the Christian life. Yet how few expect it and fewer teach it! For those of us who are spiritual directors and pastors (in the shepherding the flock sense) we can develop a scent for this stuff and become very useful in helping folk to explore the movements that are on. Moreover, we need to go there deeply ourselves. I wonder what all this means for our discoveries in Scripture, our use of the Sacraments as means of grace, our growing sense that there’s more mystery about than we realised, being disciples of Jesus in our patches and witnesses to him, of being the Church, of relating to this harsh world in which we live? Grace and contemplation go hand in hand. Grace’s hand draws the contemplative further along and further into the depths and mystery of God in all the many ways that catch our attention and imagination. Contemplation is the faculty that enables us to see and experience something of the wonders of grace. And we don’t have to go to Antarctica for that! But it helps.
1 Comment of John Rodstedt, the professional photographer on the expedition who helped us sharpen up our photography. 2 Rowan Williams, “Eastern Orthodox Theology”, in David F. Ford (ed.), The Modern Theologians. Blackwell 1989. Vol. 2. 153 3 ibid.
THE TREE, THE WATERFALL AND THE TRAMPOLINE: BEYOND PERSONAL IMAGES OF GOD by Adrienne Thompson ‘So you’re interested in theology.’ That was the response of a young man when I told him I was about to write an article about the images and language we use to describe God. My strong reaction: No. This is about experience. Not thinking about God, but reflecting on some of the ways it feels like to be with God. This isn’t theology, but it is, I believe, the earth in which theology grows. It seems that metaphor and simile are as natural a part of human language as sounds and syllables. We have no way of describing our experience of God (or any other invisible relationship) except by saying ‘it was like ….’ I recall a description in a novel. The hero is telling his friend about his bride: “…she is like a quiet and beautiful room where one can take refuge from noise and storms and ugliness, and sit back and feel peaceful and happy and completely content: a room that will always be there and always be the same.”1 Like a beautiful room, like a red, red rose, like a sleepy blue ocean, like a melody sweetly played …the poets and singers describe their beloved and we lovers of God find images and metaphors for our experiences. I grew up with the traditional loved and familiar images of God: Father, Shepherd, King, Friend. I well remember a moment in my teenage years in which my inner sense of loneliness and sadness was met by a warm, loving presence which the name of Father seemed perfectly to describe. At different times the other words fit well with what I experienced. God my friend, with whom I shared the details of my day; God my King who required my loyalty and obedience; God my Shepherd who protected and nurtured me – perhaps this image came nearest to anything approaching a feminine image of God. (Certainly the Good Shepherd of my imagination always wore a long dress, had long wavy hair, and cuddled little lambs.) At the same time, alongside the traditional names and images I had for God I was starting to recognise other pictures that somehow went with my experiences of God. Many of them were (and are) places. For example, a moment of quiet awe in worship ‘translated’ for me into a mental picture of white stones and a waterfall. The picture, like the experience, was drenched with God-ness but no human figure came into it. God my light has been a dominant theme of my life. As a very little girl I ran away from home (I didn’t want to go shopping.) After running down hill into the forest for a long time I decided I must be lost. I remember sitting down on a stone under the immensely tall trees, warmed by the sun, looking up and up through leaves and branches to deep blue sky. I can’t remember if I prayed for help – but I was filled with the tranquil certainty that someone would come and find me if I waited. Ever since then my sense of God’s providence has looked like the leafy pattern of shadow and sunshine that day, and sounded like the growth-filled silence of a great forest. I remember a time when my spirit hurt all over – as if all the skin had been grated off me. I tried to seek for God’s comfort but in images of Father or Lord I found only sternness and blame on this occasion. At a meeting I sat behind a woman who was holding a child over her shoulder. The little girl, three or four months old, looked at me and smiled. My misery, my depth of guilt and failure, meant nothing to that little baby. For me the trustful, joyful smile of a baby became my way back to a sense of being accepted by God. A grown-up mother or father couldn’t reach me. A baby could. Such images of God are not crafted to make a theological point but grow directly out of experience. Sometimes I later discover that Scripture or the saints have long ago used a similar metaphor. A baby, a stream, sunlight – all these images can be found in Scripture if I look for them. But some of the images that have delighted me are uniquely mine. Walking home, humming a song under my breath without really attending to the words, I came to the line His steadfast love reaches to the heavens and his faithfulness to the clouds. I looked up to a cloud-filled Wellington sky, and remembered suddenly how as a little girl I imagined the puffy clouds to be as bouncy as a springy bed. I felt myself bouncing on the love of God, free and joyful as a child on a trampoline, utterly safe to leap in any direction I choose because there’s not the smallest chance of falling off. God as trampoline. Some people might challenge that image on the grounds of irreverence. Are all and any images acceptable? I think that in this area of my life as in every other I do need to be discerning. But what must be tested is not so much the image as the experience relating to it. In fact, orthodox, scriptural images of God can be misapplied with potentially brutal effect. A person’s experience of a controlling mother or a tyrannical father can infuse these Biblical images with pain. Trying to approach God through this window might lead instead to a cosmic bully who has nothing in common with the God made known in Jesus. So I don’t censor the images but I do reflect on the context that gives them birth. Is there congruence with what I have known and experienced of God in the past? Does this experience fit with the God whom Jesus described, trusted, demonstrated? Not every image of God that arises in prayer is lif |
