COME THOU FOUNT OF EVERY BLESSING
Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it…
I’m running late as I climb the stairs of the old wooden church, clutching a notebook. At the top of the steps a man stands unsteadily, leaning against his walker. He has a smile on his face and a kind of twinkle in his eye, like a mall Santa. His long, neatly trimmed white beard would only serve to accentuate his Claus-like demeanor if it weren’t for the air of authority lent him by the black cassock hanging gracefully from his ninety-two-year-old body.
Inside the church, I help him put on his stole, and we sit in a small room outside the nave, facing each other. I take a breath, placing my notebook in my lap. Inside is a list I have carefully written. At an earlier, more innocent time in my life I might have used a notebook like this to write down everything I wanted Santa to bring me for Christmas, but today it contains a long list of all my sins. When I converted to Orthodox Christianity years before, I was taught to always bring a list to confession so I wouldn’t forget anything, the idea being that a sin unconfessed is a sin unforgiven. I have known priests who would generously account for these sorts of lapses and absolve their penitent parishioners from every sin they had failed to confess in addition to the ones they had. But it was still emphasized that a proper confession was a comprehensive one. And of course, one mustn’t conveniently “forget” to bring something up in hopes that the prayer of absolution would cover it.
“How are you?” Father Nicholas asks.
“Pretty good,” I say, glancing down at my notebook. “Work is good. I can’t believe how fast the kids are growing.”
Something in his expression tells me this isn’t going to be an ordinary confession appointment that begins with a few minutes of chitchat before getting down to business. Father Nicholas wants details. So, we sit and talk. Every thirty minutes or so I glance at the clock, and then at my notebook, knowing I’m running out of time to share my list with him and receive what I’ve come for: forgiveness.
At one point, Father Nicholas and I bond over a hymn it turns out is a shared favorite of ours, Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing. (1) I remark that the line “prone to wander, Lord, I feel it, prone to leave the God I love” feels particularly suitable to the occasion.
“Why?”
“Well, I mean, that’s how I feel. I love God, but I don’t stay close to God. I leave.”
“What would it mean for you to stay close to God?”
“You know. Not making so many mistakes. Not being so selfish. Not doing things that hurt and disappoint the people I care about.” I hold up my notebook, waving it slightly for effect. “Not doing any of the things in this book!”
He nods, and his knowing smile tells me something I find hard to imagine about this man: he knows how it feels to love God and fail to do the right thing at the same time. But there’s something else, something in his eyes that tells me that he knows this and yet doesn’t feel the shame and despair I feel. He knows this, and somehow feels … joy?
Robert Robinson, the writer of Come, Thou Fount, may have been much like Father Nicholas in that respect. The opening lines read like an expression of sheer joy, even though we later learn Robinson feels he has been wandering from God. “Come, thou fount of every blessing, tune my heart to sing thy grace! Streams of mercy never ceasing, call for songs of loudest praise.”
In the second verse, Robinson describes finding his greatest treasure at the “mount of God’s unchanging love.” Elaborating, he tells us, “Jesus sought me when a stranger, wandering from the fold of God; he, to rescue me from danger, interposed his precious blood.”
Father Nicholas may have sensed the danger I was in as we talked that day. He may have sensed my shame, my discouragement at having so often come to confession in hopes of availing myself of the redemptive power of Christ’s sacrifice, only to be left feeling just as guilty as before. If Christ’s blood was shed for the forgiveness of my sins, why didn’t I feel forgiven? Why wouldn’t grace work for me?
“What is grace?” asks the Catechism in the back of the Book of Common Prayer. And it answers neatly, “Grace is God’s favor towards us, unearned and undeserved.” There’s a line about grace in Come, Thou Fount that I think is delightfully paradoxical in this light: “Oh, to grace how great a debtor daily I’m constrained to be.” Robinson feels daily indebted to grace, and yet grace is not something lent only to be repaid with interest. Grace is obtained, as Isaiah says, “without money and without price.” Freely.
How? One way at least is through the sacraments, which according to the Catechism are “given by Christ as sure and certain means” by which we receive grace. For years I thought of grace simply as having my sins forgiven, and I would participate in the sacraments for that reason alone. But God does much more for us than that. By grace “God forgives our sins, enlightens our minds, stirs our hearts, and strengthens our wills.” (2)
Three out of those four actions of grace are less about what we have done and more about who we are. Somehow, receiving grace, whether through the sacraments or by some action of God, is supposed to change us in a positive way. It is interesting that forgiveness of sins is listed first because it is unlikely any of us will be able to overcome whatever is holding us back if we’re suffering from feelings of guilt or shame. We must be freed from self-loathing before we can be transformed.
That freedom is offered to us every Sunday in the Eucharist. I think it is significant that before the consecration of the bread and wine, we offer our hearts to God. When the priest says to us, “Lift up your hearts,” we can take all our joys and sorrows, our pains and fears, and pray, as Robinson does,
Let thy goodness, like a fetter, bind my wandering heart to thee: prone to wander, Lord, I feel it, prone to leave the God I love; here’s my heart, oh, take and seal it, seal it for thy courts above.
Then a bit later we eat the bread of heaven, the Body given for us, and bring the grace-filled cup of salvation to our lips to sip of the Blood shed for us for the forgiveness of sins. Having been forgiven, we are free to forgive ourselves, then change for the better, perhaps with help along the way from friends, pastors, counselors, or doctors when needed. Having received grace, we can then be instruments of grace for others, going “in peace to love and serve the Lord.”
Speaking of such a transformation, my favorite observation about grace comes from Rowan Williams, who said, “Grace, for the Christian believer, is a transformation that depends in large part on knowing yourself to be seen in a certain way: as significant, as wanted.” (3) Everything else depends largely on knowing this one fact: that we are loved by God as we are. We are significant, we are wanted. You, reading these words, are significant. You are wanted. You are beloved. When you truly understand that, you receive the greatest freedom offered by grace: the freedom to be yourself, knowing that you are loved simply because you are who you are.
So maybe that line in the hymn about being daily indebted to grace is not so paradoxical after all. There’s an oft-repeated story in the Orthodox Church about a monk who’s asked what on earth he does in the monastery all day. “I fall down and get up,” he says, “and fall and get up again.” Growth is a process lived daily, if not moment by moment.
Two hours have passed before Father Nicholas mentions he has another appointment, and I realize I haven’t yet made my confession.
I open my notebook. “Wait, don’t you want to hear my sins?”
He laughs. “Maybe another time. I’m not interested in what you’ve done, I only wanted to know you a little better.”
It would take years for me to fully understand what Father Nicholas was teaching me in that moment. By offering me forgiveness without shame, he taught me the true meaning of grace.
Before I leave, he asks me to kneel. He places his hands on my head and says, “May Our Lord and God, Jesus Christ, through the grace and bounties of his love towards mankind, forgive you all your transgressions. And I, an unworthy priest, through the power given me by him, forgive and absolve you from all your sins. Amen.”
“Amen,” I say.
All lyrics quoted are from The Hymnal 1982 (New York: The Church Hymnal Corporation, 1985).
The Book of Common Prayer (New York: Seabury Press, 1979), 857-858.
Rowan Williams “The Body’s Grace,” in Theology and Sexuality: Classic and Contemporary Readings, ed. Eugene F. Rogers, Jr. (Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 2002), 309.
