WHAT IS GRACE?
Photo by Ales Krivec on Unsplash.
When I was about five or six years old, one of my parents made me a chocolate milkshake. I was sitting at the counter, perched on the edge of a barstool, so excited for my treat. So excited was I that when the treat was passed to me, I promptly knocked it over. My tiny heart plummeted. No chocolate milkshake, and I was so sure I’d be in trouble for making a mess. But my dad cleaned up the spilled mass of swiftly melting ice cream and chocolate syrup and then promptly made me another one.
“This is grace,” he said, as he passed me the new drink. “Grace is getting what you don’t deserve.”
Later I would learn that if grace was getting what you don’t deserve, mercy was not getting what you do deserve. But as an adult who has had to reexamine many aspects of my faith, I’ve come to question this framework of “what we deserve.” I think this language of “deserving” can be misused. In order to validate or justify helping our fellow humans, we often have to build up stories about them, making them appear almost superhuman in order to paint them as “deserving.” We make up stories about what we can or can’t eat, asking ourselves questions about whether or not we’ve eaten healthy enough or exercised enough to “deserve” dessert.
In the Book of Common Prayer, we find the definition of grace as “salvation unearned and undeserved.” (1) At first glance, this definition validates the notion of grace as getting what you don’t deserve, but if we look deeper, it is actually quite subversive. We who claim to follow Christ put great emphasis on our undeserving nature and our inability to earn salvation, yet we then turn around and act as though we have to earn our salvation in retrospect, burning ourselves out on the altar of self-sacrifice as though Christ’s own sacrifice was not enough. As though it wasn’t once for all. We feel as though we somehow need to contribute to it. What is that, if not trying to earn our salvation after the fact, when it was always meant to be a gift?
What if, when my spouse gives me a present, I spend the next few weeks trying to do extra things to “pay him back”? Is that how we properly appreciate a gift? Our instinct is probably to say no, and that instinct is correct. However, I’d ask you to look with me at society and see our issues around gift giving. If someone gives us a gift, often we feel as though we have to give them one back, if not during the same holiday or event, then at the next one. We try to guess the value of the gift and match it for taste and expense. Is that receiving a gift? Absolutely not. We act as though the gift puts us in debt to the giver. Gifts are not true gifts if they are used as tools of indebtedness.
If I want to give my friend a gift, it is, in fact, unearned and undeserved. It’s not because of anything they did for me, it’s because of who they are to me. So it is with God’s grace to us. It is a gift to us not because of what we’ve done, not because of what we will do in the future, it is simply because of who we are to God: God’s beloved children whom God adores. Understanding this perspective is vital. We act as though it is up to us to decide when the scales are balanced, when the scoreboard is evened up. And we often act as though our own efforts to pay God back are sufficient, yet we turn around and decide that other people’s efforts are insufficient.
A clergy friend of mine told me a story of walking in a downtown area with a wealthy young man. A person who seemed to be unhoused came up and asked them for change. My friend didn’t have any cash on him, so he turned to the wealthy young man he was with. This young man said he could help but didn’t like to give help for free. So he stood there making the man who asked for help do math problems before he’d give him any money. This is a picture of the very opposite of grace from one who has himself received grace.
And so, unless we can see ourselves as we truly are–recipients of God’s grace unearned and undeserving–we can’t fully enter into our humanity, and in turn we end up dehumanizing others of God’s children who cross our path. We have deemed our own efforts as enough: we decided the scales were balanced for us. And then we decide we are in a position to judge how deserving someone else may be.
When I first started musing on the question, “What is grace?” the first thing that came into my head was “Everything, grace is everything.” But of course, that’s not precisely true. I was driving as I was musing and looking around me at the trees and fields illuminated in the golden glow of the late afternoon sun and marveling that all of this beauty is still here for us to enjoy despite our frequent mismanagement of it. I live on a couple of wooded acres surrounded by second-growth forest. After over-logging and stripping this region of resources or over-clearing for farmland, I am surrounded by trees that have spent the last fifty to one hundred years coming back. They stand tall, cooling my house with their natural air conditioning.
There’s nothing quite like walking through a bare field, sun beating down on your scalp, sweat beading around your eyes and then stepping under the protection of the canopy. It’s like a hug, only it cools you off and shelters you from the elements. This is grace.
However, grace is not everything and not everything is grace. Natural disasters, humans being terrible to one another, a virus that changes the entire world, prison systems that put images of God in cages for minor offenses, violent police, an economic system set up to make rich people richer while treating the rest of us as cogs in a machine to facilitate the system rather than individual miracles crafted from stardust: none of this is grace.
Grace happens in the response to disasters, the neighbors who show up for one another. Grace happens in the people and organizations that embrace those released from jail and reunite them with society. Grace happens in the people dedicated to reforming the injustice in our justice system, in the efforts made in all corners of society to recognize the full humanity of everyone. We are all equally valuable and irreplaceable beings living on a blue-green orb that was gifted to us for us to take care of.
By extension, then, justice and mercy are parts of grace and the three are inseparable. Mercy forgives the offender the offense; justice declares the offense was real and not to be forgotten if the good of everyone is our goal. Or, as Buechner said, “Justice is the grammar of things. Mercy is the poetry of things.” (2) Grace is the binding that holds the whole work together.
The world is a gift, but we often act as though it is something we are owed.
Wendell Berry’s poem “The Peace of the Wild Things” talks about going into nature “when despair for this world grows in me.” (3) When he is surrounded by nature, soaking in the sounds of the trees and the animals around him, he says: “I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.” If we understand the natural world as grace, then we are surrounded by an environment of grace. Grace is the context for everything.
Poet Lori Hetteen writes, “Grace doesn’t need one thing from you, beloved. Just breathe. It is finished.” This is a lovely way of approaching that Prayer Book definition that grace is “salvation unearned and undeserved.” Because from the standpoint of salvation, looking at where we stand with God, all of that work is finished. There’s no retrospective earning of it. Rather than coming from a standpoint of trying to earn a gift that has already been given, we must embody that salvation and share it with all of creation. This extends from care for our planet to love of neighbor. From climate justice to upending the systems of injustice in our governments at all levels. From work within our own hearts to working in our world, doing our part, but only our part. We do what we can, and then we rest. (4) Part of resting in the grace of the world and the gift of our salvation is knowing that we were made for so much more than work. We were made for play, for beauty, for rest, for connection, and for pleasure. These are all gifts we too often avoid because we are still trying to earn that which has been given us.
Amy Kenny discusses community and relationships from the perspective of disability in her book My Body is Not a Prayer Request. She points out that one of the stumbling blocks that disabled people seem to present to abled people is that disabled people are a reminder that we need each other. In reality, this isn’t just true of disabled people. Rather, all of us were meant to live interdependently, not independently. Independence is a myth, a veneer that should have been removed during an event so far-reaching as a worldwide pandemic, yet it does not appear that people are collectively moving towards interdependence. Instead, we continue as individuals—unaware of our collective trauma from this event—trying to move on and go “back to normal,” which trauma survivors can tell you doesn’t exist. There is no back, only forward.
Looking at Israel’s story, Kenny writes, “Just like non-disabled people today, Israel is constantly trying to define itself as people who do not need God. They want to create their own way in the world, to outpace the need for God.” (5) What is this behavior if not the rejection of grace? Seeking independence is at its core a rejection of grace. Rejecting grace from God and from our fellow humans puts us in a poor position to understand how to extend grace to others and enjoy the grace of the world. We do best individually when we are working for mutual thriving. We only can truly thrive when everyone is truly thriving. We can only truly thrive when creation itself thrives alongside us.
We can accept the unearned and undeserved grace from God, the world, and our fellow humans and turn around and extend grace back to the world and to our fellow humans. There is no scoreboard, no final tally. There should be no need to “pay it back,” not if we are all truly working for the mutual good of others. We can enjoy rest and beauty and connection and pleasure because we are made for it: we deserve it. And we deserve it because we are already worthy. We are worthy by virtue of simply being God’s children. Our status is unearned and undeserved and because of that we are worthy and deserving.
Finally, we must be very careful to recognize the interdependence of grace and forgiveness with repentance, boundaries, and safety. All of a sudden people want to talk about grace and forgiveness when certain people—especially white, cisgendered, straight men in positions of power—are discovered to have “missed the mark.” There is very little mention, if any, of grace for the victims. No, all of a sudden it’s the duty of everyone else to forgive and extend grace. When one has been the source of abuse for others, one can’t simply claim grace and move on. This isn't grace. Rather, it’s a free pass for people in power to continue abusing that power. Once you’ve received the gift of grace for an offense, it is a rejection of grace—a rejection of God—to repeat the offense and demand more grace. Receiving grace as a gift is supposed to be transformative. If grace doesn’t transform, it wasn’t received, and all too often that person will go on to repeat the very thing they said they needed grace for. This is why grace, mercy, and justice have to be understood together.
If we can understand grace for what it is, we can rest in the understanding that we are already worthy. We can rest in the knowledge that grace, mercy, and justice are intertwined and essential for God’s goal for us: mutual thriving. Because if everyone is thriving, then no one is left out. Each of us is worthy, deserving, and capable of co-creating a better world with the God who created us. If only we can receive the gift of grace and stop trying to earn that which is given freely. If only we accept our worth and humanity and recognize that same worth and humanity in every other human. Then we can rest in the grace of that world, even as we work to heal the world: for that, too, is grace.
The Book of Common Prayer (New York: Seabury Press, 1979), 158.
Frederick Buechner, Whistling in the Dark (New York: Harper One, 1993), 74.
Wendell Berry, The Peace of the Wild Things (London: Penguin Books, 2018), 25.
Anna Elisabeth Howard, Inward Apocalypse: Uncovering a Faith for the Common Good (Eugene, OR: Resource Publications, 2022), 131.
Amy Kenny, My Body is Not a Prayer Request: Disability Justice in the Church, (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos, 2022), 138.
