AMAZING GRACE

Don’t
 doubt the    grace.

Wisdom Wherever You Find It   
 
Don’t doubt the grace.        Anonymous Catholic priest
 
I am not a Roman Catholic, so I don’t even remember who shared this pithy admonition with me. The context (which I had the good sense to jot down) was not anything I experienced: a penitent confessed a second time to a sin for which they had already sought forgiveness. The priest shared these four words and sent the person on their way.
 
I love the notion that once a person genuinely repents, the forgiveness they receive is irrevocable. In the case of the Catholic confessional, the priest serves as the conduit of promised forgiveness from God. You can accept that theology and ritual or not, but the point is not the authority of the interaction to absolve. Every religion has its ritual of repentance and forgiveness, and every culture as well. If the offending party and offended party are both sincere, what matters is that sincerity.
 
But grace. Grace is a quality I only came to appreciate as I got older, not because I never heard the word, but because I didn’t understand its power. For the human heart, grace is not a quality of elegance, nor is it a prayer over food. Grace is the unforced and unearned gift of compassionate love. Grace is an act of generosity so powerful and unexpected that it provokes tears of gratitude.
 
Grace is not always about forgiveness, but I think it is most magnificent when it is. We were each graced with life. Most everyone has been graced by love, certainly by parents and with some serendipity by a life partner. The injury we do to ourselves when we act wrongly, however, requires something more than restitution to make it go away. That’s when grace is so profoundly important; it can be bestowed only by someone who need not do so. No wonder people of faith (like me) turn to God as the source of grace.
 
There is an addition to weekday worship in Jewish liturgy that is all about grace. It is called “tachanun,” which has buried in its grammatical construct the word “chen” (with a phlegmatic “ch”). It begins with all sorts of confessions of personal inadequacy, including bone-shaking trepidation (see Psalm 6), and pleads for collective and personal reassurance. I guess it is an irony that grace cannot be solicited, really – somehow the freewill nature of it is what makes it grace and not a favor or wish fulfillment. Tachanun is regularly omitted, sometimes by occasions on the calendar (like celebrations) and sometimes by people’s impatience with the length of worship (like me). I think that officially and personally, we do not take the priest’s advice (yeah, I recognize the absurdity of that assertion), and we doubt the grace.
 
But also, I think that grace strikes us as counterintuitive, especially in a society like ours that places so much emphasis on transactions. How can you receive anything of value if you offer nothing in return? The further along we travel on the road of life, the farther away we get from the act of grace that placed us here, and the more we seek to assert control over the blessings and misfortunes that are the signposts on that road. Our approach is reactive, even in our pleas for grace. And grace is anything but.
 
I often hear Christians talk about living in a state of grace because of their acceptance of the basic tenet of their faith. I cannot recall every hearing such a claim by a Jew, except maybe in the archaic Hebrew of the liturgy. It seems to me that the importance of grace, however, is not so much receiving it as it is opening our eyes and our hearts to the capacity to provide it. To my mind, it is only God who can provide an unending stream of grace. We mortals are endowed with such complicated hearts that a few doses of hatred, envy, and grudge-holding, to name a few, are inevitable.
 
Yet even acknowledging that we can act with grace toward each other liberates us from the presumption of inevitability of our own sometime lack of lovableness. Watching for an opportunity to act with grace – not elegance, not performative thanksgiving, but rather the unforced and unearned gift of compassionate love – can bring real-world salvation to a wretch like me or you. And if you can offer it, then you can accept it.
 
And you never need doubt it.