A New Look at Grace by Bill Huebsch PDF

# GRACE IS ORDINARY ## 6 I think it was Will Rogers who once said that life is just one damn thing after another. We want to talk about that next. People live their lives every day. On the face of it, that may seem like kind of an obvious thing to say. But think about it for a minute: our lives are...

# GRACE IS ORDINARY ## 6 I think it was Will Rogers who once said that life is just one damn thing after another. We want to talk about that next. People live their lives every day. On the face of it, that may seem like kind of an obvious thing to say. But think about it for a minute: our lives are filled with commonness, with ordinariness, with repetition, with mundane earthiness, with everydayness. We live every day: we get up, we get through the bathroom routine, we get a bite to eat, we get on with the tasks of the day, we get back to work, we get finished, we get to supper, we get some time in the evening, we get to bed. In the midst of all this, How are we supposed to see the Glory of God every day? How are we supposed to recognize the grace and power of God every day? How on earth are we supposed to recognize the Reign of God as it breaks into our lives every day? An important question, this, and the one on our minds in this chapter. The answer is not easy, and not easy to put into words. But putting it into words is exactly the way to understanding it. Some folks would say that daily Mass, regular prayer times, spiritual direction, joining a prayer group, volunteering in the parish, or having holy cards around the house are the ways to recognize The Reign of God, The In-breaking of the Holy Spirit, The Presence of the Risen One in their lives. But it is possible, no, it is probable, that if we are busy with all of those other things we will miss it completely. I mean to say exactly what I said. If we stay busy with activity, with parish duties, with busy-ness, we will miss seeing God. The church can be an obstacle to grace, as well as a moment of grace. In order to recognize the grace we speak of here, we must step back from programs, structures, organizations, and hierarchies, in a word, from churchiness. We need to step back in order to gain perspective on things spiritual. We need to step back in order not to take too much for granted in this constantly surprising part of our lives. We need to step back in order to forget ourselves. The kind of experience of grace that we will talk about here is one, after all, that even the unchurched have on a very regular basis and that often the most churched miss completely. So we're not talking here only about people who come to Mass, only about people who say their prayers, only about church "insiders," or only about "faithful" Catholics. We're talking as well about all those others who also experience God in their lives, even when they don't call it that or even when they don't admit that. We're also talking about those parts of life that sometimes seem remote from God, those parts that don't seem to have anything to do with the traditional ways that we have come to understand the work of God in our lives. So where do we start? We start with God: Where is God? "What kind of question is that?" you might ask. "We all know where God is, don't we?" But do we? We have always been taught that God is "out there," wherever that is, or we've been taught that God's in heaven and all's well with the world. We carry around inside of us (even those of us who think a lot about God do this) we carry around a sense that God is distant, absent, busy, and uninvolved. We have a sense that when it comes to real life, to everyday living, Our God is an "outsider god." It's surprising to us to realize this, even those of us who think we know God, even those of us who refuse to admit that this is true, even those of us who look upon the unchurched and are grateful that we "aren't like the rest of them..." many of us treat God this way, as though God were outside of us. But nothing could be farther from the truth. And this belief, that our God is an outsider god, which the church itself has had a large hand in forming as a popular belief, this belief is one major source of pain, suffering, sickness, alienation and division. We must do all we can to move forward, to grow in our understanding, but more important, to grow in our experience, of the God who is an insider in our lives. How can we do this? The key approach to take for the one who wants to live with God is to listen. Listen to what? We go along in our lives, living every day in a willy-nilly sort of way. We don't think much about our common tasks, ideas, conversations for events. They all just sort of happen, day in and day out, one thing after another. And we talk about this stuff that goes on in our lives in the same, common way: "No big deal," "we did this," we say, "or we did that today." "This came to pass, or that didn't," we might say to someone. We talk about the everyday, common stuff of our lives with an everyday, common language, nothing fancy, just plain old words. But, every now and then, sometimes every day, or even several times per day, those plain old words just don't do it. Then you hear us say, "I just can't tell you how much..." or "Words just can't describe how I feel..." or "There's no way I could tell you..." And we mean precisely what we are saying: we've run out of language, run out of the words we need to describe certain experiences in our lives. It's as though we've come to the end of words. Plain words can no longer explain the experience or express the feelings. We are simply left speechless by whatever happened. What causes this? Maybe a sunrise. Maybe a warm expression of affection from someone. Maybe an overwhelming, spontaneous sense of well-being. Maybe a death, or a birth. Maybe news of an illness. Maybe a phone call from an old friend. Maybe the afterglow of sexual loving. Many experiences may cause this speechlessness. These experiences are no longer ordinary, common, everyday experiences for us. Because we notice them in a special, observant way, they begin to take on new meaning. They become full of meaning for us. We begin to identify these experiences as important, as unique to us: we begin to see that they are what makes us truly human. They are no longer simply raw human experiences, undefined and unrefined, but now they are dignified, lived, and wholly us. We load them up with meaning and significance and they quickly and importantly become the stuff of which our memories are made. Later we find when we are in other related moments that we do certain things as though "in memory" of them. We memorialize these moments and re-celebrate them again and again. These moments or events become very special to us then; so special, in fact, that we are left speechless in the face of them: They are too beautiful, terrible, mysterious, lovely, peaceful, wonderful, frightening, tremendous, and alluring to ever adequately be described in mere words. They push us to our outer limits, to the edge of the ordinary, to our boundaries, to our deepest depths. We aren't sure how to respond, how to talk or act. We can't explain how we feel because the ordinary language is not sufficient. But who has a language that is sufficient? We are tempted to go to a scientist (they know everything, you know). But we would not ask a scientist to describe love to us because, while their explanation might be accurate, scientifically speaking, it would not be loving. To describe love, we would ask a poet, an artist, a painter, a sculptor, or a music writer. But the language of the poet is not ordinary, common language to us. It is a language that seems to come from the other side. The other side? Yes, the other side. We are beginning to speak now about God, that one who is on the Other Side. But we must be careful to note that, while God is on the Other Side, God is not, thereby, on the outside. When we finally face the fact that we've gone beyond the ordinary, we stand at the edge of what we know and can control, and we peer over that edge into the unknown; and we ask, sometimes we shout, the Ultimate Questions: - What is over there? - Do we dare to go there? - Will we find there some way to express our depths? - Will this give meaning to our lives? - Can we endure? - What does all this mean? - Is anyone there? - What the hell is going on? (Trite as these may sometimes seem, they are the Ultimate Questions.) So we stand at the edge, peering over into the darkness, feeling at once lured beyond yet frightened to go there. These are very key moments in our lives and they happen with frequency, although not always with the same force. These are moments of decision, moments of grace. These are the moments of grace in our lives. It is as though we face our true selves in these moments, our full and true selves and we gather all of that self together, gather in the rough and the smooth, and have the opportunity, an opportunity offered to everyone, to be transformed, to be moved, to be transfixed, to be made whole: and therefore to be made holy. Let me remind you: these are not usually moments that can be scheduled in the parish bulletin. They are moments, rather, that catch us, grip us, hold us, almost beg us to take notice and thereby be moved beyond. The trick, we began here by saying, is to listen for them. By using the word "listen" here, we mean to say that we need to pause, often, in the daily on-goings of life, pause to reflect on what is going on: the person who called by phone, the letter we received today, the beauty that is rushing past our car windows, the people we are meeting on the streets, the kiss we received and gave this morning, the illness we are experiencing today, that article in the news about that child, this or that, all stuff from our everyday lives: we need to pause to notice it, reflect on it, let it touch us, let it move us. This really isn't very complicated: For example, you go to lunch with a friend, but instead of talking only about "the weather" instead of chattering about nothing, you talk about what's really going on. You explore your life. You ask tough questions. You ask the ultimate questions. What you have when you do this, is a moment of grace. What began as lunch, can end as eucharist or reconciliation or healing or whatever you call it. Only when we are touched and moved by the everyday events and people of our lives, can we be touched and moved by God, whoever he or she may be. That is why the busy-ness of our lives, and often of the church, can be an obstacle, a defense mechanism against the honesty, intimacy, and holiness of crossing over and moving beyond the ordinary. You see, as we stand on that awe-full edge, peering over to the Other Side, we must make a terrible choice. No one and nothing can ever force us to move beyond that edge. We must choose to do it. The choice, the terrible choice, then, is to go beyond or to turn back. Many of us will turn back. We turn to cope the best we can and we invent ways to make that coping possible for us. We may use alcohol to cope or drugs or meaningless sex or work or busy-ness or intellectualism or consumerism or partying or "macho-ism" or eating. We turn back to lose ourselves in compulsion rather than move forward to find ourselves on the Other Side. The turning back becomes a habit, some would say a religion. By turning back, we pass through the same experiences of self-discovery, sexual discovery, death or birth, beauty, horror, pain, or wonder but instead of being led to Meaning by them, we turn around in fear and do not reflect on them do not allow them to form us do not admit our feelings do not share them with others do not come out into the open but rather we hide. Sometimes we are afraid: Others will think that we "just couldn't handle it." We don't want to appear to be a fool, or worse, a weakling. We don't want to appear dependent on anyone, or needy, or confused, or, and here's the key: vulnerable. So instead, we bury it all inside ourselves and try to go on as though nothing had happened. What fools we can be! We can never just go on. We are constantly changed. We are always being formed. So as we stand at the edge, the other choice, the opportunity we have, is to give meaning to the stuff of life by leaping into what is apparently darkness but, we discover, is really Light. We do that by embracing these experiences, admitting the feelings, sharing ourselves with others, dealing with the joy and pain, and finding, on the Other Side, the language to adequately describe all of that, and, therefore, to own it and to let it become a part of ourselves. In short, we cross over by telling our story and by letting our stories be made meaningful as they're shared among others. You see, we can't share alone. We know that we can't, we know that we don't have the words. But we can find the words, the language we need, on the Other Side. And there have been people telling their stories like this for centuries. We are certainly never alone as we struggle to find words to describe our experiences. We are not alone. We have, for starters, the authors of the letters and gospels. We have the early mothers and fathers: the stories of faith from then until now. But we also have our neighbors, friends, family, and even strangers who appear in our midst. We have to become vulnerable, we have to admit our story is true: - I am sick. - I am so happy! - I am weak in faith. - I need friendship. - I am grateful. - I am gay. - I don't want children. - I love you so much. - I am alcoholic. - I am who I am. Does that sound familiar? It is, and it is the beginning of finding a language to adequately describe ourselves, our Word. This language of the Other Side is not ordinary. It is transcendent: two people sharing poetry, all kinds of music, wedding dances, painting, silence, touch, imagination, crying and tears, truth-telling, a whole theater of language that gives a way to express meaning and that, all taken together, is called religious language (which is not the same as churchy language). There is a strange and powerful mystery in this: in order to cross over, thereby encountering the Other, whom we name God, we must give up ourselves. There is a kind of dying we must do as we stand at that edge, peering over. We give up our ordinary self in order to receive in return a transformed Self. This dying is the key. Unless we are willing to die to ourselves, we should not expect to find this new life. It is a strange mystery, and mystery is incomprehensible: that is its nature. This cannot be explained: it can be pointed to, we can build ritual around it, we can probe it theologically, but, ultimately, it remains mystery. So we don't know why we must die, we only know we must. But what does this mean? "to die...." It means, really, that we become vulnerable, we become open, we stop the hiding and lying, we face the truth once and for all, we let go the controls. Dying like this is very scary business. We are both drawn to it, yet frightened of it. Dying usually begins with denial: we deny the truth, just as Peter did at the trial. Then it moves to anger, we know the truth but we are angry that it is the truth, just as Peter became angry at the trial. Soon we begin to bargain, accepting the truth, but with our own conditions attached. Until we begin to see that we are who we are and then we grasp the sheets of our deathbed, clinging desperately, hoping not to have to pass through this. But finally, we let go, we become vulnerable, we open ourselves up, we begin to talk about ourselves, and then we find ourselves, strangely, mysteriously, but undeniably, at peace…. This can happen in the Sacrament of Reconciliation, but it also happens, more often, over lunch with a friend, talking with a child, a phone call in the night, pillow talk, boat talk, and other common ways of coming to grips with ourselves. This is how God speaks to us, not many words, as Brian McDermott has said, but one basic word, a word divinely spoken, and that word is nothing less than the life of the one who prays in this way, that life as continually drawn into God. Listening to God in this way means listening to our lives as lives being drawn into God all the time… . We become now, not a word, but rather a Word, spoken by God. Notice this: It isn't that God operates from outside of us, controlling us like a puppet, but rather that our very Self is transformed by the encounter with these new words, this new dying, this new language, this Word of God. Our Self is transformed now so that even the ordinary to which we return and in which we live will never be the same again! This whole, simple process of naming our experiences in life, of coming to the edge, of facing the ultimate questions, of choosing to turn back or go beyond, is something we often face alone. But for those who choose to move beyond, for those who choose to die to self, this journey to the heart of the Lord will not ever be traveled alone. And this is our point here: we are graced, everyone is graced, empowered, in other words, to move beyond and be transformed. And the grace is communicated to us in the community which is the Body of Christ. This is such a powerful reality that we can scarcely scratch its surface in attempting to describe it here. But this much is very clear: we must bring ourselves to each other, wounded or rejoicing, vulnerable in any case, bring ourselves to each other, giving ourselves away in intimacy, trust, and faith. What we receive back will be our full, transformed, whole and Holy Self.