Hands are remarkable things.
Kaaren Anderson wrote very poetically about our hands. And
it’s funny to me that in my own hands, I can see those of my Dad’s, even though
we have engaged in entirely different kinds of labor.
Grace isn’t just about what our hands do. We do lots of
things, lots of acts of kindness, with our hands…we might even do this every
day.
Just before dinner at our house, if we are being mindful,
we say grace.
Now, we have a couple of them.
One is short and a little deistic.
(At this point I point to the sky, then I point to an imagined dinner plate. I then smile and made a "thumbs up!" gesture.)
The other is somewhat longer.
Bless the sun and the earth and the marriage in between.
Bless those who till, those who plant, those who water, those to harvest.
Bless those who transport, those who sell and those who prepare this food.
May we take the energy from what we eat and use it to make good in the world.
The whole time we say this grace, I am picturing the hands
that my food has passed through. Even if
those hands are really not touching the food, but touching some machinery which
is touching my food. I’m thinking, for
example, about the salted peanuts I sometimes eat for a snack. Even if some
poor soul isn’t shelling every peanut and roasting it for me, someone is surely
not making enough money dealing with the machine that does it faster than a
human could.
So for me, the prayer becomes Bless those (hands) who till,
those (hands) who plant, the hands that water, the hands that harvest. Bless
the hands who transport, the hands that arranged the food nicely in Sprouts,
and the one of us in the house who took the raw materials and made them into
something yummy.
The Rev. Kate Braestrup, a Unitarian Universalist minister
who works as the Chaplain for the State of Maine’s Game Warden Service wrote a
book called Beginner’s Grace. In the book, whose intention it is to make things
like prayer more accessible, wrote this grace, for those who live busy lives.
May the hungry be well fed. May the well fed hunger for justice. Amen. [1]
Today’s question, Is Grace Enough, was prompted by a
discussion between myself and our worship associate for the month, Tina G.
As I talked about last week, grace is a gift. You can see
grace as a gift from the Universe, from a Loving God, from another human being.
But is that enough?
I think that often it is, but part of the effectiveness of
Grace might depend on timing.
With the wrong timing, grace can be confused with irony.
Canadian artist, Alanis Morrisette, said it like this “An old man turned 98, he
won the lottery and died the next day… isn’t it ironic?”
She goes further, and I’m not going to quote the whole
song, but there’s a line in it “It’s like rain on your wedding day.” This year,
wouldn’t we love some rain? We have 4 inches of rain last year in total, but on
my wedding day?
And finally, “It’s like meeting the man of your dreams, and
then meeting his beautiful wife,” an especially frustrating experience for a
gay man.
Taken one way, each of these things that Alanis talks of
could well be gifts from the universe to you.
But at the wrong time, it’s less than useful.
Often in the discussion about social justice there is,
bandied about, the word paternalism. Paternalism is defined as:
the policy or
practice on the part of people in positions of authority of restricting the
freedom and responsibilities of those subordinate to them in the subordinates'
supposed best interest.[2]
The Social Gospel movement of the late 19th and
early 20th centuries is often seen as having engaged too much in
paternalism as part of its social mission.
Jane Addams did this, at first. As did her life-long
friend, Unitarian Emily Greene Balch, who worked in poor neighborhoods in
Boston. Both Jane and Emily created “settlement houses” in poor neighborhoods
in their cities, and initially, they tried to bring new immigrants more
smoothly into our American melting pot by trying to teach them how to let go of
their ethnic identities and embrace their new country.
To our modern ears, the idea that Addams and Balch would do
such silly things as ask Italians to cook food more plainly because their spicy
food made them more emotive and prone to emotionality, to our modern
sensibilities this sounds ridiculous, offensive, and high minded.
Please keep in mind that this was all a new discipline and
career back then, and it’s from these painful lessons that we, as a culture
have evolved. It is because of these mistakes that we now keep a cultural
competency with us as we engage the world of social justice.
To the best of our abilities, of course. We have not
completely conquered paternalism in our own time, in our own efforts.
Though the many people who engaged in settlement housing
efforts were, if could be easily argued, trying to make the world better for
the greatly suffering immigrants and, here I am thinking particularly of Rev.
Jenkin Lloyd Jones and his settlement house in Chicago focused on helping freed
slaves and their descendants, in a way, they were both trying to lay the ground
work for grace, and also trying to force grace to happen.
They had a mission of grace, but they were often not
willing to just sit and let grace happen. Rather than invite grace, they tried
to induce it.
And so often, lessons were lost, opportunities for grace
were missed, because the timing and the method weren’t appropriate to the needs
of all involved.
I say this not to discount their valiant efforts. As a
student of the social gospel movement, I firmly believe that the efforts of our
forebears helped bend the arc of the universe toward justice.
A phrase that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King used, a
phrase that he borrowed from our forebear, Rev. Theodore Parker.
Grace, even with the best of intentions, cannot be forced.
It cannot be earned.
Here I told a personal story, without script.
Obviously, while you cannot will a moment of Grace to come
to you, nor can you force a moment of grace to come through you, you can
however, be ever open to it.
Imagine with me for a moment the Lotus Flower.
A lotus flower grows best in the muckiest, pondiest
environments. And yet its flower is renown in several ancient religions as
sacred.
My own Buddhist teacher, while teaching us to read, let me
correct that, begin to read, the Wonderful Dharma of the Lotus Sutra, Michio
Sinuzaki taught us that one of the reasons that the Lotus flower is such a
sacred image is not only that it even though it grows in a mucky, muddy,
slippery, dirty pond and yet still is able to produce blemish less flower
petals, the flower continually produces a seemingly endless supply of these
petals.
Which some have taken to symbolize the constant rebirth of
the soul as it travels through many lifetimes.
Take then, a lesson from the beautiful lotus.
Be ever open to the possibilities of grace in your life. As
you live from day to day, produce the beautiful petals that are your daily
life.
Keep the image of the lotus flower with you, and when life
is less than kind to you, think of it. Remember that every life goes up and
down. I don’t mean to minimize your own, personal struggle, of course. I just
wish to normalize it.
There have been events in each of our lives which have been
so terrible, that we could scarcely imagine living another day.
There have been moments in life that have been so perfect,
that even in the middle of them, we have grieved a little, because we know that
moment cannot last forever.
Grace may find you in either place.
You cannot invite grace. You cannot earn grace.
You can only remain open to it.
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