Is Grace Enough?

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 19^th and early 20^th 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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[1] Braestrup, Kate (2010-11-02). Beginner's Grace: Bringing Prayer to Life (p. 238). Atria Books. Kindle Edition.

[2] Merriam  Webster.

Human Acts of Grace

The other day I experienced the most pedestrian version of grace in my life.

I walked out of the gym, and there on the bush next to my car in the parking lot, was a damp, one dollar bill. Just laying there, on the bush.

Damp…in Modesto.

Often the Universe offers me lessons during the week that make my task of writing a sermon easier. There was the time when I wrote a sermon on compassion, and that week I found a puppy who needed rescuing in the alley. 

There was the week that I talked about living an engaged religious life, and struggling with just what to do when a person on the street asks me for money. Wouldn’t you know it, that three times I was asked for money that week and twice after, as if the Universe was saying to me “So, now that you’ve talked about this, are you going to actually DO it?”

This week, though, a dollar bill on a bush.

Not a burning bush, mind you, so don’t get nervous.

Just an average, run of the mill bush that lives it’s life suffering in what is undoubtedly a very hot parking lot for in the summer.

What kind of meaning am I supposed to make out of that, I ask you.

I don’t know if you know this, but here at the Fellowship we have a small group ministry program. In this program a group of no more than 12 people gather monthly to discuss, deeply, a theme. In Modesto there is a facilitator’s group, and each of us is responsible for finding or developing that month’s theme. And then each small group does the theme.

This month, Marcia G. was in charge of the lesson. On the day of the Facilitator’s Group, she called me in a state of panic. “I don't know what to do with Grace! I grew up a Universalist! I know nothing of this whole topic! Why did you pick it!?”

Marcia demonstrates quite nicely, and colorfully, the problem that Unitarian Universalists have with Grace. We don’t know what to do with it.

Of course, I told Marcia that I had every confidence in her ability to wrestle successfully with the topic, and of course, she came through with shining colors.

She also, by the way, took some of the best material to use, so that I now feel like I can’t use it, too.  For that I’m both grateful to her for her work, and a little flummoxed. 

What do we do about Grace?

When most people encounter the world Grace, thoughts turn to phrases like “being in God’s good graces” or “therefore but for the Grace of God go I.”

These aren’t always useful for us.

Some of have an immediate reaction to such phrases, and it’s no mystery as to why.

Aside from personal complex histories with churches and people who may utter these phrases with some regularity, we have an institutional reason for struggling with them.

As I like to remind you with some frequency, our Unitarian and even Universalist history comes out of the Puritan church. This is true in both England and the United States. The Puritans were Calvinists.

They followed the teachings of John Calvin, who lived from 1509-1564. One of the main tenants of Calvinism is that God has an “elect” of people who are saved from eternal damnation. One cannot earn a place in heaven, or heaven forbid as the Catholic’s believed “buy a place in heaven.” These people are known to God, and only suspected by themselves.  It is only through God’s generosity that one either is or is not in “God’s good graces.”

You can, perhaps easily see, why this did not sit well with our early Unitarians and Universalists. Firstly, early Universalist doctrine was of course, that there was universal salvation. The name says it all “Universalists”: no damnation, no Hell.

The Unitarians have long believed in salvation by character alone. Unitarianism in America "reacted against Calvinistic doctrines that emphasized human sinfulness, as well as the Trinity. Unitarians argued that such doctrines were inconsistent with the Bible and contrary to reason"[1]

It is easy to see that while these two faiths were separate, neither had any use for the Calvinistic Predestination.

And yet, some 200+ years after our departure from Orthodox Puritanism began in earnest, still we struggle with this concept of Grace.

So what if we step away from the idea that Grace only comes from a God we may or may not believe in?

In the past I have quoted the Rev. Dr. Bill Sinkford when he said “we are all humanists in that we know that we have only human hands to rely on to improve the world.” I think of this not as atheism as much as I think of it as an Enlightenment Era definition of humanism.

In the Reading from the Global Scripture today, Anne Lamott tells a story of humans conferring grace on other humans.

In her touching story, we can see a young, unmarried woman, who is at the end of her rope, and pregnant. This is not an unfamiliar story, nor, I want to be clear, is this a person who should in any way feel shame or be abused.  But still she is alone in the world, and vulnerable.

What today’s reading couldn’t encompass because the story is elsewhere in the book Traveling Mercies from which the reading was extracted, Anne is new to church life. This idea of a spiritual community was new to her then. She didn’t really “get it.”

So this may seem all the more miraculous to her, if you know more about the context.

I particularly am fond of the imagery of the little elderly black woman, Mary Williams, putting dimes in a little baggy with the twist tie. There is something so maternal, so grandmotherly, in that.

And we, perhaps, we can hear this story, and think, oh, that’s so sweet of them. And it was.

Incredibly generous.

We can hear this story and it’s a nice story, not too challenging…and it feels like a kind of a triumph of the human spirit story.

But it isn’t.

Anne is, by many ways of measuring, better off than the little old church ladies who help her. She is college educated. She is lighter skinned, perhaps, and I didn’t look this up but I have seen pictures of her, Euro-American.

What makes this story not just nice, but germane to our struggle with grace is the last few lines.  She was deeply grateful for their many kindnesses to her, but it’s the final sentences I want us to look at closely:

I was usually filled with a sense of something like shame until I’d remember that wonderful line of Blake’s—that we are here to learn to endure the beams of love—and I would take a long deep breath and force these words out of my strangulated throat: “Thank you.”[2]

We are here to learn to endure the beams of love, and say, sometimes in a voice deep and husky with emotion, to say “Thank you.”

This accepting the kindness of others is not an easy thing for Unitarian Universalists. Helping others? Oh, we have that down pat.

Need someone to fight for Marriage Equality?

We got it!

Need a church to host a meeting about Water Justice?

C’mon in!

Need people to go out and be an ally for …..fill in the social cause here…

Sign us up!

But to be on the other end of that? This makes us squirm. Along with many other “genetic” gifts we have leftover from our puritan ancestors, is a very strong work ethic.

To offer help to those who need it, this is the right thing to do. The just thing to do.

But on some level if we, with all of our advantages, privileges and positions, if we require help, than it can only be because we have somehow failed to be a success.

And here’s where Grace comes in.

Grace is offered, but it is not complete until it is humbly accepted.

So this is the challenging part to us. How can we accept help, when we’ve done nothing to earn it? And how can we, through a throat tightened by emotion and gratitude simple say “thank you”?

Part of the answer lies in Universalism, part in Unitarian Universalism.

Our Universalist forebears taught the world that each person is loved by God and thereby lovable to all. No person is beyond redemption, even if they sometimes irritate us.

As a Unitarian Universalist congregation, we have, along with 1,600 other congregations in the United States, agreed to Affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person.

This, awkward as it may seem, includes us.

A gracious host gives their guests what they need, but doesn’t crowd them. And when I think about a gracious guest, it’s one who arrives knowing the imposition they’re making. But with each it’s this acknowledgement, the biggest part of the graciousness is to acknowledge that they are there for each other.  – Rev. Denis Paul

You can see by way of Denis’s quote that there is a dance to grace and graciousness. The generosity is the easy part for us. The small gesture—or the grand gesture—depending on the interaction. 

The struggle for us is the humble acceptance of a gift that we do not deserve. The challenge is to receive grace without feeling the need to explain ourselves, to know that this act of kindness is just that, an act of kindness. It is not a judgment, not blaming, not a pointing out of your own moral failings.

By definition, an act of grace is undeserved. An act of grace is not a response to something you did, or did not do. It is an act of kindness, a gift, a blessing.

I have been shown grace many times in my life, and mostly they have been acts of grace by other humans. A kind word when desperately needed. A soft hand on the shoulder when I needed to be heard; a free lunch just because.

I, too, have had to learn to say Thank You. Lest you think that I stand up here an expert, let me confess to you that I have not mastered the art and skill of it.

Try to think of grace not as a gift from God-on-high, but think of grace as closer to the ground. If we can do that, perhaps grace won’t seem to big and complex and otherworldly. Then we can see grace for what it truly is: all around us, in between and among us.

Next time the universe, in the form of a friend offering you a ride, a dog asking to play ball, a kindly smile as you go about your day…the next time grace shows up in your life, I ask you to step into that grace, to whisper, if you cannot say it aloud, Thank You.

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[1] Harold J. Berry, What They Believe, Unitarian, Universalist (Lincoln, NE, Back to the Bible, 1988), pp. 6,7

[2] Lamott, Anne. Traveling Mercies.