Grace

So lately I've started developing a sense of grace.  I don't know if that immediately makes sense, so I will try to explain it some.

As an unchurched person for the majority of my life, my theology happened ground-up.  No one really told me what to believe or how to interpret the Bible, and while I had a brief stint as a fundamentalist-minded person in my teens, I only sought a religious community after spending time studying religion in a secular academic setting as a Religious Studies Major.  So: I haven't much taste for suspending historicity, nor the particular contexts of biblical figures and authors, textual criticism, etc. in favor of trying to maintain a theology that conflicts with my scholarly mind and my experience of the world.

More simply put: I built my own theologies (not without help from scholars and theologians) before entering any kind of space (like a church) that would "tell" me what I should believe (also, I chose a church that doesn't do that).  Furthermore, since leaving behind more conservative views that I adopted for a short period of time after reading some conservative authors and before my college experience in religious academia, I have found little use for theologies of grace.  Grace, perhaps like some forms of confession, has felt like a cop-out.  It's felt like a "reason" I can be a crap person.  GRACE!  It struck me as connected to the kinds of Christianity in which people feel they are forgiven for their asshole-ish-ness because they accepted Jesus Christ as their personal savior... the kind of Christianity that manifests in the world in mostly unhelpful ways-- apathy toward issues of justice, except for maybe some hateful pro-life and homophobia stuff and more concern about whether you have the right kind of faith in Jesus.

I had developed a more "gospel of works" kind of theology, that I still feel is largely in line with the Jesus I find in my scriptures.  I've felt that my faith is about how it manifests in the world.  I can talk about being Christian all I want, but what am I doing about it, you know?  Am I protesting the rampant racism in this country?  Am I feeding the hungry?  Am I living a simple life that doesn't hoard resources in a world in which so many lack access to resources?  Am I practicing peace and compassion?

I still think this should be a dominant lens.

But I've started thinking about grace lately.  I've encountered some very justice-driven people who I know are trying their personal best to make this world a better place, but I sometimes feel a particular kind of hostility present in some of these ministries.  It is not without reason-- these hostilities generally come from wounds caused by oppressive forces, some of which look very much like me and my tradition.  Christianity and white people have existed in the world in some pretty terrible ways.  However, what is (perhaps more easily) important to me is being able to reach new hearts and minds.

I can talk to my friends all day about my liberal ideas, but the reality is that I am mostly preaching to the choir.  It seemed to me that some of my peers were so driven and angry (and rightfully so) that their ministries seemed to lack grace (except for particular kinds).  Part of grace, I think, is knowing that God is Love and that that love extends unconditionally to all beings.  I understand my call toward ministry as a response to this and also as a way to communicate this.  While it may be difficult for me to deal with sometimes, God loves the homophobes and the racists and the xenophobes and all of us unconditionally.  God certainly is saddened by homophobia, racism, and xenophobia (among other things), but God still loves people affected by such thinking and wants them to find the kind of love that can no longer be stopped by phobias or hatred.  And they need some help to get there... and yelling at them is probably not the best way to go about that.  They need grace and compassion, too.

Recently I've started to realize that I need grace, too.  My gospel of works was making me rigid in ways that weren't allowing me to forgive myself or to tolerate less than perfection from myself.  I realized that the compassion I feel so comfortable extending to others was not something I gave myself.  If I was as harsh on other people as I am on myself, I would make a terrible minister.  That might be true of all of us, but it's becoming more and more obvious to me.

So I think I'm finding grace.  Just a little bit of it and mostly as an idea more than a practice.

But it's something.