Finding a Place for Common Grace

If I am honest, and I hope to be, the times I have felt closest with God, most loved and full of joy and hope and peace, most myself, are moments outside of church walls. As a Christian, how could this realization not come tinged with a shade of guilt? Sorry, Mom and Dad, other members of the congregation-it’s not you, yet it’s not me, either. It’s others I know, friends, full of faith or not, who I talk with, who share stories about books, movies, conversations, quiet walks in an arboretum, ear-numbingly loud concerts, moments that, though they don’t use the same language, have an air of transcendence about them. Instead of critiquing the church, for there are too many voices already doing that, I’d like instead to look at this idea of knowing God, of relating with him, of understanding how he speaks to us as individual, unique, strange, lovely people.

Discussing what it means to “know God” evades our lingual abilities deftly, leaving us to phrases such as “I sensed…” or “It felt like…,” or, sometimes, “God seemed to be saying…” In the past, disregarding the stories that followed these introductions was as easy as deleting spam from my inbox. However, the more I am convinced of God’s interaction with humanity, the slower I am to jump to incredulity. Hearing a nonChristian friend speak like this can be even more wonderful, for it is as though they are coming to a roundabout, a real and idiosyncratic understanding of God. He doesn’t love just Christians, and he certainly doesn’t work his love in their lives only, either.

In The Four Loves, CS Lewis’ graceful and candid collection of discussions on the nature of love, he prefaces his essays by distinguishing between two types of “nearness to God,” meaning the ways in which humans are either endowed with or cultivate Godlike qualities. One type of nearness is “likeness to God. God has impressed some sort of likeness to himself, I suppose, in all that he has made,” which draws on Genesis 1.27: “So God created man in His own image” (4). The second type of nearness he calls “nearness of approach,” which is akin to one trying to live as God would have it, presumably by following the life of Jesus: “the approach, however initiated and supported by Grace, is something we must do.” Thus, “likeness” is something “built in, that can be received with or without thanks; can be used or abused,” whereas nearness is the active pursuit of godliness (6). This “likeness to God” corresponds, it seems, with Romans 2.14:

“When outsiders who have never heard of God’s law follow it more or less by instinct, they confirm its truth by their obedience. They show that God’s law is not something alien, imposed on us from without, but woven into the very fabric of our creation. There is something deep within them that echoes God’s yes and no, right and wrong.”

The thread connecting these excerpts from Scripture and Lewis’ distinction is the notion of God having embedded himself within all of humanity. There is something in us that calls out to him, that wants to connect, that responds to that connection and causes us to say “I sensed…” It seems more and more real to me that we, us humans, all of us, know God in actual ways – yet we often don’t know him in the divisive “us – them” context of the reductive language that contemporary Christianity tends to speak with. In a recent interview, when asked what recognition of God remains after largely leaving Christianity, David Bazan said, “When I’m listening to the radio and there’s this story about a leader of a town against odds doing the right thing, when [I] see justice happen in a profound way, I [have a sense that] this is good, this is right, can we just keep doing this? I know that you know this is right [too]. I have joy, I feel peace” (Interview with rednoW staff, 8 April 2009).

In high school, I was part of Young Life that was often led by our area director, a thoughtful man named Bob. He knew and trusted that our inherent likeness to God was what would draw us into truer relationship with God. There was no “special information” to bestow, or prescribed formula to follow – the God inside us simply needed stirring, amplifying among the myriad voices inside that conspire to drown it out. Too often I sense a focus and call to stoically apply oneself to Christ’s ways, as though we are to try to force our circular souls into a square hole that we might not even be made for, as though his yoke was not easy nor his burden light. Yet Bob, and others I have crossed paths with (David Dark, Eugene Peterson, Frederick Buechner) focus on the wonder and mystery that is following God and trying to know him – trusting that communication with him is what we are made for, what gives us life.

So many are dissuaded from pursuing how God encourages us to live, as he did in becoming a revolutionary, subversive, brilliant Jew, because of the pressure to “repent,” too often portrayed as a feeling of deep guilt with oneself that ought lead to new behavior instead of a newer, better way of living, of loving. Buechner writes in his sermon, “The Kingdom of God,”

“Biblically speaking, to repent doesn’t mean to feel sorry about, to regret. It means to turn, to turn around 180 degrees. It means to undergo a complete change of mind, heart, direction…turn away from madness, cruelty, shallowness, blindness. Turn toward tolerance, compassion, sanity, hope, justice that we all have in us at our best”

The call to repent is a call to a greater, freer way of life, to seeing life in newer, realer ways, to fitting Jesus’ easy yoke, the burden of which is light. (Matthew 11.30). Pressure to feel contrite for who I am has yet to lead me closer to God, let alone want to be closer to him. Too often I walk away from sermons feeling pitiful and weakened, despite a pastor’s concluding, incongruously positive prayer. While our sin is what keeps us from God, and while we are truly pitiful and weak when contrasted with him, I’m not sure that the best way to lead others to God is convincing them of their brokenness. If only we would listen to the voices of our culture, voices in song and literature and movies, we would see that all of us, all faiths or lack thereof, know emptiness, hurt, the need for love, the God who is love (1 John 4.8).

The question, then, is how do we know God, how do we interact with him and learn that he is not a distant puppeteer, possibly asleep at the handles? Buechner writes, “It is not objective proof of God’s existence that we want but, whether we use religious language for it or not, the experience of God’s presence” (“Message in the Stars). True, “God works in mysterious ways” is not a verse in Scripture. Yet I believe we would be misguided to think that God only speaks through Scripture, that God only speaks to, or through, churchgoers, in their pews on Sunday morning. In A Matrix of Meanings, Craig Detweiler describes the idea of “common grace:”

“The theological term behind learning to look closer is ‘common grace’…exhibiting a sense of humor and playful surprise, the God of the Old Testament speaks through such unlikely means as a burning bush, a donkey, and a dream. Jesus continues the unpredictable, inverted pattern. He chooses tax collectors and fishermen to initiate his kingdom. He befriends prostitutes and defends a woman caught in adultery…common grace subverts preconceived notions of how, when, and through whom God chooses to communicate. It makes God bigger and the evangelist’s burden lighter.”

This is why I cannot read just the Bible, or theology for that matter. A Matrix of Meanings is an intellectually edifying and spiritually liberating work because it exists between the Church and culture, essential aspects in the life of anyone seeking God, believing God to be moving through each. Ray Bradbury novels, Sam Mendes films, Sufjan Stevens albums speak freedom into my life in ways I often don’t experience in church, yet I have hope that the not-so-lofty idea of common grace will be embraced more and more. Works of art like these draw me (or us, depending on your aesthetic inclinations) into a deeper wonder and awe, into a “celebration of life,” as a friend of mine recently put it. And didn’t Christ come “that we might have life, and life to the full?” We ought not think that this relationship with God can be fully understood, as Wendell Berry puts impeccably well:

“[The Gospels are] a mystery that we are highly privileged to live our way into, trusting properly that to our little knowledge greater knowledge may be revealed…reality is large, and our minds are small.”

To know God is to submit to his mystery and to his love that miraculously reaches us through honest conversations, enchanting literature, beautiful films, through connections with others. Perhaps we’ll come to recognize more and more that the God-prints we see in one another and ourselves were fully revealed in a Person who walked this earth two thousand years ago, who asks to show us truer ways of life.