21. Be the Means of Grace
‘If you want to get across an idea, wrap it up in a person.’
Ralph J. Bunche
Participation is called ‘at-one-ment’ by D.H. Lawrence and called grace by theologians. Set against this, the word for devil in Hebrew — Shatan — literally means ‘no response’.
We have used the terms ‘nonduality’ and ‘mystery’ to refer to the place from which the manifest world has sprung. It is non-essence and formlessness but from formlessness form has emerged. These terms carry no implication of intentionality — no ultimate purpose is presumed. The word ‘grace’ takes things a little further. The word carries an implication of benevolence. Grace is a reality, not because it is somehow given to us from outside the world but because we are grace. We are beauty, awe, gratitude, celebration, pleasure, joy, compassion, equality, freedom, justice, love. Likewise, if the universe is ‘Lila’ — that is, God’s joy — then value is inherent in the universe. Reality is somehow not neutral and yet the reason why this might be so is forever beyond our comprehension.
In the style adopted throughout this work, we have already named this process as the ‘economy of grace’. What is the grace economy? The grace economy is about embodied persons in relationship. It is an economy about particular individuals and their particular circumstances, rather than a transcendent moral or idealistic code. Donna Haraway says this:
‘We seek not the knowledge ruled by phallogocentrism (nostalgia for the presence of the one true Word) and disembodied vision, but those ruled by partial sight and limited voice. We do not seek partiality for its own sake, but for the sake of the connections and unexpected openings situated knowledge makes possible… the joining of partial views and halting voices into a collective subject position that promises a vision of a means of ongoing finite achievement, of living within limits and contradictions, ie., of views from somewhere.’
Donna Haraway (my emphases). (Haraway is contrasting with Thomas Nagel’s ‘view from nowhere’, mentioned briefly in an earlier chapter, which is in many ways the epitome of the current world view.)
Sharon Welch compares ‘beloved community’ (the idea for which she has developed from Martin Luther King) with the Kingdom of God. She says:
‘The Kingdom of God implies conquest, control and final victory over the elements of nature as well as over the structures of injustice. The ‘beloved community’ names the matrix within which life is celebrated, love is worshipped, and partial victories over injustice lay the ground work for further acts of criticism and courageous defiance.’
Sharon Welch, as quoted by Grace Jantzen in Becoming Divine.
Welch continues:
‘A ‘symbolic’ rather than an ethic or an ideal. Divinity is not a mark of that which is other than finite. Grace is not that which comes from outside to transform the conditions of finitude. Divinity, or grace, is the resilient, fragile, healing power of finitude itself. The terms holy and divine denote a quality of being within the web of life, a process of healing relationship, and they denote the quality of being worthy of honour, love, respect and affirmation.
Sharon Welch, as quoted by Grace Jantzen in Becoming Divine (first emphasis mine, others are the author’s).
Jantzen comments:
‘…the divine that is encountered is immanent in the beauty, and pain and struggle of this world and our relationships in it.’
She goes on to suggest that in order for societies to be ‘beloved’ they must be ‘performative’ rather than simply intellectual. Individuals will ‘…perform deeds and narrative stories… as embodied suffering subjects.’ All of this relates of course to Jantzen’s defining us as ‘natals’ rather than mortals. Natals are significant because they are born — they are in a process of becoming. By contrast, mortals are only defined by the inevitability of their death. Strangely, despite our society’s denial of death, we nonetheless continue with this term, perhaps because as observed in an earlier chapter, the consequence of unlimited ‘spirit’, our economy of ascendancy, is that genuine fulfilment is inevitably relegated to an abstract life after death. Whilst this was once only or mainly a religious conviction, it is now covertly embedded in our entire culture. For Western culture, things have a beginning (often out of nothing) and then an end. By contrast, as suggested by many of the authors in this work, life is better viewed as a process of becoming. The idea of narrative and performative acts is important too. It is the alternative symbolic, which takes us away from the purely abstract images, reflected in our language and so insidious in our culture and moves us instead toward an ethic that is a lived reality. The narrative of the beloved community — the grace and beauty of particular people and place — is the alternative symbolic.
In this work I have deliberately tried to avoid the word love, except as it sometimes occurs as one of our ideals, the images to which we are drawn as a concept, as described in earlier chapters. Love is a difficult word in our culture. Whilst our other ideals remain abstract goals — and this is the position very much being challenged in this work — love is particularly awkward because the meaning of the word itself is far from clear. We get a flavour of a different kind of loving above as Jantzen describes immanence in beauty, pain and struggle and says of the beloved community that it is made up of ‘embodied suffering subjects’. Catherine Keller says: ‘To love is to bear with the chaos’. A broader description of this point is given by Simon Parke:
‘We will also be cautious about attaching ourselves to the word ‘love’ for the word has lost its way. Its origins are fine. Openness towards all is the spring from which love once flowed. But it has become polluted by the ego, and cut off from its source. From being an attitude to life that acknowledges all as equal, and lives the ultimate oneness of reality, blessing all and favouring no-one, it has become a high-voltage emotion, something possessive and jealous and therefore never far from hate.
‘Openness has become a controlling and localised emotion called ‘love’. Love is now shorthand for something untouched by wonder.’
Action in the world then can easily become an obsession of the ego. We have seen already that our quest for fulfilment of desire is potentially just another abstract goal or ideal to which we might aspire. A thing to possess rather than a living reality. Matthew Fox contrasts compassion with compulsion:
‘This temptation to compulsion is one more reason why contemplation and solitude are so important an ingredient for compassion. We need to learn to let go even of our good intentions, our good works, and attitudes and this kind of letting go is learned in solitude and cosmic contemplation.’
Solitude and contemplation are therefore a necessary counterpoint to our action in the world. They put us back in touch with the formlessness of which we spoke in Chapter 2. Grace and our notions of parochial purpose are then only background. Beauty too, as we explored in Chapter 13, can have the effect of taking us out of ourselves. The reality of what we do and why we do it is always going to be part of mystery. This in turn is touched on by Simon Parke as he speaks about the pursuit of truth:
‘The pursuit of truth is not an intellectual affair. It is merely the dismantlement of our attitudes.
‘To receive truth, I need above all things to create something new inside me, a space not previously developed. I need to create a middle space, or in-between place — somewhere that is other than both my starting essence and my claustrophobic personality. A place where I can take off my coat and simply experience myself. A place to listen to who I am, free from the tyranny of personal agendas. A place where I can begin to trust my experience as something other than my manipulative ego. A place where I could prepare to hear the truth and perhaps recognise it when I do. What a fine place that would be, if I could create it: an inner sanctuary, a clean space within.
‘The search for truth is all in the preparation.’
Parke continues:
‘This moment of discovery and revelation…has been called the mustard-seed moment. It is a moment requiring two simultaneous experiences; the external experience of the thing perceived, and the internal experience that is ready to appreciate it. That is why two people can look at the same view and experience very different reactions. They share the same external experience. But their internal experiences are poles apart.
‘We see outside us what is inside us.’
Simon Parke also speaks of how mystery engages with the world via ourselves as persons:
‘At the heart of the mystery is your essence. It rests wonderful and wild at the heart of your being, untouched by the savagery of life and indestructible against its onslaughts. It remains as it was at the beginning, perfect and unscarred, at the centre of your soul.
‘Your soul is the adventure of your essence. It is through your soul that your essence engages with life.
‘It is also through your soul that you lose your way.’
Grace is the normal English translation of Agapé. Grace is also defined as love in action. Eros and Agapé are often seen as being opposing nodes of love, but I hope it is now evident they can work together. Agapé is the basis of the ‘beloved community’ in which Eros can properly flourish. The alternative symbolic — ascendancy embraced by descendancy, spirit tempered and made wise by soul. The masculine brought back into correct relationship with the feminine.
We have seen how the fulfilment of desire may become another ideal to which we aspire — a compulsion of the ego rather than something genuinely lived. Grace is in danger of being this too if we treat it wrongly. Are we in danger of creating another ideal out of grace? What makes it different from any of the other abstract goals we have identified? We will return to these questions in the Conclusion, but for now this quote from Matthew Fox suggests that we are already grace and provides us with part of the answer:
‘What is being said is that compassion — interdependence — already is the universe. We do not have to make it anew. Compassion, one might say, is a grace and not a work.
Matthew Fox — Original Blessing
Note that Fox says not that grace is in the universe, he says grace is the universe. There is something fundamentally different going on here. It is more about creating a space within myself to allow grace to flow, rather than my making grace, or being compassionate. We are the grace of the world. Unless we allow ourselves to be the means of grace, there is no grace. This is where the term ‘panentheism’ has its meaning. Grace resides in mystery. I can only create a space within myself to allow grace to flow. But — within the context of the human economy - I am grace. This is the ‘economy of grace’. ‘Wrap it up in a person’ the opening quote of this chapter suggested; But the only people around to wrap grace up in is you and I.
Some final words from Brian Swimme sum up all that has been explored in this work:
‘…we awake to fascination and we strive to fascinate. We work to enchant others. We work to ignite life, to evoke presence, to enhance the unfolding of being. All of this is the actuality of love. We strive to fascinate so that we can bring forth what might otherwise disappear. But that is exactly what love does: Love is the activity of evoking being, enhancing life.’
He goes on:
‘…do I desire to become pleasure?’
‘…our own truest desire is to be and to live. We have ripened and matured when we realize that our deepest desire in erotic attractions is to become pleasure … to enter ecstatically into pleasure so that giving and receiving pleasure become one simple activity. Our most mature hope is to become pleasure’s source and pleasure’s home simultaneously. So it is with all the allurements of life. We become beauty to ignite the beauty of others.’
