Theologian Serene Jones offers a compelling description of God’s ever-present and transformative grace:
Divine love is the source of the universe and of the dinosaurs, the planets, the elements, and the air, the force that sparked us into existence and baffles us all while we exist, the current of love and joy and beauty that runs through the human experience.… All life flows into being out of one source, Divine Love, and it is forever deeply related and responsive to that love. That love defines, holds, and promises to be present to the lives that God calls into being. That eternally present love is, most simply stated, my definition of grace.…
God does not stay at a distance from us but constantly seeks to transform our lives by asking us to awaken to the divine presence. God is a mysterious, creative, sustaining life force.… God is there all the time. The challenge for us is to open our eyes, ears, hands, minds, and hearts to receive the truth of God’s real, persistent presence, God’s grace. When we open ourselves to it, we are changed by it. The way we perceive the world shifts, like a radically refocused camera lens, and we experience life differently. You see everything around you as suffused with God’s love. You see God’s grace everywhere, saturating all existence. This process of awakening to what is already true, but you haven’t previously seen it, is called conversion—a word that literally means “to see anew.”
Jones highlights the paradox of awakening to God’s grace alongside the realities of sin and evil:
Sin simply refers to all aspects of life where the reality of grace is not manifest and evil flourishes. It’s what happens when we’ve got the wrong story about reality in our heads. If we do not recognize grace, we latch onto lies about who we are. These lies are manifest in an endless variety of godless dispositions: hatred, violence, greed, injustice, pride, despair, isolation, self-loathing, unbridled arrogance, a hardened heart, a cold soul. When these lies are aggregated over time, they get compressed into social systems and cultural patterns that look to us as if they are true, when in truth they are not. They are evil and profoundly destructive. This is what it means to be godless—to not be awakened to the light of God’s love. It describes grace-asleep people as well as whole grace-asleep societies.…
This constant tension between sin and grace in our lived experience doesn’t mean, however, that they are equal partners in determining our destiny. Because grace is of God, it ultimately wins. We are forgiven by God, whatever horrors we commit or are done to us, however unmeritorious our deeds and broken our lives, because that’s who God is. Grace is free; we don’t earn it nor are we required to deserve it. That’s what makes grace grace. It comes unbidden to us all.
Reference:
Serene Jones, Call It Grace: Finding Meaning in a Fractured World (Viking, 2019), xvii, xviii, xix–xxi.
Image credit and inspiration: Geentanjal Khanna, Untitled (detail), 2016, photo, Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. Unearned and unmerited generosity is an element or extension of the divine, revealing itself in our lived experience—spontaneous, unplanned, sometimes messy, as small as a drop of water—requiring open hands to receive it.
Story from Our Community:
My mother just passed away at 100 years old after losing her home in the Palisades fire in Los Angeles. The process of working with family members and filing insurance claims has challenged me, especially since I was struggling with the loss of my own home. I have relied heavily on the AA mantra, accepting what we cannot change, the courage to change what we can, and the wisdom to know the difference. Repeating this wisdom to myself has restored my sanity during this chaotic time. In her final year of life, my mother lost all her possessions but gained eternal peace.
—Mimi J.
