Father Richard Rohr insists that grace is the essence of who God is.
The goodness of God fills all the gaps of the universe, without discrimination or preference. God is the gratuity of absolutely everything. The space in between everything is not space at all but Spirit. God is the “goodness glue” that holds the dark and light of things together, the free energy that carries all death across the great divide and transmutes it into life. When we say that Christ “paid the debt once and for all,” it simply means that God’s job is to make up for all the deficiencies in the universe. What else would God do?
Grace is not something God gives; grace is who God is. Grace is God’s official job description. Grace is what God does to keep alive—forever—all things that God has created in love. If we are to believe the primary witnesses—the prophets, the mystics, the saints, the transformed people—an unexplainable goodness is at work in the universe. (Some of us call this phenomenon God, but that word isn’t necessary. In fact, sometimes it gets in the way of the experience, because too many have named God something other than Grace).
There’s no way that the Scriptures, rightly understood, present God as an eternal torturer. Yet many Christians seem to believe this, and many are held back from trusting God’s goodness because of this “angry parent in the sky” that we have created. The determined direction of the Scriptures, fully revealed in Jesus, is that God’s justice is not achieved by punishment, but by the divine initiative we call grace, which enables us to bring about internal rightness, harmony, balance, and realignment with what is.
The concept of grace is first called mercy, or hesed in Hebrew: the ever-faithful, covenant-bound, infinite and eternal love of God. All God’s power for renewal and resurrection proceeds from this source, never from punishment. Jesus punishes nobody! I would go so far as to call grace the primary revelation of the entire Bible. If we miss this message, all the rest is distorted and even destructive. I cannot emphasize this strongly enough.
The only prerequisite for receiving the next grace is having received the previous one. As the mystics have often said, God “hides.” Every moment is not obvious as God, as grace; it looks quite simply like another ordinary moment. But our willingness to recognize it as gratuitous—as a free gift, as self-revelatory, as a possibility—allows it to be that way. God’s hiding ceases. God and grace become apparent as a gift in each moment. And those who learn how to receive gifts keep receiving further gifts. “From God’s fullness we have all received, grace upon grace” as John 1:16 puts it.
Reference:
Adapted from Richard Rohr, A Spring Within Us: A Book of Daily Meditations (CAC Publishing, 2016), 147–149.
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:
I’d like to share how I understand radical grace. Grace is knowing that God loves me intensely because God has imprinted me. In other words, God loves me because God sees the divine reflected in my being. I had nothing to do with this; it is a gift. And because of this gift, I can love myself and whatever enters my life. I allow God to see me in my weaknesses and also in my gentleness, faithfulness, and deep desire for a deeper connection to God.
—Joseph G.
