Hints of Grace, Unlikely People, & God’s Purposes

In this week’s Sunday New York Times, Barbara Ehrenreich wrote a piece called “A Rationalist’s Mystical Moment” in which she describes an experience of seeing “the world — the mountains, the sky, the low scattered buildings — suddenly flame into life.” She goes on to describe this experience as “a furious encounter with a living substance that was coming at me through all things at once, too vast and violent to hold on to, too heartbreakingly beautiful to let go of.”

[caption id="attachment_1025" align="alignright" width="225"] Celtic Christians called places they saw in which the boundary between the physical world and the spiritual realm briefly overlap “thin places.” Photo credit link.[/caption]

It seems to me that Ehrenreich, who describes herself as an atheist, experienced what Celtic Christians might call a “thin place,” which they understand to be a place in which the boundary between our physical world and the spiritual realm briefly overlap. These experiences are more common than we might think. I’m reminded of a story in 2 Kings, in which the prophet Elisha prayed for his servant, “‘O Lord, please open his eyes that he may see.’ So the Lord opened the eyes of the servant, and he saw; the mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire all around Elisha” (2 Kings 6:17).

Another image of a “thin place” comes from C.S. Lewis in his famous sermon “The Weight of Glory,” in which he says, “It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare.”

Finally, Thomas Merton, in his Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, narrates his “epiphany” of the deep spiritual truth of reality: “In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers . . . And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.” It strikes me that Ehrenrich’s experience has the potential to bring about an awareness of the divine, thus opening potential conversations about the reality of something like God, which might eventually lead to a conversation about the specific God we meet in Jesus Christ.

Speaking of Merton, I heard a fascinating interview with Paul Elie, who wrote a widely circulated piece in the NYT Book Review last year called,  “Has Fiction Lost Its Faith?” In the interview, he talks about his book The Life You Save May Be Your Own (this title comes from the title of a Flannery O’Connor short story), in which he profiles four mid-century Catholics and their engagement with literature – Merton, O’Connor, Walker Percy, and Dorothy Day.

Along the lines of Christians and art, I was struck by a column in the Washington Post by Michael Gerson titled “Graceless and Clueless” in which he engages with two recently released movies, “Noah” and “God is Not Dead.” He observes that these films, embraced by many Christians, reduce non-Christians to “moral types and apologetic tools,” but also observes the disconnect, in that Evangelical Christians don’t live as though their non-Christian neighbors are like that. He states, “In general, Evangelical lives are better than their art.” He goes on to give a compelling definition of what art might aspire to be: “Good religious art — or good art by religious people — does not shape a fantasy world to conform to pious platitudes. It finds hints of grace among the ruins of broken lives, where most of us can only hope to find it. Art is truly religious only when it is fully human.” Interestingly, I just finished the well-reviewed novel Peace Like a River by Leif Enger (The Christian Science Monitor called it “a rich mixture of adventure, tragedy and healing . . . a journey you simply must not miss.”), a beautifully told story with deeply spiritual, even Christian, themes.

Finally, two more examples of what the Reformers would call “Common Grace” in the pages of the NYT. First, in the Sunday Review, Akhil Sharma wrote a piece called “The Trick of Life.” Sharma, who was raised by pious Hindus but doesn’t identify as having any explicit religious beliefs, talks about his crippling anxiety, and how he experienced freedom from it through the act of praying for people. Whenever he felt anxious, he began to pray for everyone he saw, everyone he thought of. He also writes about learning to relate to difficult people by, each time he talked with them, thinking to himself, “I love you, I love you, I love you.” It seems to me that he discovered the truth of Jesus’ saying, which, paraphrased, says, “If you want to find your life, you must let go of your life,” (cf. Matthew 10:39), and also the Apostle Peter’s statement, “Love covers a multitude of sins” (1 Peter 4:8).

Second, on Tuesday NYT columnist David Brooks (one of my favorite columnists) published a piece called “What Suffering Does.” He talks about various responses to suffering – introspection, gaining a sense of one’s limitations, and, possibly, experiencing a sense of calling. Brooks, who is Jewish, writes that “the right response to this sort of pain is not pleasure. It’s holiness.” It’s almost as though he’s read Paul’s letter to the Romans, in which Paul writes, “And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us” (Romans 5:3-5).

The “mainstream” media often (rightly) come under criticism from Christians, but there are also hints of the longings that each human being feels. This is the “restlessness” that St. Augustine talked about, or Pascal’s “God-shaped void” that we try to fill with any number of things. I wonder what would happen if we heard these stories and celebrated the insights given to these writers, began to pray for them, and trust that God delights in choosing unlikely people to use for his purposes.