The Fabric of Grace

I remember one of the first times I cried post-infanthood. The tears were not exactly of sadness, or loss, or frustration. They were tears that I can only attribute to being awestruck by the totality of God’s holiness. I was somewhere in the middle of my PhD. I was yet to be diagnosed with ADHD. I was struggling with being able to focus on the long and extremely difficult task of in depth research, reading, writing, translating, and producing original thought. I felt as if my passion, my love, wonder, curiosity, and joy about who God is, had simply shriveled away. I couldn’t think clearly, or even find the right words. I felt overwhelmed and anxious, like every mistake or every disagreement was some sort of personal or spiritual attack. I felt inept. I felt like a failure. And I worried that I had made a huge mistake, perhaps simply imagining that God had called me to follow him. 

One day a handwritten letter with an address arrived in my dorm room mailbox. I opened it expecting to find some sort of spam or scam. Instead, it was a thank you letter. It read: “I wanted to thank you for the conversations we had while I was living in residence. I want to thank you for listening to me, for hearing me, for your steady presence. I never told anyone this while I was living there, but I was severely depressed. I felt trapped in a life I didn’t want. I felt afraid of other peoples’ judgments.

I felt despair about the life I was expected to lead. And I felt like a failure because no matter how well I did or how much I tried, I couldn’t follow what I was expected to do. You never had words of judgment for me; just the willingness to ask questions about where I was coming from. I didn’t tell you this because I didn’t want to scare you, but you created space for me to feel my life was worth living and I’ve been able to find the path I am supposed to follow.” 

Now I have to be honest and say that I had probably a hundred conversations a week about so many different topics with other students, professors, friends, parishioners where I was doing student placements, you name it. So the conversations I had with this person didn’t particularly stand out. What I saw before me was simply someone whom God made. Someone whom God placed along my journey. 

But when I read that letter, what I saw was not simply two people making their own respective ways - both silently struggling with their own things. No, what made me cry was being struck by this reality: that every moment of our various interactions took place in Christ. Not in his presence, not with him responding after we had acted; rather as the God the Father created us and put us together in that time and place, as God the Son, opened the way for us to be drawn together to God and as God the Holy Spirit used our interactions together to strip away our defenses, to open each of us to one another, each of us a child of God through whom Jesus continuously works to help us heal from whatever wounds of the heart, mind and soul we carry.

In this person’s moment of raw, wounded openness, Jesus worked through me - completely ignorant of it as I was - to be a salve without knowing it; in my moment of raw, wounded openness, of fear and despair and unspoken need for help - Jesus worked through them not simply to be a momentary salve of comfort, but to be far more than that: to be a sign of God’s eternal, unmitigated presence, never ever leaving me, even when I feel the world I thought I knew falling apart around me.

God is with us. God is here, whether we go to the literal or figural mountains of Alberta or joy, hope and fullness, or whether we fall into what feels like the ground out valleys of canyons, or fear, despair and pain. There is nowhere we can go literally, or in our hearts, minds and souls, that God is not with us. This is what brought tears. Tears of relief. And moreover, tears of release. Release from the burden of believing that my value and worth is contingent on getting things right, or others seeing my worth and value, or of getting things right enough to be acceptable to God. 

Jesus doesn’t go to those who already have it right, or to those who think they have it right. Jesus goes to Matthew, the tax collector, hated by society, unclean traitors, criminals. Jesus goes to those who are sick. Jesus even goes to his enemies, many religious leaders, even people like Saul who persecute and kill his followers. In his death and resurrection, Jesus has opened the door to relationship with God that no one else can open. Then he comes to each of us - people just like Matthew the tax collector - an outcast, a sinner, maybe a criminal, maybe a failure in the eyes of the world, maybe someone who is lost for one reason or another - he comes to us and says, “follow me.”

That’s it. He doesn’t lay out a list of rules that we need to check off each day or week or year. He doesn’t make the invitation contingent on us getting our following him perfect. He simply says, “follow me and I will make you into what I intend you to be: fishers of people, disciples, learners, witnesses. I will make you into people who - often without you being aware of it - can show my very self, my love, my peace, my joy and my hope - to those you meet along this road of life that I’ve given to you.”

Once you see God - not your idea of God - but God who is profoundly not like you, knitting the lives of people together through moments of simultaneous confession, judgement, mercy, forgiveness, and sustained love, you cannot go back; you cannot let go of Christ’s cloak. You cannot help but seek this grace and so run the race God has set before us.  AMEN