Love is holy because it is like grace–the worthiness of its object is never really what matters.
― Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

The last two books I’ve read, Jack and Home, are novels written by American author, Marilynne Robinson. Both novels explore the role of grace, that life-giving presence that moves with and through us, in and out of the most sublime and the most terrible circumstances. And though the word “grace” may sound like such an elusive and ephemeral thing, a lovely wisp that is subject to whatever winds may carry it, Robinson reveals it to be more like a bulldog whose tenacious nose tracks down subjects whose worthiness is never really what matters.

In both novels, Robinson’s character, Jack Boughton, is a man in desperate and perpetual need of grace. He begins his life in Gilead, Iowa as a rebellious teen, then impregnates and abandons a young woman with their child who dies tragically as a toddler, and finally survives prison and the streets of St. Louis. Sometimes through a haze of alcohol and other times through the stark loneliness of sobriety, this is a man who ultimately meets and falls in love with a black English teacher in an age when interracial marriages are impossible. Della, the daughter of a Memphis preacher, sees through Jack’s self-deprecating humor, cynicism, and alcoholic lapses into his tender, searching soul. She is grace personified, God’s indiscriminate love and unwavering assurance in female form. But much as he’d like to—and certainly as much as he needs to—Jack can find no way to cross the chasm into the open hearts of those who reach out to him across the widening expanse of his shame. Nor can he find his way to God. For Jack, there is no balm in Gilead—or anywhere else for that matter.

The more I read, the more I became smitten with Jack, both as a complex character and as a fellow sinner. Is it really wise to say that you’re smitten with a sinner? I think so. At least In the sense that you find in this sinner a kindred soul, one whom you truly understand and with whom you empathize.  Long after I’d closed the book, I found myself planning the conversations I’d have with him and pondering how I might save him from himself when everyone else had failed. That should have been my first clue that I really understood little about grace. Oh, I had the prerequisite Christian head knowledge that allows me to talk the talk. But truly, the more I read and thought about Jack, the more I became convinced that I would be the last person who could ever save him. It would be like the blind leading the blind.

In her collected essays, The Givenness of Things, Marilynne Robinson devotes an entire essay to grace. In it, she suggests that prayer “opens on something purer and grander than mercy” and that the “residue of judgment makes mercy a lesser thing than grace.” Generally speaking, when we think of mercy, we often think of a pardon or a reprieve that comes after a judgment. Mercy operates in the realm of justice where transgressions and their consequences are the natural order of things. In this realm, you get what you deserve. Unless, of course, mercy blessedly interjects itself into the process.

Grace, however, has little to do with justice and everything to do with love. If there was a hierarchy of unmerited acts of generosity, grace would most certainly be at the top. It supercedes any consideration of the law, any causal relationships, any human explanation or expectation. Robinson writes that “[t]here is no justice in love . . . it is only the glimpse or parable of an incomprehensible reality . . . the eternal breaking in on the temporal.” Jack and I struggle with the notion of grace precisely because it is incomprehensible and divine. Though we both have lived much of our lives in the world of abstractions—words and ideas—we often lose ourselves in the mire of tangible, temporal earthly reality. We think in terms of faults. We labor over I-should-have-known-betters. We lay awake at night and count our sins, lining them up like canned goods on the shelves of our dirty souls. We play judge and jury as we try our many transgressions, and the verdict is always guilty. We are on a first-name basis with shame, who is our constant companion.

Perhaps most foolishly and tragically of all, we cling to the notion that it is our humility that prevents us from accepting the grace we don’t deserve. With such a keen awareness of our flawed natures, we humbly insist that we move aside while others deservedly step up to receive their grace.

      If Jack were a real person, I believe that he’d have a particular fondness for a scene in an older feature film, The Mission, starring Robert DeNiro and Jeremy Irons. Prior to this scene, Robert DeNiro’s character, a Portuguese slave trader has killed his brother whom he’s discovered with his lady love. Stricken with grief, he languishes in prison for months until Jeremy Irons, a Jesuit priest, visits and challenges him to accompany the priests to the mission that serves the very natives he’d previously sold into slavery. He agrees but only if he’s allowed to choose his own penance: to literally drag his former weapons and armor behind him for the entire trip. In one scene—the scene Jack would undoubtedly rewind and watch again–DeNiro loses his bundle of weapons and armor, and they slide down the mountain in the mud. He reattaches them and tries several times to climb the slippery slope, dragging the bundle behind him. Each time, he fails. Finally, a native pulls out a knife and cuts the rope attaching the bundle to DeNiro. His penance clatters down the mountain and disappears over the falls.

Jack would understand and empathize with DeNiro’s penance, for he, too, bundled his faults and dragged them over decades and miles. But he would marvel at DeNiro’s quick acceptance of the grace that freed him from a prior life of violence and greed. He would marvel but fail to see that it is just this simple acceptance that separates those who lug their penance around and those who have been freed.  

Grace works in a world where those in need seem to have Teflon souls which repel any act of unmerited love, protecting the emptiness inside them. In her book Gravity and Grace, French philosopher and writer Simone Weil writes:

All the natural movements of the soul are controlled by laws analogous to those of physical gravity. Grace is the only exception. Grace fills empty spaces, but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void. The imagination is continually at work filling up all the fissures through which grace might pass.

Those resisters-of-grace often have active imaginations which work diligently to fill up all the fissures through which grace might pass. The grace-shaped voids in their souls stay empty. They refuse to let grace be an exceptional act; they refuse to let it in. Instead, they set about the task of mixing more mortar for fissure repairs.

     As I learned more about Jack, I discovered how well-read he was, how articulate and charming. And polite, a man of impeccable manners. He was keenly aware of how far these attributes could take him—and where they could not. Like many of us, he grew to regard living as solitary, human work. Keep your nose clean, put it to the grindstone, sniff out temptation, and breathe as deeply as your circumstances will allow. In her book, Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith, author Anne Lamott writes about grace:

It is unearned love–the love that goes before, that greets us on the way. It’s the help you receive when you have no bright ideas left, when you are empty and desperate and have discovered that your best thinking and most charming charm have failed you. Grace is the light or electricity or juice or breeze that takes you from that isolated place and puts you with others who are as startled and embarrassed and eventually grateful as you are to be there.

Grace sweeps us out of our isolation into a communion of others who are just as startled and embarrassed and eventually grateful as we are to find a way out of the darkness and into the light.

Grace can only sweep us into the light, however, if we know the source of it. Sadly, in spite of having grown up in a God-centered home with a minister as father, Jack can’t honestly acknowledge God as the source of this light. He can quote scripture and theology, as well as play beautiful hymns on the piano, but he can’t find his way to faith.  There are moments where he stands just at the edge of the light. And then he retreats into the shadows of skepticism and shame.

     In the end, all this lugging around penance, tallying faults, armoring up, and hiding in the darkness is human folly, not God’s work. And God, Robinson argues, is so much bigger than all of this:

To think that only faultless people are worthwhile seems like an incredible exclusion of almost everything of deep value in the human saga. Sometimes I can’t believe the narrowness that has been attributed to God in terms of what he would approve and disapprove.

I confess that I’ve often attributed this kind of narrowness to God. I know better. Still, I find myself deciding what God would approve and disapprove of, forgive and not forgive in regards to my own soul. For others, I see God’s extravagant, unlimited grace. Even as I write this, I understand how utterly foolish this sounds. Foolish and arrogant. For if I believe that God wouldn’t offer grace to me, doesn’t this suggest that I see myself as somehow exceptional, set a part from my fellow mortals? Clearly, I’m not. Clearly, I’m a mere mortal, a sinner in need of grace.

The more Jack struggled with his past, with his unbelief, with his sin and pain, the more I wanted to reach into the novels and pull him out of all of it. Just take my hand, I’d say. But then, Jack would first have to acknowledge that there was a hand extended to him and then accept it. He would have to see that his worthiness doesn’t matter. He has no eyes to see this, though.

We live in a world that is increasingly marked by blame and shame, by accusations and quick judgment. I think it’s safe to say that, as a whole, we’re not very good at either offering or accepting grace. We’re too consumed by the worthiness (or unworthiness) of ourselves and our fellow humans. Too often, we regard the whole lot of humanity as just one big gene pool of faults, flaws, and failures. Our capacity for grace-giving and receiving is narrow, and so we assume that God’s, whose scrutiny is infinitely sharper than ours, is even narrower. Like Jack, we have no eyes to see the true nature and source of grace.   

All of us have failed. One wishes to be punished. One is willing to assume all kinds of penance, but do you know, my daughter, that in love — I scarcely dare say it — but in love our very mistakes don’t seem to be able to last long?
― Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey