my problem with grace

I used to love grace.

Grace was supposed to be good news.
Unearned love. Radical welcome. Divine generosity.
Grace is the love and forgiveness of God that you don’t need to earn or work for.
Grace is God loving you in spite of who you are.
This kind of grace is a big rich god bailing you out every time you fuck up. This kind of grace only makes sense if you are undeserving.

So much Christian theology teaches that grace is beautiful only because we are wretched. Grace is amazing because we are depraved. Grace is necessary because we are, at our core, broken, sinful, wrong. This kind of grace is big gift from a distant god to the pathetic and undeserving. [us]

This is my problem with this kind of grace.

It may offer forgiveness, but only after it names you guilty.
It may lift you up, but only after insisting you are low.
It may call you beloved, but only after convincing you that you were never really worthy of love in the first place, and it takes a supernatural effort to like you.

Grace, as many of us learned it, is a cure that depends on us believing we are sick.

What happens when we internalize this kind of grace for long enough?

Many of us learned to distrust our desires.
We learned to apologize for our bodies.
We learned to stay small.
We learned that who we are is not inherently loveable.
We learned to receive love as a temporary antidote to the shame we deserved.
We learned to believe that was love.

There are other meanings of grace, you know, kindness, elegance and poise. What if God’s Grace described the way beauty moves through this world lighting it up in wonder. What if we spoke of the charm of God? What if we talked about how God is really classy and polite? What if God were Graceful like that?

What would it change if Grace wasn’t something given to the broken, but a way of living in the world?

I think I might still believe in grace. But not as a rescue mission. Not as a handout from a disappointed god. If I believe in grace, it is as the dance of the universe, as the fabric of connection. I believe in a grace that holds out her hand and says join me in beauty and delight, join me in awe and wonder. I believe in a Grace that is like sunlight.

Sunlight does not ask if you are worthy before shining.
Sunlight doesn’t check your credentials or withhold warmth because you made a mistake.

It simply shines.

You can block it out. Hide from it. Believe you don’t deserve it.
But it is still there. Constant. Generous. Indiscriminate.

The grace I can believe in says there never was anything but Love, and you don’t need to mend what was never broken. You don’t need to pay back what you don’t owe.

And so my loves and my dear ones,
God’s love is shining
no matter what you did or didn’t do
Love is not waiting to light up this world
Love is not tired of loving
You are not a problem to be fixed
you are a miracle to be witnessed
You are easy to love
and the God of Gracefulness delights in you effortlessly
she does strain or struggle to love you
God is captivated by you
exactly as you are.

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