Trouble with Grace

Today my husband, Daniel, is guest-posting about some of his experiences this summer, and some of his reflections on our reading of Wendell Berry. This summer would have been much less rich without him, and I am grateful for his companionship and his intentionality about reflecting on our experience together.

I have not formally asked any one to guest post before, but I would love for others to contribute to this blog! If you have something to say about sabbath, farms, food, travel, life, chickens...you get the idea, please let me know! I'd love to continue this even though we've almost made it back home.

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I’ve always had trouble with grace. As a child, I sang about it often in hymns like ‘Amazing Grace’ and ‘Grace Greater Than Our Sin’, but it wasn’t preached or talked about nearly enough for me to truly understand the feeling of grace. When I was baptized as a teenager, no great sensation swept over me, as I had hoped it might. Throughout my life, I have believed in and known God’s love and even God’s forgiveness in various ways. But grace has always been a little bit more elusive.

In a way, I’ve always felt that I’m somehow missing out on something that a lot of other people seem to experience with a degree of ease. I’d love to have one of those dramatic ‘see the light’ or ‘come to Jesus’ moments that certain Christian people have had. And growing up in a church where folks talked about salvation and piety a lot more than grace only intensified my disappointment that I never found myself in the middle of such an experience. Alas, I’ve had to ‘settle’ for subtle moments of beauty, truth, and clarity instead.

You might wonder what any of this has to do with our farm work and sabbath journeys this summer. Well as I look back over the past few months, I’m beginning to wonder if I’ve been looking for the wrong kind of grace. My work and time on farms this summer was filled with blessings. The simplicity of the lifestyle, the connection to the land, meals that were healthy and fresh from the garden, and being able to spend all day outside in the sun – all of these things filled me with a subtle but deep feeling of gladness and contentment. I’ve hoped to encounter God’s grace as an all-consuming redemption and perhaps as a mystical relationship with the Divine. Ultimately, I’ve wanted grace to be something overwhelming, something of which I’m clearly conscious. But I suspect that through our work and sabbath time I have experienced grace at a very unconscious level.

In The Art of the Commonplace Wendell Berry writes, “The distinction between the physical and the spiritual is, I believe, false. A much more valid distinction, and one that we need urgently to make, is that between the organic and the mechanical” (p. 147). He’s talking about the tendency in Christian theology of drawing a sharp boundary between flesh and spirit, between body and mind. It is this division that fuels the expectation of an entirely conscious experience of grace. I believe that Berry is suggesting that the subtle pleasures, simultaneously spiritual and physical, of living and working within the flow of creation’s rhythms are as true an experience of God’s grace as any dramatic altar call.

I’m learning how to embrace and enjoy this grace. As our summer ends and we return to a more normal routine, I wonder how we might maintain an ability to dwell in those graceful rhythms.

~ Daniel