There but for the Grace…

In recent days, I’ve read on Facebook and other social media proclamations of thanks and praise to God for escapes from potentially devastating circumstances—tornadoes that miraculously didn’t touch down, people who survived pileups on freeways, reports of remarkable recoveries from potentially terminal illnesses. I feel joy or relief for the people involved. I am indeed glad that whatever happened did (or could have but didn’t), but I must confess that I am bothered by the expressions of gratitude to the Lord above. They often come off as glib to me, thoughtless.

The late writer Madeleine L’Engle, who wrote, among other things, A Wrinkle in Time, one of my favorite mid-readers, often held writing workshops. At one of them, attendees were talking about this very thing—expressions of thanks to Yahweh, God, Allah, the source of life, whatever name you attach to the mysterious and simultaneously transcendent and personally accessible presence.

L’Engle told a story about a wildfire in a California town that had destroyed several houses in a neighborhood and left several more completely unmarred. In the front yard of one of the unaffected houses someone had placed a sign that said, “Thank you, Jesus!”

A little girl and her mother, whose house had been destroyed, looked through the debris of their home for anything salvageable. On their way back out of the neighborhood, the little girl saw the sign. “Mama,” she said, “Does that mean that Jesus doesn’t love us?”

After that, Madeleine never wrote the phrase or anything like it again.

If I recall correctly, the actual discussion at the workshop started because someone had written the phrase “There but for the grace of God go I.” On one hand, the phrase does suggest a certain humility, an understanding that our narrow escapes are a function of something outside our control, but for those stuck in the idea that the universe is only and always transactional, it suggests the opposite—arrogance—and invites the question of why the grace of God came to the speaker but not to the person observed. How it’s heard depends on which one you happen to be.

I have no problem at all with gratitude expressed to God. I do, however, have a problem with it posted on Facebook, at least without a more explicit description of what one is thankful for. Otherwise, I feel like the little girl in Madeleine L’Engle’s story. In your heart of hearts, do all the thanking and praising you want. Send a private message. But however you do it, remember that for every tornado that doesn’t touch down, one does, leaving disaster in its wake for people God loves just as much. Remember that for every person who survives a traffic accident, there is one who doesn’t. Remember that for every cancer survivor, another dies, leaving a hole in the hearts of those who loved the person now gone. No matter how joyful we may be for every Ukrainian who has escaped, the unspeakable acts of Vladimir Putin continue—and thousands of people simply trying to live their everyday lives now lie dead on the streets. And I’m just getting started.

I understand the thoughts and feelings associated with great relief at the things that pass over us. And I have no doubt that there was a for sure time, back in the 1970s, when if Facebook had existed, I might have posted or said the same things. But I was mostly a teenager or young adult then, still viewing God a bit like Santa Claus. He was keeping a list, checking it twice, and determining if things would go well or not-so-well for me based on how closely I followed rules made, based on their beliefs and interpretations of life, by humans just as frail as me, and quite a while ago—before we discovered the earth isn’t flat and the sun doesn’t revolve around it.

Somewhere in the fifty years since, though, as I experienced more, I came to view things differently. (St. Paul said something about that.) For example, I no longer believe that “divine intervention,” another phrase I heard or read this week, ever involves punitive or capricious acts by God to save some and not others from the consequences of the natural law God himself created. As Jesus said, The rain falls on the just and the unjust. (As an aside, I have always been unsure that rain is a negative—ask a few farmers—but just in case the phrase is interpreted so, its corollary is equally true. The sun shines on the just and the unjust, too. The “prosperity gospel” preached by some mega-church evangelists is a bit suspect to me for that reason.) Why do bad things happen to good people? Because the rain falls on the just and the unjust. Bad things happen to bad people too. Summary: Bad things happen to people, no matter whether they’re just or unjust. Hint: You can usually tell the difference by who they blame.

Let me hasten to say that I am not at all saying that the people who wrote “Thank you, Jesus!” or “Praise the Lord!” are mean hearted in any way. I in no way believe that for the overwhelming majority, purposeful or accidental arrogance is involved. I just hope that the next time they are inclined to express relief to the Creator, that they remember that someone who isn’t so relieved—but just as faithful to and just as loved by God—may be listening in pain.

This topic is especially tender to me in that those of us of the Christian tradition now approach Holy Week and Easter, which is superimposed—co-opting in some ways—the Jewish observance of Passover, the remembrance of the Hebrews’ escape from Egypt and the “passing over” of certain forces of destruction and suffering.

Fair warning: Another belief that has flown for me is that Jesus was the “Lamb of God,” or “died for our sins.” Why those ideas “flew” is a discussion for another day and, if you still hold those beliefs, I am not suggesting that I am right and you are wrong, but in my mind, the upcoming focus of the week between Palm Sunday and Easter is the fact that false accusations that Jesus was planning an insurrection, brought by the greedy-and-power-hungry “religious authorities” in charge at the time, resulted in his execution. Unjustly, the Romans believed them and killed Jesus, even sparing a robber thought to be more “deserving” of punitive death. And this despite Jesus’s alleged prayer prior to his arrest that, if possible, “the cup” would be taken from him. Evil would not, as we know, “pass over” him.

Instead, what I learned I learned not from his death, but from his resurrection—that death, no matter how just or unjust, how painful or peaceful, no matter how early or late when compared to the average life expectancy, no matter how fair or unfair we view it, is not, and never will be, anything but a natural event. I learned that loss, although sometimes extremely painful, is not an end point. In this life, as we keep going, we will suffer—we will lose people and relationships and jobs and money and life, as we know it. We will not be “saved” from the consequences of evil (although Jesus did say to pray to be delivered from it when it ensnares us) or “saved” from ever finding ourselves on our knees in grief or from mistreatment by greedy-and-power-hungry folks (and the people they exploit like the fearful folks who yelled for Barabbas) who still populate our lives today.

We are saved from the everlasting despair that loss is the absolute end of anything, the thought that we are unloved or unlovable, the idea that we are more or less valuable than any other human, no matter what others think or say. If we “get” that, in the face of loss, we will, in due course, pick up our mats, and go on, with renewed gratefulness for what survives, ever watchful for new opportunities for joy in front of us. We’re saved from the abject loneliness we sometimes feel at not being known and accepted by another because a God who literally has experienced how humans feel—in good times and bad—will be with us on the journey from beginning to end, no matter what may delight or befall us in between.

To my Muslim friends observing Ramadan, I join you in the holy pursuit of ever-deepening spiritual awareness and closeness to our Maker.

To my Jewish friends, I join you in the sacred contemplation of your ancestral slavery in Egypt and remembrance celebration of the exodus to freedom.

And to my Christian friends, may the lessons of Easter remain with you from this day forward. Celebrate that some days we’ll be “passed over” by the painful experiences of life—and that some days, we will not. Most of the time, our suffering will not come at our own hands or even at the hands of others. It will have nothing at all to do with what we’ve done or not done, achieved or not achieved. And yet, even if we determine that our suffering is a result of our own foibles, life and love and joy persist. Death, where is your victory?

Thank you, God, that today, at least, the quicksand of grief passed over me, for your abiding presence with those for whom it did not, and for the eternal knowledge I have, because of Jesus, that on the days grief does not pass over me, your comforting spirit will be with me.