Amazing! Grace: Was Blind But Now I See ~ Wendy
Repass I was listening to a friend describe grace.
She’s an alcoholic but she’s been sober for several decades now. She said, “how
is it that I have remained sober, whereas others have gone back to drinking?
But for the grace of god go I.”
And this struck a chord with me deeply. I thought about Mary who
over the years would get angry more and more often during times of trouble. When
she had a baby, Mary’s fits of rage became frequent- blaming, yelling,
screaming and hitting in anger at loved ones.
I could see her spiraling into this recurring behavior, completely
blind to the effect she had on other people. Lashing out at loved ones at the
moment when she needed support the most.
How is it that she cannot stop herself and snap out of it? Why
does she seem blind to her own behavior?
Perhaps grace is like when you’re working on a math problem, and
you work at it and try to do it, but you just can’t get it. Then you put it
down. A day later, or a week and all of a sudden you’re like “Ah-Ha!”
Or maybe it’s like when you see someone else mired in
the same kind of addiction you have and you wonder, wow, how did I ever break
free of that? People tell you it’s because you worked hard, but you know deep
down inside that there was a time you couldn’t even see, that you were
absolutely blind. And you wonder in amazement at how you got here.
Or
maybe it’s like what happened to John Newton. John
was a slave ship captain who enjoyed “an easy and creditable way of life” (1)
until he was forced to resign because of health problems. He got an
administrative position, but he eventually got involved with a church and
became a minister. Years later, Newton would
write, "I think I should have quitted [the slave trade] sooner
had I considered it as I now do to be unlawful and wrong. But I never had a scruple upon this head at the time; nor was such a thought ever suggested to me by any friend." (1)
had I considered it as I now do to be unlawful and wrong. But I never had a scruple upon this head at the time; nor was such a thought ever suggested to me by any friend." (1)
He wrote the hymn “Amazing Grace”. Eventually public opinion started to turn away from
slavery. 30 years later he would write a popular pamphlet talking about his
days as a slave trader, apologizing for it and campaigning against slavery.
30 years is a long time. But grace was seeping like water onto a desert in Newton’s world. The culminating effect of changing attitudes in society, the fact that he had to stop working at that job and his entry into the ministry all culminated in him gradually being able to see what he had done.
30 years is a long time. But grace was seeping like water onto a desert in Newton’s world. The culminating effect of changing attitudes in society, the fact that he had to stop working at that job and his entry into the ministry all culminated in him gradually being able to see what he had done.
May we see even though today we are blind. May we recognize our
own blindness so that we might have compassion for the blindness of others.
“Let the desert rejoice.... For waters shall break forth in the
thirsty ground....The wasteland will be turned into an Eden.... You will become
like a watered garden.”(2)
(2) Excerpts from Isaiah, Bible as arranged in
“Addiction & Grace”, Gerald G. May, 1991.
Amazing! Grace. ~ Erik
Walker Wikstrom Amazing
Grace. Perhaps one of the most popular
hymns of all time that nobody every really sings. At least, not the way it was meant to be
sung. That first line? “Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound, that
saved a wretch like me”? It’s been
recast as:
·
That
saved a soul like me . . .
·
That
saved and strengthened me . . .
·
That
saved and set me free . . .
The great Protestant writer Kathleen
Norris has lamented that these alterations are “laughably bland.” The whole point is that the narrator of the
song has known a wretched life . . .
absolutely wretched, horrible . . . and not just the outer circumstances of his
life, but his inner life as well . . . he’s
been a wretch.
And John Newton certainly knew both
things. He was, as is now well known,
involved in the English slave trade – first as a sailor on slave ships and
then, eventually, as a captain. He was
involved with the buying and selling of people. Or, to look at it another way, he was
involved with the debasing and dehumanizing of people to such an extent that
they could be seen as commodities. From
the abolitionist perspective he developed later in his life, and from our
perspective today, that earlier time was certainly most wretched.
And personally he knew a wretched
existence as well. In his days as a
sailor he was continually getting in trouble on ship. He wrote obscene songs about his captain,
songs that were so popular with the crew that they even started singing
along. (Not so popular with his captain,
I’d imagine.) His language was so
profane, in fact, that in a profession rather well known for its salty talk, he
was (and I love this line) “admonished several times for not only using the
worst words the captain had ever heard, but creating new ones to exceed the
limits of verbal debauchery.” On one
occasion he got himself into so much trouble – and I truly wish I knew what
he’d done – that he was chained up below decks like the slaves they were
carrying and was then himself sold off the ship into slavery in Sierra Leon. (I’m thinking he knew a thing or two about
wretchedness.)
He was saved from his enslavement by
another ship’s crew, the crew of the Greyhound,
in whose company he then set sail. It
was while aboard the Greyhound that
he experienced another kind of wretchedness – a severe storm that challenged
the ship to its core. Newton watched as
a crewmate was washed overboard from a spot where he’d been standing only a
moment earlier. When he and another
shipmate were set to operating the pumps, they had to lash themselves to them
so as not to be washed away. And Newton
himself spent eleven hours on deck steering the boat – and this, after hours
and hours of battling the storm in other positions.
At one point, after speaking with the
captain about a possible plan of action, Newton said, “If this will not do,
then Lord have mercy on us.” They made
it through, and surviving this storm provided an opportunity for Newton to
reconsider his life. He saw their
survival as nothing but God’s mercy, yet he knew that he had not only neglected
his own faith but had actively opposed it . . . in himself and others. He was want to ridicule people who spoke of
religious things and even reveled in declaring that their God was nothing but a
myth. And now he felt as though he’d
just been saved by this God he ridiculed.
He felt as though he, a wretch of a man who’d known a wretched life, had
just been saved and suddenly it seemed as if he’d been blind his whole life
before and now could see.
Powerful stuff, right?
Of course, we’re not wretches,
right? I mean, none of us could say that
we’ve lived the kind of wretched life John Newton had, right? That’s why we sing all sorts of things other
than “saved a wretch like me.” Right?
When the Worship
Weavers were discussing this service in our meeting last month one of the
members said that they resonated with the song as someone who was thirty-five
years sober. Looking back at their life
of active alcoholism was without question or doubt looking back at a wretched
life, a life of blindness. Looking at
their life’s trajectory, the gift of sobriety, the grace of sobriety, was a “sweet sound” indeed.
This got me to
thinking about one of my teachers, Gerald May.
Gerry was a psychiatrist who was interested in spiritual direction – he
was also the younger brother of the more famous Rollo May. In his fantastic book Addiction and Grace, Gerry makes the point that there are all kinds
of addictions – the obvious ones like alcohol, drugs, food, and gambling are
just the tip of the iceberg. He suggests
that anything we can’t give up, anything that we find ourselves locked into and
unable to let go of, can be understood as an addiction. So, some people are addicted to the
accumulation of wealth, others to “being nice,” and others to “being
right.” Does any of this ring a bell?
And one of the
things about addiction is that not only are we caught up in it, virtually
powerless to let go of it, but that this is true to our own detriment. It’s not just that you think that making
money is a really good thing, it’s that you think so to such an extent that you
spend all of your time involved in its acquisition even to the point of being
unable to actually enjoy any of it. Or
you think that “being nice” and keeping everybody happy is so important that
you aren’t nice to yourself and you, in your own life, are anything but
happy. Addictions warp our minds and our
hearts, twist our souls so that the good we seek becomes a harm – and we end up
becoming trapped, enslaved.
Some say that
that’s what happened with Thomas Jefferson and slavery – he was intellectually
opposed to the inhuman practice, but he was so caught up in the lifestyle and
the ways of life of his day that he could not let go of it. Enslaved persons were necessary in his kind
of life, and despite the dissonance between the institution of slavery and his
values about freedom he couldn’t let it go.
That was
certainly true of John Newton. Even
after his conversion experience he continued to run slave ships for several
years, although each trip became increasingly more difficult for him until he
finally collapsed from the strain, never to sail again.
The truth is, my
friends, that each of us . . . (I was tempted to write “some of us” in order to
give you an out and increase the chance that you’d feel positively toward me,
something I’ve been known to struggle with) . . . but the truth is that each of
us knows our own kind of wretchedness.
Each of us has our own blindness.
Each of us knows that place – oh, probably not to John Newton’s extent
but don’t let’s let that stand in the way of our acknowledging that we do, in
fact, know it – and if we don’t also know the sweet sound of grace then we know
what it feels like to yearn for it.
And when we feel
it – like the calming of the seas that have been throwing us about; like the
breaking of the storm clouds, the cessation of the rain, and the coming out of
the sun – we may well be surprised.
Amazing! Grace! And that’s part of the truth about grace,
too.
Last week I said
that there is no limit to grace, that it abounds, that it exists all around us
and that we just have to be open to it.
But it’s not as easy as that, is it?
It’s not as simple. There’s
something fundamentally mysterious about grace; it’s beyond our control. I don’t even know for sure whether we should
say that grace is that moment, that event, in which our lives are opened up or
if it’s that ineffable “energy” (for want of a better word) that’s moving in,
and around, and through our lives making those moments, those events,
possible. And that’s probably okay. It’s okay for us to front some mysteries and
allow them to remain mysterious.
What I do know
is that there are “many dangers, toils, and snares” in this life. I know that all of us have our moments of
wretchedness. And I know that I wish
grace on us all.
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1 comment:
Very thought provoking. I wonder about the wretchedness that I have experienced in my life. I think the temptation has been to blame others or circumstance rather than my choices for landing me in those situations. Then Grace can set me free...from blame and self- recrimination. I'm sorry not to be participating in services so far this month. I miss church.
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