race is love freely given, with no restrictions and no demands on the person who is loved. Grace chooses to accept and respect other people simply because they are part of God’s creation, made in God’s image, and because God loves them. Grace is not only God’s gift to us individually, but our gift to other people.

God’s path of grace winds gracefully through the woods of this world filled with the sounds of people crying out for simple respect and for love freely given.

Gracious thoughts flow more freely for me now than ten years ago. I confess to a natural tendency to be critical of people, to see them do something “wrong” and to quickly “know” what they “should” do. Because I am naturally passive, I usually would not tell them, unless they asked. But the thoughts and judgments were there.

As a child I learned what Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount: “Do not judge” and “First take the log out of your own eye so you can see clearly to take the splinter out of your neighbor’s eye.” Yet I did not live up to those words. Judgments, even condemnations, came easily.

In the past ten years, an important path of my journey has been to move toward grace, toward love freely given, toward a non-judgmental and gracious attitude toward other people. It is not an easy path to walk.

THE GRACE OF GOD

We hear grace in these words from John’s gospel: God did not send [the] Son into the world to con-demn the world, but to save [heal] the world through him. [John 3:17] God loved the world and sent light into the darkness of this world because of divine grace, as a gift because of God’s own choice and not because of anything we had done. This is the gospel of grace.

If some choose not to accept that grace and choose not to come into the light of God’s love, they are like people given a wrapped present who set it down and never open it and never enjoy it. But the gift was given and will not be taken back.

In Romans 5 Paul describes God’s grace. While we were set against God, while we were still refusing to even acknowledge God, God loved us and gave the Son for us. God’s love does not depend on anything we have done or ever will do. Divine love is unconditional.

Divine grace appears from the beginning of the Bible. God created all things, formed the earth and all of creation, created the animals and human beings. Then God said, “It is very good.” Creation is love freely given. Creation is grace. Living beings were created to extend their own life and spread out through the whole earth. I imagine that God looked upon all of this, as any creator might, and smiled. Maybe God laughed a hearty laugh that pealed throughout the earth. Grace fills the earth with laughter.

Grace characterizes all that God does. With each story in scripture, we see God’s grace in action. Adam and Eve are not destroyed, only kept from returning to a place of unfaithfulness or protected from knowledge too great to bear, perhaps. Cain was not killed after he murdered his brother; rather God put a mark on his forehead to keep other men from doing what God chose not to do. Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob all made some poor decisions and used people in their lives in ways we might consider immoral. Yet God worked through them to establish a people to carry the name of God into all the world.

Moses did not want to go back to Egypt, but then he filled with pride at what God did through him and took credit for it. Rahab was a prostitute. Samson was a violent womanizer and not particularly religious. David com-mitted adultery and ordered the death of the woman’s husband so people would assume the baby David fathered belonged to the husband. Solomon taxed the people so excessively, living lavishly with their money, that the people rebelled after his death.

The stories continue all through the Hebrew Bible. God works through the lives of men and women who are far from perfect. Some were not even particularly people of faith or of faithful lives. Some committed what we might call flagrant immorality and sin. Yet God worked in them and through them in ways that changed the world for the better. God’s grace is like the melody line holding together a beginners’ orchestra trying to play a symphony.

PAUL’S EXPERIENCE OF GRACE

Paul wrote more directly about grace in his letters to the churches than most biblical writers. To the church in Philippi he recounted some of the many reasons he had reason to boast as a Jew and a Pharisee and a man who had kept the law. Then he said none of that mattered; it was all like refuse thrown onto the garbage heap. He spoke in a gentle, humble spirit and said something like this: “I am not perfect. I have much to learn. But as a runner leaning toward the finish line, I press on with all the energy I have to reach the goal God set out for me.” [See Philippians 3]

God’s grace gave Paul a humble confidence. He knew what he had experienced, and he knew what had been revealed to him. He knew the scriptures, too, but based his preaching and life more on his experience of Jesus through the Spirit than on the tradition he had received. In fact the tradition was what he often chal-lenged and even contradicted if what the Spirit had done in and through him spoke differently.

The early council in Jerusalem [see Acts 15] saw these new Christians accept the story of what God did in their midst as more authoritative than the scripture and tradition they had received. Their Jewish scriptures (the Christian Old Testament) taught circumcision as an es-sential requirement for Jewish men. When Gentiles (non-Jews) believed in Christ, they questioned that.

When the church gathered, and the leaders sought a decision, they listened to the stories of Paul and of Peter and of what they were convinced God had done in bring-ing these men and women to faith in Christ and giving them the Spirit. In contradiction to the scriptural tradition, they said it was no longer necessary.

Of the four things they said were still important, though not essential for salvation [not eating food sacrificed to idols, not eating meat with blood or from strangled animals, and abstaining from sexual immorality] one was later rejected by Paul in his letter to the church in Rome as obligatory upon the Christian. Paul said eating food sacrificed to idols was a matter of conscience. [See Romans 14]

Paul’s experience of divine grace gave him a vision of spiritual freedom greater than most prophets. It is for freedom that Christ has set us free, he wrote in perhaps his earliest letter. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery. [Galatians 5:1] The “yoke of slavery” he warned about is the law, the written letter that kills, as he described it - not the Torah itself, perhaps, but the centuries of additions to it.

Paul understood that grace and freedom go to-gether, freedom from the suffocating burden of trying to live up to law in the form of religious rules and regulations no matter who creates the rules. He admonished these Galatian Christians not to establish their own new regula-tions nor to try to live up to what other religious leaders, both Jew and Gentile, forcefully urged upon them.

We are not in a right relationship with God be-cause we live up to the law, Paul said. Nothing we can do will accomplish that. Christianity’s traditional notion of going to heaven or earning rewards by what we do goes directly against all that the apostle said the Spirit taught him.

Grace is love freely given, not earned, not bought, not gained by begging, but given freely and without reason except God’s gracious love.

GRACE AND LOVE

One Wednesday night a small Bible study group talked about whether God hears the prayers of the Jews, because the then-current president of the Southern Baptist Convention said God does not. I advocated for an understanding of scripture which says that God hears all people who call out in prayer for help. Two women argued with me. Finally, one asked: “Then what is the point of being a Christian if God hears the prayers of just anyone?”

Grace does not limit the love of God, nor does it limit God’s willingness to respond to the needs of people whoever they are. If God loves the world, then God loves the whole world. No exceptions. If God was in Christ reconciling the world, God reconciled the whole world. If God extends grace to anyone, God extends grace to all. Otherwise how could it be grace?

As a child growing up in church and in a Christian home, I learned what Jesus taught. I learned the supreme value of love for God and for each other. But practicing a life of love has to be learned through the temptations, trials, and testing of our relationships with people. We learn how to love slowly, one day at a time, one rela-tionship after another. No two people are alike. No two relationships are the same. Love in one context may not be love in another.

Learning grace often proves to be the hardest lesson of love. To freely give love to people challenges our moral sensibilities because we have been taught that we must earn love. “I love you because….” seems a reason-able, appropriate way to express our love to another person. But the “because” shouts out that our love is conditional, dependent on that specific reason.

Our conscious mind may not think it, but in our soul we ask, “Would you love me IF….” - If I were not whatever that “because” says about me, would you love me anyway? I might ask:

• If I were not handsome, would you love me?
• If I were not a good boy, would you love me?
• If I were not smart, would you love me?
• If I were not … - would you love me anyway?

When we say “I love you because…,” we may not intend

to say our love is conditional, but the inner message says it is.

The journey of love follows the path of grace. If we choose another path, we also leave the way of love. The church has too often chosen another path. If salvation depends on believing a certain set of doctrines, is that grace? If being welcome in a congregation depends on living according to standards set by the people of that church, is that grace? If acceptance at the table (whether literal or symbolic) depends on being in agreement with everyone at the table, is that grace?

Grace does not come easily. We stumble along this path of love because the rocks of religious and cultural expectations keep surfacing. We use “God-language” to make our all-too-human categories of moral and spiritual acceptability sound righteous, including such attitudes as these:

• God hates sin. This is sin, therefore God hates it, and so do I.
• God can only accept the righteous into heaven. This behavior is unrighteous. This person is not among those who God will accept. Neither can I.
• God says in the Bible that we must believe in Jesus. So those who do not believe in Jesus [the way I do] cannot be accepted.

The variations abound, but the melody the same. It is a harsh tune, a grating sound.

MY EXPERIENCE OF GRACE

Years of living as the older son in an older son community made me rigid. My conscious journey of transformation into a more loving person began suddenly. Within a matter of weeks my eyes opened and cleared as a newborn baby begins to see, not comprehending every-thing but becoming aware of surroundings and of itself in a new way.

It felt like a death, a tomb-experience. But it was more a womb-experience, a new birth into a way of living I thought I already knew. But I did not.

The way of love had been an intellectual exper-ience, a head-knowledge of something I taught and preached about and urged others to follow. Yet my love came mostly from the head, not the heart or the soul. My love was conditional, dependent on what other people did or did not do.

As an older son, I had well-established boundaries for myself and for other people. I knew the rules of be-havior and belief and issued the call and challenge, the admonition and warning, to other people to live up to them. I thought this was what Jesus meant when he said, “Be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect.” [Matthew 5:48] Do what we’re supposed to do. Follow the rules. Stay inside the boundaries.

Living that way made me rigid. A few years after I began this journey of transformation, a man who had been a prayer partner, a friend, and a deacon in the church I served as pastor said to me: “When you came, you were rigid.”

“Rigid?” I responded. “Are you sure you mean ‘rigid’”?

And he said, “That’s exactly what I mean.”

And I knew he was right. I had been rigid. I still am to some extent, but the sharp edges were more rounded now. Other people found me more comfortable to be with, more gracious, more loving than I had been.

I remember the first time in my life when I said I was sorry without adding “but….” to my apology. After 45 years of life and 25 as a pastor, I finally understood the grace of saying “I’m sorry” without adding anything to it.

I always rationalized the apology because I almost always thought I was right. To this day I consider every decision, almost every word, carefully. I weigh the pros and cons of the consequences of my words, my actions, my decisions at great length. Not as much as I used to, but still too much.

When I considered all the reasons for or against something and made my decision, I was clear in my mind that I made the right decision. If someone didn’t like it, I was sorry they didn’t like it; but I was sure I was right. Apologizing for anything when you are sure you are right is difficult for anyone to do. It was for me.

The day I said I was sorry followed the sudden awareness of who I had been all those years. For the first time I saw my rigidity, my hardness of spirit, my uncom-promising attitude. For the first time I knew it didn’t matter if I thought I had done the right thing (or at least had not done anything wrong). What mattered was that I did not truly love the other person from the heart, only the mind. And loving from the mind is never enough.

“I’m sorry you feel that way” is not enough. Grace does not characterize any of these “apologies”:

• “I’m sorry you were hurt.”
• “I’m sorry it happened.”
• “I’m sorry you don’t understand.”
• “I’m sorry, but you…”
• “I’m sorry, but I’m not the only one who…”

We all know the variations on these apologies, either on the giving or receiving end, probably both. And when we’re on the receiving end, we know in our spirit there is no grace, no love, in these words.

Did God suddenly transform me into a paragon of love? Of course not. With Paul I have to say that I am not perfect. I have not arrived. But I am on the journey, and I press on toward the life God intends for me to live, a life of grace, freedom, and love.

GRACE AND FREEDOM

This three-fold foundation for The Spiritual Exer-cises of St. Ignatius has become an important part of my life in recent years. The formation of lives characterized by grace, freedom, and love takes time. This transformation of life surges out of the scriptures like ocean waves rolling onto the beach and pulling back into the water whatever it finds. The Spirit draws us into the water of life, a great ocean filled with living beings, through this call to grace, freedom, and love. God desires every person to walk this path through life and constantly reaches out to draw us into the embrace of divine grace.

In this Ignatian way of spiritual formation, we learn indifference as a means of grace. Imagine taking every decision (every word and action), holding it up before God, and saying “Whatever you desire I am ready to do.” That is indifference. I hold up to God every interpretation of scripture, every belief, every perception of what is right and wrong, every moral value, and I say “whatever you desire I am ready to do.” I hold up to God every relation-ship in my life and say “whatever you desire, O God.”

I hold up to God everything in life and ask for grace to know what God desires. The knowledge of God’s desires comes from within, welling up from the fountain of God’s presence within the heart and soul. Such know-ledge comes out of love. It comes out of freedom. I am no longer bound by the rules I once learned, the boundaries I once established, the regulations set for me by others.

Neither am I free to do whatever I choose. Paul also said to the Galatians: Do not use your freedom to indulge the sinful nature; rather, serve one another in love. [Galatians 5:13] Love establishes whatever bound-aries are needed. Love sets whatever standards are es-sential. Love formulates whatever regulations are appro-priate to the situation.

As I continue this journey, love teaches me that my idea of the boundaries and standards are far different than what God desires. God’s love frees us from rigidity, from arrogance, from the false perception that we are always right. Love frees us to say “I’m sorry.”

Grace frees us to say, “I don’t know everything; maybe I need to understand more than I do about this.” Mystery weaves a thread of grace through all of life. It allows us to hold things with open hands and humble hearts. This mystery is not a riddle with a solution, nor a mystery story which has a surprise ending, but deep mystery which encompasses more than we can ever finally know or understand. And it is a mystery that can only be grasped by the heart.

Grace allows mystery to be part of our relation-ships, knowing that we cannot fully understand any person or any situation. We do not even really know ourselves. How often I have said, “Why did I do that? I’m not like that.” But I did it. I said it. Something sits in the shadow of my being which I do not yet fully see or understand.

Paul describes that mystery in Romans 7: I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do….For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do - this I keep on doing.

We all live in the same mystery, and so we need to hear one another’s stories. We need to pay attention to the mystery in other people, and listening to their stories of what they understand about themselves helps us do that.

GRACE LISTENS

Grace does not judge other people but sits with them, listening to their stories of what has happened to them through life and of who they understand themselves to be.

When I listen to a woman who is considering an abortion, I want to understand (as much as I can) what has happened and why the woman feels so deeply about this. I want to know her story of what led to this moment and her hopes and disappointments, her longing and her de-spair, that are pushing her in that moment toward a de-cision to end the life within her.

When I listen to a man who is gay, I want to understand (as much as I can) how he came to that know-ledge about himself, what his struggles and fears and joys have been in the journey of life. I want to know his hopes and disappointments, his longing and despair, of what it means to be gay in this culture and in the church.

Grace draws me into listening to the story and mystery of the other person’s life and heart, without judg-ment, without thinking he or she has a problem that needs to be solved. Maybe she does, maybe not. But the other person needs to come to that choice within himself or herself and to ask for help, if help is what he or she seeks. I need just to listen to the story and wait for the person to tell me if he or she needs or wants something from me.

Some years ago I became aware that I found it hard to look someone in the eyes, and that I was often attracted or repelled by someone’s face. That awareness made me more conscious as I read and listened to what others experience, and I realized it is a common human experience.

Facial expressions and what we see in another person’s eyes are often the first and primary means we have of “reading” that other person. We even have ord-inary phrases we use to describe our reactions: He has a kind face; She has shifty eyes; He has a hard look to him; She can see into my soul.

We don’t communicate just with words; indeed the words we speak are only a small part of how people understand us. We watch people’s faces and eyes as they speak, and we interpret their words - honest, insincere, caring, suspicious - on the basis of whether they look directly at us and smile, for instance, or glance away and frown.

My awareness of the importance of “face” in com-munication opened my eyes when I read the scriptures. “People could not see the face of God,” it says. Or “God looks upon us with kindness.” Or “God looks away from us because of sin.” Or “God’s face turns toward us and gives us peace.”

Grace, I have come to believe, is the embrace of God’s smile. Not just that God is looking our way, not just paying attention to us, but God seeing into our soul and smiling with love at us. And God’s call to grace in our relationships is to be like that - paying attention to people as they are and smiling with love at them.

GRACIOUS PEOPLE

Jesus does not use the word, but grace is the foundation for the Sermon on the Mount. Gracious people are:

• Those who are merciful, pure of heart, and peacemakers
• Those who go and reconcile with someone
• Those who love their enemy
• Those who forgive others even as they seek forgiveness
• Those who seek first the kingdom
• Those who refuse to judge others
• Those who do to others only what they desire in return

As a child I learned the importance of listening to what Jesus said and doing it, like the wise ones who build their lives on the practice of Jesus’ words. In my continuing journey, I am learning that such practice in-cludes living in grace as freely-given love.

In Romans 12, Paul’s encouragement to the Christians in that city also speaks of grace. Gracious people lead lives characterized by:

• Sincere love
• Devotion to one another
• Honoring of others above ourselves
• Joyful hope and patience
• Sharing with people in need
• Practicing hospitality
• Blessing those who oppose us
• Laughing and crying with people according to their need
• Living in harmony with each other
• Being humble and willing to be with all kinds of people
• Refusing to repay evil for evil
• Choosing peace as much as it depends on us
• Seeking to overcome evil with good

The apostle and Jesus both call us by their lives and their words to live gracious lives in all our relationships. The way of grace is the way of life for those who claim the name of Jesus.

The Practices of Love: Generosity