Extreme Grace

I haven't written about grace in awhile -- I haven't written at all in awhile, because I've been all exploring Paris this and finishing nursing school that and by-the-by, my after-school program served full-on 216 6th graders a day this week, one of whom came up behind me yesterday and enveloped me in the Biggest Hug Ever, and it. was. amaze., considering that mostly I remember sixth grade boys as being simultaneously underwhelming and exhausting.

But here is grace: because I spiraled -- briefly, like I do -- from the kind of more expansive view of faith I referenced in my last post (remember that? hey, August Amanda!) to Total Emotional Collapse. And then, as is often the case, what seemed like the end of everything was actually just a giant paradigm shift: Oh Wow, as a certain spiky-headed compadre of mine likes to say.

So here's a few things I'm glad to have resolved for myself, things that I'm newly okay with:

• I just have absolutely no interest in an existence structured around, and limited to, those things that can be intellectually understood, proven, and articulated discursively. Play by those rules, and you're just yanking away not just God but all my favorite things about life, like love and imagination and dreams and art.

• It's totally possible that objective reality is a thing, but I find it entirely unlikely that an individual human can perceive it, or can see enough of it to make any but the most qualified and specific truth claims. 

• Some people really love the challenge of trying to push fact and discourse to some sort of limit where it shows them the truth. I think that's awesome, and I will happily benefit from their technology and museums. But the things that interest me most don't have to do with discourse, logic or fact. I'd much rather use these tools to mess around with things dearer to my heart: stories, people, life and meaning. 

• Also-also: irony may be my favorite tool of all, and it makes sense to me that if it's helpful in wrenching a position for myself in relation to say, Christianity, it's equally applicable when approaching other valuable, but incomplete, efforts at understanding the world, like rationalism, science, and the rest of modernities various little darlings. 

This is grace, and I want to pass out uncomfortably-illustrated pamphlets about it on the subway:

• God doesn't take off because I stop thinking the things I learned about sin are true. 

• I don't need to out-blog people who think different from me about Him, or explain in words a reality that exists outside of and before and around language. 

• I don't need any special protection, either from people for whom the literal truth of the Bible is both assumed and necessary or from those who think that reading the Creation story as a gesture towards meaning rather than as scientific data leads directly to QED NO GOD. 

I can say: maybe I feel convinced of God and Christ's existence because I prefer a world understood on those terms, because that world -- however complex and contradictory and challenging -- is also a truer and more generative and more convincing account, for me. Yes, that is probably true.

For me, today (and hopefully moving forward, because this leitmotif is one I'd happily confine to Summer 2013), the Historical reality of a physical Jesus is just uninteresting, when instead I could attend to the experience of Christ in my life, today -- what that means for, say, prison reform or rude "stakeholders" or dealing with a screaming two year old or figuring out how to turn my essentially selfish nature towards the ongoing project of Being Married and other gettings-over of myself.

Why care so much about what Christ looked like in Galilee when clearly my day-to-day existence is screaming for some more attentive consideration of what Christ looks like accosted by panhandlers or managing a rocky start-up program in an urban middle school or as a working mom acclimating to a newly supporting-cast position in her life?

That's basically all I've got as far as apologetics go. I'm not sure what to tell people whose worldview demands that I agree with them in order to satisfy God, or that I do better at explaining myself in order to gain their permission to believe and feel the way I do about God without further intervention. Except for my Triumvirate of Most Awesome Phrases, magic with any custodians and sullen twelve year olds and aggrieved staff members alike:

I hadn't thought of it that way. 

Thank you for bringing that to my attention! 

Is there anything else you need from me?

BOOM. And 6 am came and went without an existential peep from a certain Baby of the World.

Any more grace up in this girl's life this week, and it'd be Christmas.