Glimpses of Grace

“Stuck in a moment that you cannot get out of” is the poetic lament of Bono of U2, offering to the listening world a window into the despair of the human heart. Things are as they are, and they cannot be otherwise. But there is a deeper story, one begun at the beginning of time, in which a surprising grace is given, offering an honest healing of the wound of all wounds, making it possible to find our way into life, becoming more human as we become more holy, seeing what God sees and hearing what God hears. In this column I have reflected on six artists who offer us “glimpses of grace” in and through the vocations that are theirs, imaginatively giving us eyes to see and ears to hear the truest truths of the universe.

There is no mystery as mysterious as grace.

And in the literature of the world, human beings have stumbled over its meaning for as long as we remember. From the Garden on, century after century, culture upon culture, as sons of Adam and daughters of Eve, more often than not, we cannot imagine its possibility, evading its reality in our very bones.

In a thousand ways we argue otherwise, certain that there must be more that can be done, that in fact more that must be done. Like our primordial forebears who instinctively wanted to save themselves, hiding themselves in the Garden, we are ashamed of what they had done and not done. And while their choices became a curse for the cosmos, God provided a way forward in the lamb that was slain. No longer need they be naked, and no longer were they separated from God. In a word, by grace they were saved.

And in every moment of every day since, we too know enough to feel alienated, from God, from ourselves, from each other, and from the creation— at home in the world, and yet, not. In the vain imaginations of our hearts we believe every sort of lie about everything. About God. About ourselves. About each other. About the creation itself.

As the English poet John Donne once wrote,

            ‘Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone,

            All just supply, and all relation;

            Prince, subject, father, son, are things forgot,

            For every man alone thinks he hath got

            To be a phoenix, and that then can be

            None of that kind, of which he is, but he.

            This is the world’s condition now…

 And as it was in the 16th-century, it is now, seemingly even more so. What are we to do with our moment in history? With our time and place? With the responsibility that is ours?

When I want to think more carefully and clearly about things that matter, I often make my way to the French philosopher, Simone Weil, whose uncanny insight into the human heart still teaches us, if we listen. In her Gravity and Grace, she simply and profoundly argues that we are disposed to a downward “death spiral,” pulled down by the gravity of a fallen world, so full of ourselves, so full of ambitions and affections that are mired in sin that we are unable to be anything or do anything that can ever save us— and yet, there is grace too, the unexplainable gift of God which offers us a way out, freeing us from ourselves as the locus of meaning and morality, allowing us to know God more honestly and ourselves more honestly, which is the beginning of all wisdom.

Yes, she has been my teacher; but as attentive as I am to her, I am also a student of John Calvin, another and earlier French intellectual, whose seminal first words of the Institutes of the Christian Religion set forth for the ages that a true knowledge of God is dependent on a true knowledge of self, and that the reverse is true too, in a few pages twining together the truest truths of the universe. When these two agree on something so foundational, we ought to listen—and at my best, I try to.

Simply said, grace is a mystery because it makes the impossible possible, the great wound of all wounds can be healed, that we can know God and that we can be known by God.

Our most important artists have remembered this in every generation, and it is on the reality of that history that we will reflect here, “glimpses of grace” that they have been and are. The biblical stories that echo across the civilizations are always stories of surprising grace, making their way through time as they do. Of Noah who found amazing grace in the eyes of the Lord. Of Jacob and Esau who chose tender grace over the hurt of a lifetime. Of Joseph who offers inexplainable grace to his brothers’s malice. Of David who finds a hard grace in Nathan’s words. Of the prodigal son who is overwhelmed by his father’s grace. Of the wounded man to whom the Samaritan gives grace. And then over centuries to follow, painterly pictures each one in the paintings we know and love that are windows into grace incarnate. More could be said.

But think with me about two novelists, two filmmakers, and two musician from the last centuries, each one with a great gift whose best work is always an artful reflection on grace, amazing as it always is. In their different vocations they each enter into the most difficult of all vocations, the one born of the most ancient of questions, “Is it possible to know the world, and still love the world?”— and so, the writing of Victor Hugo and Wendell Berry, the cinematography of Agnieszka Holland and Zhang Yimou, the songs of Bono and Marcus Mumford.

One more year, one more season of Lenten meditation, I am reading Les Miserables. Not all of it, but as I have for many years, the first book, “A Just Man,” the 100+ pages of the story of Bishop Bienvenu. While the stage production of “Les Mis” is as grand a musical as ever could be, the Bishop gets about five minutes; and while we hear the most wondrous words, “I have bought your soul for God!” we don’t know who he is and why he is— at best we have an impression of a memorable man. The book offers more, from the early years on through, and we understand his pilgrimage, which slowly tells the tale of a just man, which is why I choose to read about him during Lent. I want to ponder him, to think about where he came from, and the way he lived, about the choices he made, the habits of heart that made him him. And most of all I want to read again about the very unusual grace that he embodied, offering himself to all who knocked on his door, and to all who stole from his house… learning from him as I look over his shoulder and through his heart.

If Hugo draws us into a world most of us have never known in his novel about 19th-century France, with a grand gift telling the tales of men and women we know because they are perennial people, Wendell Berry writes about Everyman and Everywoman in ways that we recognize, his literary universe born of 20th-century life and times. While most of us will never live on family-owned farmland along the Kentucky River, we see ourselves in his stories of the Port William Membership, novel after novel about men and women, farmers and families, about barbers and lawyers, whose life together over a hundred years teaches all with ears to hear something about being human. Of all that he has written, one story stands out as I think about grace, “Thicker Than Liquor,” a short story in the collection, That Distant Land. Wheeler Catlett, whom we come to know and love through many stories, is a young boy as this begins, the nephew of Uncle Peach, his mother’s brother. Rolling and playing they once were, but can no longer be as Wheeler grows up into his adolescence, with shame realizing that his uncle is a drunk. Over the years there is a hurtful distance that comes between them, and then a day when his mother and father ask him to go into the big city of Louisville and bring Uncle Peach home from a hotel where has been found at the end of a terrible drunken spree. To cut to the chase, Wheeler goes, and brings his uncle home on the train, wanting to serve his folks but resenting his traveling companion who vomits on him again and again. Finally they get to Uncle Peach’s house, and he is put to bed, sleeping off his drunkenness. But Wheeler, seeing him toss-and-turn, newly-wed that he is and longing to be home with his bride, decides to stay through the night, sleeping beside his long-loved kin— even putting his arm on Uncle Peach’s shoulder to keep him through the hours, giving a great grace to someone who didn’t deserve anything. But that is grace, always and everywhere.

Almost a million miles from Kentucky and its most gifted storyteller, is China and its most honored filmmaker, Zhang Yimou. Known for “Red Sorghum,” “Raise the Red Lantern,” “Not One Less,” “The Shanghai Triad,” and more, one of his most recent films is “Coming Home.” The story of a family stretched taut across the years of modern China, the film begins as the cultural revolution is losing its way, still oppressing and yet gasping, unable to sustain its terror. A mother and her daughter have suffered deeply because of the imprisonment of their husband and father, a professor who 20 years earlier was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and like thousands upon thousands was wrongly sent to a labor camp to be “reeducated.” When he is finally released, he comes home, eager to see the ones he most loves, only to find that his wife— played by Gong Li, Yimou’s favorite actress —cannot remember him. Traumatized by her years of loneliness, something has happened to her memory, and tragically, she does not recognize her husband. Try as he does, with gentleness and persistence over days which becomes years, her mind cannot be awakened; something has been broken, and in this life will not be healed. What does it mean to be her husband? To still husband his wife? All that is possible is the most simple grace, which is the love he offers.

From the artful imagination of one of Europe’s most distinguished  filmmakers, Agnieszka Holland, the Polish film, “In Darkness,” is a story set in the 1940s of terrified men, women and children who spend fourteen months underground, overwhelmed by rats and smells that were beyond what is imaginable. Though at the beginning he does not know what he is seeing, having no heart to see— therefore not having eyes that see —a sewer worker in Lvov is forced to see things he had never imagined, the opening salvo into the horrors of the Holocaust as its destruction came to his streets and his city. A very ordinary man in a very ordinary place, a glorious ruin in his own body, more local burglar than great hero, he is anti-Semitic, dismissive of the Jews, knowing very little of them, and indifferent to them. What is remarkable in this film is the transformation of the man’s loves, and therefore of his life. In one very poignant scene, born of a moment of great crisis, a little girl gives him her hand, offering her trust; with true affection he takes it, leading her to safety— and we all cry, watching him move from a hard-hearted “so what?” as he hears the aching cries of the Jewish people of Poland, to an open-hearted affection that is willing to do whatever is needed to keep them safe, at the very end finally exclaiming, “These are my Jews! My Jews! These are my work!” And yes, this too is grace, a deeply-wrought grace.

The final two are singers extraordinaire, Bono and Marcus Mumford. One Irish, one English, both knew something of God in their growing up years, both deciding along the way to sing their songs for the whole world, rather than making art that was more parochial, stories themselves which are of honest interest, but not for here. If Bono has recently told more of his story in the autobiography, Surrender, walking through the years of being a son to his mother and father, their parenting forming him in every way that he cannot ever forget— for blessing and for curse —Mumford has recently given the world a solo album, “Self-Titled,” after years with his group, Mumford and Sons.  Both men have suffered, still bearing the wounds of their suffering— and that cannot not be anything other than grievous. And yet, both have songs simply named, “Grace.” If Bono poetically acknowledges that

            Grace, it’s the name for a girl,

            It’s also a thought that changed the world…

            She travels outside

            Of karma, karma.

Then Mumford sings,

            And yeah, see, there will come a time

            When it won’t feel just like living it over and over

            With the weight of the shadow on your shoulders

            And I hear there’s healing just around this corner

            This all behind

            I’m fine, it’s alright

Genius is not too much of a word for these artists, novelists and filmmakers and musicians each one. But they are also marked by grace. Seeing the world as it is in its woundedness, crying out against the wrongs of history and human nature, feeling its pains and sorrows as deeply as can be felt, and yet giving grace. The vocations which carry them in and through life have given them eyes to see something more than karma, something more than the fated existence which seems required by the evolutionary determinism of the West and the pantheisms of the East. We are not stuck in moments that we cannot get out of— by grace, yes, only by grace.

What are we to make of this? What do we learn from this remembering of good work by good people? This, plainly this: we are not left “lost in the cosmos” in the inimitable words of Walker Percy the essayist and novelist. Rather it is our vocation— and a very good word it is —to love God and to love what God loves, even and especially the very now-but-not-yet world that is ours. In fact the deepest meaning of vocation is to know the world and still love the world, not only globally but very locally. In the families and friendships of our lives, which is where our stumbling begins; but also in the questions that run through every heart about what we do with what we know in our complex and diverse relationships and responsibilities, especially through the work of our lives in the arts and architecture, in economics and politics, in literature and science, in mathematics and engineering. Called to know, we are called to love, as God does.

These graces do not save us from our sin, but they are true graces nevertheless, common graces, common graces for the common good. And they are central to what it means to be more human and more holy; as Irenaeus of the 1st-century church taught us, “The glory of God is man fully alive.” Simply said we are most human when we are most holy, as we are most holy when we are most human.

To know the brokenness of life and the world, to take in the hurts of history as we do, to hold the wounds of our very wounded world as we must, we are called into the vocation which is God’s, to know the world and still love the world— as butchers and bakers and candlestick—makers, and as novelists, as filmmakers, and as musicians, and more, much more.

The featured image is courtesy of Sam Keyes and used with his kind permission for Cultivating. 

Steven Garber

Steven Garber is a teacher of many people in many places, through the years of his life drawn in again and again to the question of vocation, of who we are, of why we are, and of what we do with our lives. A native of the mountain valleys of the West, places that have formed him in every way that matters, he has lived with his wife Meg in Virginia for 35 years, a life among friends and flowers that keep his heart alive. And his bookshelves are full of books that he loves, prizes by Charles Dickens, Leo Tolstoy, Wendell Berry, Abraham Kuyper, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Dorothy Sayers, and Walker Percy.

A professor and an author, his most recent book is The Seamless Life: A Tapestry of Love and Learning, Worship and Work. The founder of the Washington Institute for Faith, Vocation and Culture, he is Senior Fellow for Vocation and the Common Good for the M.J. Murdock Charitable Trust, and also works for the Economics of Mutuality Project as Senior Fellow for Vocation and the Public Good.

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