Agents of Grace

A former colleague of mine suffered from Seasonal Affective Disorder – at this time of year she had a bright light panel beside her desk to compensate for the winter’s lack of sunshine.

The other morning, as I woke up one of our daughters at 7am as she’d asked me to, I felt intensely the preciousness of these young women to me, the depth of my love for them. I cherish them, in the phrase which came to mind ‘like the apple of my eye.’

And then I remembered that those words are used in the Bible to describe God’s love for God’s people, for each and every one of us. Each individual is – and therefore I am – as precious (or more precious) to God as our daughters are to me.

But that raises the question ‘Why?’ Why this long season of disorder and sadness? Why a pain-wracked world? What’s God’s love worth? Is it merely words? Is God powerless, or absent, or dead?

This week I read an interview with the notable Scottish artist Joyce Gunn Cairns in which she describes wrestling with this. It was contained in Ron Ferguson’s moving biography of George Mackay Brown, The Wound and the Gift. On the one hand, Joyce Gunn Cairns  says ‘I do feel that I benefit from a benign presence.’ Yet she feels it hard to reconcile ‘that sense of being singled out’ with the reality of living in Edinburgh’s West Pilton surrounded by kids who are messed up by their environment from the day they’re born. (The word she used is stronger than ‘messed’.)

If an all powerful God loves these kids why doesn’t God act? We talk about God giving us freedom of choice, and argue that genuine freedom involves living with the consequences of bad choices. But we’re still uneasy. If God’s heart throbs with a greater love than my love for my daughters then why do we not see more intervention?

The only adequate answer is the death of Jesus on the cross. Jesus was, more than any of us, the ‘apple of God’s eye’, yet God did not spare him. God willingly gave him up to cosmic spiritual anguish  - and Jesus willingly embraced this anguish – in order to transform the world, to bring light and healing, to initiate a new season of grace which will bring sorrow to an end.

But still the questions come. If this is true, why are its results not more evident? Must it always be grace tomorrow, grace in a coming dimension, never grace now, here. Never grace today. But we’re forgetting that the sadness of the season can blind us to the reality of the real presence of grace in the here-and-now, the sprouting mustard seed of change in lives and communities.

And in fact it is the role of Christians as God’s partners to be agents of this grace, agents of light and justice and love. And we are each to do this in our own unique ways – not necessarily by signing up to help in a church programme, though that may be what we’re called to. We are to what we are called to do, whatever it is, to be who we’re called to be.

Joyce Gunn Cairns struggles as I do with questions about faith, and there was a time when she found her vocation as a painter a burden. She recalls praying ‘Please God, if there’s a purpose in what I’m struggling to say, show me a way.’ And she says she has been gifted ‘a level of liberation’ by ‘struggling to honour’ the role she was called to, to walk the beckoning way.

I think it helps us discern who we are and what our role is when we realise that both we, and those we live and work with are each equally precious, cherished by God. And it helps, secondly, to know our failures.

Joyce is aware of her own inner imperfections, and has she says ‘to live with that raw awareness of just how unpleasant a person I am.’ It’s when we have a faith which permits us to view ourselves unflinchingly as we are, and bring our who conflicted selves into the presence of God, into that cherishing love that we experience grace, and become channels of grace to others.

For to stand, in this season of sadness in the light of God’s love is to glimpse, as Joyce Gunn Cairns puts it ‘something that’s holding and binding.’

And as we choose to be the people we are called to be, following the call of our vocation, we will be sparks of light, whispers of grace, sprouting tendrils of mustard seed growth, so that we will be able to say something similar to Joyce Gunn Cairns ‘I’m no angel myself, but some of the things I’ve produced have a touch of the angelic about them.’

(Christian Viewpoint column from the Highland News dated 29th November 2012)