Grace |
||
What is grace? |
"Grace is God's favor towards us, unearned and undeserved; by grace God forgives our sins, enlightens our minds, stirs our hearts, and strengthens our wills." From the Catechism of Episcopal Church. |
|
In the West, we ordinarily think of grace in Christian terms. In Christianity, grace is God's love that redeems mankind from sin and enables men and women to fulfill their potential as Christians. |
||
Grace also has a humanistic meaning. Non-Christian religious philosophers, phenomenological psychologists, and humanistic existential philosophers have persuasively argued that the experience of grace identified in Christian doctrine is a universal and fundamental feature of the formation of the healthy human personality. |
||
In humanism , grace is each person's rightness of being, their confidence of belonging, and their potential for self-transcending growth. Grace brings freedom, because it gives the strength to meet society's most difficult moral challenges, rather than simply failing before them. |
||
Grace is bestowed by the caring concern of others, as parents give love to children. They know the child needs their love to develop as a healthy person. When children become older, they learn that other adults, whom they may not personally know, have also given them grace. Their historical ancestors, for instance, may have graced them by setting up the circumstances in which they could fulfill themselves. An immigrant ancestors' decision to flee religious persecution by coming to the United States would have been made for their descendants as well as for themselves. So emigration was the grace that Elisabeth's ancestors gave to her. They sought to escape German anti-Semitism that in 1923 they presciently identified with Hitler. That she should live today, a free Jewish professional woman, when distant kin were murdered in the Holocaust, is her immigrant ancestors' grace to her. |
||
The Christian doctrine of grace helps us to understand another characteristic of the humanistic experience of grace. God's grace is notcannot bepassively received. Negative will thwarts the intent of grace; the Christian must actively have faith to be graced. |
||
In analogy, in humanism we say that persons do not passively experience the grace given by parents or others, or bequeathed by their forebears. Only as they actively work in projects to engage the past can they bring their heritage alive. |
||
Freedom is necessary for a healthy personality. Growing up, we first keenly feel the need for freedom in adolescence. The freedom adolescents obtain to realize their potential and to exercise their moral capacity is given to them as a social product, not as a simple result of natural biological growth. |
||
Freedom is a way of being in the world delivered to the adolescent through years of adults' caring concern. In this sense, grace is a social relationship. |
||
We have described our house and Lucknow in New Hampshire as giving grace. Of course, a "house" cannot give grace. A house is just boards and batten - a material construction. A "home" can give grace. A home is a house invested with symbolic value. A home gives grace when it makes apparent the caring intentions of others for us. "Home" does not need to be a physical dwelling. When we say we are "at home," we mean that we are living within the shelter of other persons' caring concern for our well being. This shelter is a way of being in the world, rather than a physical or geographical location. We think of the biological family and its dwelling as "home" only because Western society has traditionally so organized itself. Home is the moral setting in which we fully realize ourselves. It could just as well be a circle of friends experiencing a journey togetherpioneers moving to a new world, women helping a friend give birth, a unit of soldiers facing combat together, or pilgrims walking to a religious shrine. |
||
Living in our house illuminates for us my family's home project - their history of creating homes with place. They lived as staying. When we moved into our new home, we took out memorabilia, old photographs, and family heirlooms from storage boxes and displayed them for the first time. And for the first time I understood why my family left them to me. They wanted to project their homes through those objects into mine, thereby providing me with the sense of place they had created. Their grace to me is my home -- my experience of belonging and my sense of my rightness to be. |
||
Our heritage reconstruction organizes our heirlooms, genealogy, and stories to convey our family's sense of home as place to our children. We believe our family tradition of home is crucial to their having their sense of rightness of being and their sense of belonging. |
||
She knows. |
||
To be and to belong are the grace of our children's heritage that will make them at home where ever they are. |
||
NotesThe colored drawings of the little boy and girl are by Maryann Sterling, 1008 O'Callaghan, Sparks NV 89434. |
||
July 31, 1998; September 1, 2002. |