The Arsenal of Grace

Who hasn’t seen at least one of the Star Wars movies? In these movies, as in most, there is a dark force or presence known as the ‘Emperor’. That’s the fellow that Darth Vador took his orders from. Then there are the Jedi Knights that represent the good force. In practically every story, whether literary or cinematic, there is this struggle between the good force and the bad force. This struggle not only comprises the essence of every good story, but if you look at the key markers along your journey in life, you may see signs of this struggle between the ‘good’ force and the ‘bad’ force as well. That’s why I was most fascinated by Philip Yancey’s chapter on ‘The Arsenal of Grace’ in his book, "What's So Amazing About Grace". When I first read that chapter, it sounded like he was about to discuss the arsenal of weapons that Grace could use against the ‘bad’ force. In fact earlier in Chapter 3 Mr. Yancey states that: "Grace is Christianity’s best gift to the world, a spiritual nova in our midst exerting a force stronger than vengeance, stronger than racism, stronger than hate." So what weapons does grace, or what some call 'amazing grace',  have in its arsenal? Are they really powerful enough to overcome the ‘bad’ force? I’m not trying to trivialize evil by calling it the ‘bad’ force. We have all experienced evil from within and from without. It is no joking matter. There have been times, in moments of despair, when I feel that Grace doesn’t have a chance in this struggle against the evil that men do. As a Vietnam veteran I represent an ever-diminishing percentage of the American population that has actually experienced the large-scale evil that a long- term war represents. It is very real to me. A person lacking in this kind of intimate experience of evil might have less credibility in tackling this question regarding the arsenal of grace.

This arsenal is comprised of any and all works of love.  There are thousands of human actions or activities that might be included in what I would call works of love.  Let’s look at some of the examples that Philip Yancey provides:

"Martin Luther King had developed a sophisticated strategy of war fought with grace, not gunpowder. He never refused to meet with his adversaries. He opposed policies but not personalities. Most importantly, he countered violence with nonviolence, and hatred with love. ‘Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred,’ he exhorted his followers. ‘We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again, we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force."

King said that "The end is reconciliation; the end is redemption; and the end is the creation of the beloved community." King, I might also add, was willing to sacrifice his life for his dream. And so the forces of divisiveness and racism received a major set back at the hands of the grace filled Martin Luther King and his followers.

Another example of a work of love that Yancey provided, albeit on a somewhat smaller scale than King’s, was that of a black woman in South Africa in 1994 during the time of Apartheid. This woman "…was walking on the street with her children when a white man spat in her face. She stopped, and said, "Thank you, and now for the children." Nonplussed, the man was unable to respond."

Mr. Yancey also sites an example from the Philippines:

"Who can forget the images from the Philippines, when common people knelt before fifty-ton tanks, which lurched to a halt as if colliding with an invisible shield of prayer. The Philippines is the only Christian-majority country in Asia, and it was here that the weapons of grace overcame the weapons of tyranny. When Benigno Aquino stepped off the plane in Manila, just before his assassination, he had a speech in his hand with this quote from Gandhi: "The willing sacrifice of the innocent is the most powerful answer to insolent tyranny that has yet been conceived by God or man." Aquino never got the chance to deliver that speech, but his life—and his wife’s—proved those words prophetic. The Marcos regime suffered a fatal blow."

A little known story about the falling of the Berlin Wall is also provided for our edification:

"The Cold War, says former Senator Sam Nunn, ended "not in a nuclear inferno, but in a blaze of candles in the churches of Eastern Europe." Candlelight processions in East Germany did not show up well on the evening news, but they helped change the face of the globe. First a few hundred, then a thousand, then thirty thousand, fifty thousand, and finally five hundred thousand—nearly the entire population of the city—turned out in Leipzig for candlelight vigils. After a prayer meeting at St. Nikolai Church, the peaceful protestors would march through the dark streets, singing hymns. Police and soldiers with all their weapons seemed powerless against such a force. Ultimately, on the night a similar march in East Berlin attracted one million protestors, the hated Berlin Wall came tumbling down without a shot being fired."

These examples should provide some idea what Mr. Yancey means by his arsenal of grace. But I think a little more clarity would be helpful. He writes, "Grace means there is nothing we can do to make God love us more … and there is nothing we can do to make God love us less. … God already loves us as much as an infinite God can possibly love." If grace is something that God freely gives to us, how can we have an arsenal of it? My personal view is that Grace is something that is freely offered to us all the time; but we, as free agents, choose to accept it, block it, reject it, repel it, defer it, or flow it as we will. We can be the biggest obstacles to grace, or we can ‘flow it’ and be a conduit of it to others. People such as Mother Theresa, or Martin Luther King, or Ghandi learned to flow the grace better than most. Jesus was the perfect conduit of Grace to mankind. So the question for me becomes—how do we learn to channel God’s Grace through us to others?

In my experience I have identified five areas that I need to continually work on in order to keep my attention on God and to better realize God’s plan for my life and not derail it. There have been entire books written on each one of them, but briefly, they are as follows:

1. Letting go of fear and reinvesting that energy in creating marvelous things out of love. It’s just a fact that many of us spend time worrying about anything and everything; but worry is just a symptom of fear. When a person is engaged in any form of fear, they cannot be investing their energy in love. They are polar opposites. Jesus tells us not to worry when He talks about the lilies of the field. But how many people mistakenly equate worrying about loved ones as a form of love. Fear and love are the antithesis of each other. Creating out of love is where it’s at in my view.

2. Being vulnerable with other people is a real gift to them, and that’s the one I have the most difficulty with. It seems so much safer to keep my mouth shut rather than take the risk of being really genuine and offend someone.

3. Being willing and able to really listen to people. Many people love to talk, but listening is a real work of love. It takes patience and self-control.

4. Forgiving—real forgiveness; this has the potential to be the most difficult of all of them. Paul Tillich once defined forgiveness as remembering the past in order that it might be forgotten. Yancey adds to this that: "…forgiveness is never easy, and may take generations, but what else can break the chains that enslave people to their historical past?"

5. Sacrifice—Now that’s a taboo ideal for the 90’s. But as Yancey pointed out, Martin Luther King, Benigno Aquino, Joan of Arc, and the ultimate sacrifice of Jesus--all are a testament to the necessity of that ingredient, at some level, in being a channel of Grace.

I would like to spend a few minutes to provide one illustration from my own life that covers most of these points. That experience has to do with Kairos, and more specifically, with Kairos #1 that I worked on in Sing Sing prison. Kairos is a Christian encounter weekend where a group of Christian volunteers, of many denominations, spend three days with a group of prison residents, also of many denominations and religions. The weekend consists of a series of talks given by the volunteers and group discussions follow each talk. That may sound very simple and straightforward, but working with prison residents is not something I wanted to do initially. I had a real fear of prison volunteer work. So right off, fear was my greatest obstacle. In school as I was growing up, I was always the youngest and shortest kid in my class. The bullies in the class used to live off me. I was periodically roughed up and terrorized by them. So I feared spending a weekend with what I thought to be a similar group of people. My good friend, Don, who kept trying to recruit me for this task, persevered for a year or two before I acquiesced and said yes with much fear and trembling. Fortunately, my fears were never realized. If you think about it, most of our fears never do come to pass in real time. So my Kairos at Sing Sing was actually my third prison weekend. Our team training for this Kairos included eight Friday night meetings. For me and for many of the team members, and our families, that was a real sacrifice. That’s a large chunk of quality time taken from the family unit. My employer also lost two days of work from me, and I lost two days pay. So as any parent already knows, any work of love requires some type of sacrifice. So in this team training that was provided to us, the most important things we learned and practiced were about vulnerability and listening. We actually spent a lot of time doing and practicing these things with other team members. The team member that we would practice with, would critique us on our performance, and tell us how we could do it better. That was fantastic training. I don’t ever recall in any time or place being trained to do those two things—listening and being vulnerable. And yet those are two of the most valuable gifts that we can give to each other. So what actually happened at this Kairos weekend?

‘Tank’, as he was fondly known to his friends, was a resident at my table for that Kairos weekend. I recall sitting at our table during one of the breaks with just one other resident by the name of Zaki and myself. Everyone else had left to get coffee or snacks. So Zaki and I started talking. He was a Muslim, weighed around 350 lbs. or more, was a former football player, and had a very imposing appearance, at least to me. He had not said very much during the weekend up until that point. But he started telling me about his grandmother who had raised him. He spoke quietly and lovingly about her, with great reverence. He described her eloquently and shared many stories of his life with her growing up. Then he shared a number of regrets he had about their relationship; things he had done which he had regretted doing, and more importantly, things he had never told her that he wished he had. These memories started to flood back over him. This huge man slowly started to lose it. As this was happening, his best friend, Tank, noticed this and rushed over to the table, and sat down next to him. Zaki then started to recount the stories he had told me to his friend, Tank; who in turn replied that they had been buddies for 7 years and this was the first time Zaki had even mentioned them. About then, Zaki just started to sob, deep from-the-gut sobs of overwhelming emotion, in the arms of his buddy, Tank.  The dam holding back these feelings had broken, and there was no stopping them. He had never been able to emotionally mourn the passing of his grandmother. I unobtrusively backed off and let Tank continue ministering to his close friend. I watched with a tinge of envy and wonder at what a personal and intimate relationship these men shared. This was the kind of relationship that develops between men that have shared together extreme adversity. This was a real breakthrough, but God wasn’t exactly finished with Zaki at this point either. That Saturday night when the residents were offered a chance to individually get up in front of the room and share what they had been experiencing up to that point; Zaki got up and confessed that there had been bad blood between himself and one other man in the room. He vowed in front of everyone that from that point on, his resentment and bad blood towards that other person was going to stop right there. He begged this man’s forgiveness in front of everyone. You could have heard a pin drop. This was a ‘first’ in every sense of the word. I doubt if anyone in that room had ever witnessed such a public confession and act of repentance and forgiveness. Everyone was speechless, and then there was a great roar of approval. That was the ‘second turning point’ that I was to witness on that Kairos weekend. Zaki just flowed huge amounts of ‘grace’ to everyone there through his huge act of vulnerability and his unprecedented public act of forgiveness. I will never forget that moment in time. Stop, learn, and listen. That’s what it’s all about. That moment crystallized it for me-- what the healing power of grace could really be. Zaki’s gift of his vulnerability allowed everyone in that room for the rest of the weekend, and hopefully beyond, to communicate at a more honest and genuine level. And that entails a willingness to openly acknowledge with each other that we don’t have it all together. It means that being honest is more important than ‘looking good’; that we are willing to empty ourselves of our facades and masks and strive for being genuine. So my friend in a few moments time transformed that room and that Kairos weekend by living out some of those principles of flowing grace. He especially exhibited forgiveness and making himself vulnerable. He also let go of the fear of what others might think of him. My part was to invest my time and to listen closely from the heart to another person. He seemed unfamiliar with that style of listening. It drew him out to a place he hadn’t been before, and from that place, Grace could work its miracle of transformation. Everyone in that room was a witness to a series of powerful miracles that kept reverberating from one person to another. No one left there untouched. We would never see life the same way after that. The force of Grace shook us to our foundations.

To summarize some of these thoughts on grace, I will use some of the words of M. Scott Peck from his book "A World Waiting to be Born" (page 351). He writes that: "Recently a woman who had just undergone a religious conversion wrote to me saying that she wanted to "learn grace-management skills." I had to laugh, since on one level the basic grace-management skill is the skill of nonmanagement." What Scott Peck means by nonmanagement is the "voluntarily giving up some control within certain parameters…. This voluntary loss of control (or emptiness) feels scary at first, but the outcome is freedom and creativity. And God. Unexpected creativity. Unforeseen genius." I think Peck is understating it to say that loss of control feels scary. It can be downright terrifying—so terrifying, that it becomes unacceptable. Scott Peck makes the important point that "You do not manage grace; you let it manage you. He later admits she was not entirely off base. "There are grace-management skills. They are the skills of attention combined with surrender, of emptiness and, in an organizational setting, the skills of community." Some of those skills of community are the ones I mentioned in the beginning about being genuine and vulnerable, making the decision to really listen, working at forgiveness, letting go of our fears; and being willing to create for the benefit of the common good.

Grace can be soft and gentle, or it can be earthshaking. It can take the appearance of serendipity—"the gift of finding valuable or agreeable things not sought for." In whatever manifestation it may come, it is usually transforming in some way. And for some, Grace is the single most transforming force in their lives. So may the ‘Grace of God’ or the force be with you.

Thomas Vaillancourt, August 1999