Our word for God’s dramatic breaking beyond our ironclad rules is grace. Grace is God’s magnificent release from our self-made prisons and the only way that God’s economy can triumph over our deeply internalized merit badge system. Grace is the secret key whereby God offers to be the Divine Locksmith for every life and for all of history. Life, when lived fully, tends to tool and retool us until we eventually find some form of grace is necessary for our very survival and sanity. Without grace, almost everything human declines and devolves into smallness, hurt, and blame.

Grace humiliates our attempts at private virtue. Grace makes us feel powerless, where, before, we knew that if we did this, then we would earn that. Accepting grace can make us feel poor and empty and even useless. Who wants grace? Only sinners and almost no one else!

+From A Lever and a Place to Stand: The Contemplative Stance,

the Active Prayer, pp. 45-46.