An Indefinition

By Andrea Lingle

God did not create humanity and then simply set it on its way to see what might happen. From the very beginning of the Bible, God is in relationship with people, providing blessings of guidance and resources for their benefit. Those blessings may be called God's "grace."

–Larry Duggins, Together, p. 14

Be clear. Define your terms. Write it down, write it out, write all the way to the end. Finish the job. Think it through. It has to make sense. Make sure you are vivid. Concrete details. Show don’t tell. What do you see? “Look, I made a hat. Where there never was a hat.”

Writing is a strange way to communicate. To whom is the writer really talking? I can tell you, I am not thinking about one particular person or audience when I write. Except for one person. Me. I am always talking to me. I am finding a way into a tangled idea, and let the writing (and editing) comb it free.

That is what I have been trying to do for the last few weeks. Straighten out an idea. Take each strand and loosen it from the spaghetti of my mind. Through the medium of writing, I have been Exploring Communities of Grace. What is grace and can community really encourage it to accumulate (is that even an appropriate verb?) in certain places/communities/settings?

Don’t be lazy. Work. Find a better word. What is the right word? Don’t think. Let writing do the writing. Loosen up, let go, listen. Move. Move. Move. Don’t think. Write. What do you see? See first. One word. One word. One word.

Writing well is getting out of the way and allowing writing to move through you. If you have developed the ability to get out of writing’s way, whatever you have dumped into your soul will come pouring out onto the page. So, I have been composting. I have been searching, reading, listening, and questioning through the lens of: What is a Community of Grace? I have been digging for a while now, and I have not hit the bottom yet, but each little scrap gets dumped into the compost bin of my mind. There it gets digested. Pulled apart. Broken down. But I am not doing it.

I have a black plastic compost bin that sits in my back yard. If I have a place where I would like to have a garden or notice a plant or tree that seems to be struggling, I set my bin up, and six months, two years, five years later the ground beneath the bin is transformed into soil. A living substrate that will produce, in the case of my garden this year, a very large number of squash. Inside the walls of the compost bin lie our kitchen scraps, grass clippings, cardboard, paper bags, worms, sow bugs, gnats, billions of microbes, water, and heat. My kids are forced to walk across our yard at least once a day with buckets of watermelon rinds and cucumber peels and coffee grounds and dump them into the bin. We have a large family, but we never fill it up. Something happens within those walls. Years’ worth of cantaloupe rinds and avocado skins and egg shells disappear and are replaced by fertile potential. The bin is the container. It does not work the scraps into soil. It doesn’t even hold in the heat because a bear stole the lid years ago. It just circumscribes a space.

Do not explain too much. Allow the story to speak. Do not insert yourself into the story. Be careful not to intrude into the writing. You never know what is really going on. Follow the turn. Be aware of when to stop. Do not explain the joke or forget the punchline.

I sat down today to define grace—a perfectly reasonable thing to do in light of the question at hand, but a definition of grace lurks at the edges of my awareness still. It will not be lured into the open, to be etched in black and white. Is grace the leaves and the branches or the shape of the tree? To know if faith communities do or do not act as conduits of grace, one must really start with the question: what is grace.

What is grace?

Is it a physical force? Could you measure it with the proper instrument? Does it have mass? Gravity? Is it conscious? Is it consciousness? Is it spiritual? Is it only spiritual? Does it have other names? Does it know my name?

Show up. Pay attention. Cooperate with God. Release the outcome.