Law and Grace: What a Snowstorm Can Teach Us About Opposing Life Principles

The “Snow-megeddon” (all 3 horrible inches of it!) that was unleashed on the Atlanta area, and throughout the South, provoked varied responses that illumine the contrasts between opposite life principles:  Law and Grace.  These principles differ chiefly in how they govern our relationship to who or what we believe to be in control of the circumstances under which we live – what I will refer to simply as “the Power.”

Principle of Law –

This principle holds that the Power works on our behalf in response to some merit that originates in us.  It yields an attitude of entitlement that is proportional to the degree of our own self-regard:  the better (more worthy) we consider ourselves to be, the more we expect the Power to deliver protection from pain and suffering, inconvenience, and discomfort.  In order to deliver these services, the Power must exercise control on the basis of certain knowledge of future events, thus eliminating all risk and uncertainty from the circumstances surrounding us.  When the Power fails to fulfill these expectations, which it often does, we (so long as we still maintain high self-regard) blame the Power (or its many proxies, i.e. people in positions of authority) with rage, believing in our hearts that the Power’s sudden incompetence is, at best, a symptom of indifference to our plight and, at worst, an indicator of malicious intent to ruin us.

The principle of law is a quid pro quo system, operating on an individual and/or collective sense of owing and being owed.  The higher our self-esteem, the stronger our sense of being owed. Thus, when the Power fails to work on our behalf, we demand change: either in the rules of the game, or for a new Power to take its place.  When this principle of law takes hold in a self-centered, consumerist culture, personal responsibility is shifted from the individual and completely onto the Power.

IN THE SNOW: This principle is at work in all the blame being hurled at authorities (and from authorities to other authorities –  Georgia’s governor just blamed the National Weather Service for “under-predicting”).  “They” should have known better, warned us earlier, told us all a week ago to plan to stay home today.  “They” don’t care about the people, just about themselves.  Heads will fall for this!  These people should be fired!  Eventually, you will see this lead to irrational decisions to close schools whenever there is a hint of snow or ice, and to invest large sums of public money on snow equipment that will seldom be used.

Principle of Grace –

This principle holds that the Power works on our behalf out of some stable trait or characteristic that lies in the very nature of the Power itself.  It solicits trust in the Power to protect and provide due to its benevolent intentions and kind disposition toward us, not because of what the Power owes based on our own merit.  It yields an attitude of thankfulness that deepens in inverse proportion to our self-regard (the humbler we are, the more grateful we are).  Thus, the experience of being shielded from pain, suffering, and discomfort is received as a gift, not demanded as a reward or wages.  When the Power does not manage circumstances as we wish, grace teaches us to rest in confidence in the Power’s intentions to do us good, humbly recognizing that good often happens to us in unexpected ways.  Thus, risk and uncertainty are understood as part of life, and embraced as portals through which the Power can do wonderful things for us and in us, things that we did not expect and that are better than what we would ever have asked for or imagined.  Adverse circumstances then are seized as opportunities for change, especially in how we use our own small power, from employing it for our own narrow interest to using it for our neighbor’s good.

IN THE SNOW: This principle is at work first and foremost in the joy of children in the snow:  laughter in a snowball fight, screams as sleds (usually cardboard or cookie sheets in the South!) glide down the hill, smiles for pictures next to the snowman. I saw this even in my 17-18 year old students: they couldn’t wait to revel in the gift of the snow.   It is at work in the kindness of neighbors, turning strangers into friends, as we have heard numerous tails of ordinary people feeding, sheltering, comforting, and transporting “snow refugees.”

We feel it in the refuge of a warm house and the unexpected rest from work.  A snow day reminds us that we do not have to work constantly to survive in this world.  That while work is necessary to produce what we need to live, the sum of what we have is far greater than the accumulation of the fruits of our labor:  our livelihood depends far more on the Power than it does on our striving.  I feel it right now as I write leisurely in the comfort of my bedroom.  While I love to work and embrace the responsibility to provide through my labor, I also recognize that it does not ultimately depend on me and that the Power gives far more than our work can produce.

This grace is perhaps ultimately displayed in the snow, though, through its purity.  Its blinding whiteness reminds us of the promise of the Power that “Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be white as snow” (Isaiah 1:18).  This purification of the soul comes through the scarlet blood of a perfect sacrifice:

Oh! precious is the flow
That makes me white as snow;
No other fount I know,
Nothing but the blood of Jesus.

(Don’t forget to read the Intro post to this, if you missed it!)

Law and Grace: What a Snowstorm Can Teach Us About Opposing Life Principles (Intro)

Monday night I watched the local news – TV and Internet – attentively, awaiting word on school closings in my district in West metro Atlanta.  No word.  The weatherman did not forecast significant snow accumulation (in the South 1/2″ is significant!) in my area until the evening.  Thus, I started my day on Tuesday expecting a full school day, perhaps with a cancellation of afterschool activities.

I knew the snow had started earlier than predicted when my students’ eyes began diverting toward the window and away from me in my 2nd period class.  At the end of the period, the announcement buzzer elicited a sound of glee from the class, the students expecting a “we will be dismissing school early” directive issued from the principle.  Instead, he said, “Go straight to your next class, not to the lunch room, when the bell rings.  After school activities are cancelled for today”  Yet the students’ glee was not crushed because they inferred that this meant that school administrators were contemplating the “conditions on the ground” and would soon decide to cancel the remainder of the school day.

They were right!  An hour or so later, they announced that school would end an hour early, and that students who drove themselves must leave immediately.  My wife got word and while she was en route to pick my elementary age children up early, I graded papers while monitoring the halls, wondering when I could leave and what might be the best route home.  I had gotten word by this time of horrific traffic conditions on the major roads in our suburban town, and the chaos around me was increasing as buses were arriving at different times and parents were rushing to the school to bring their children home.  A kindly janitor, who had come to clean my room, spoke critically, in response to the growing craziness, about the powers that be, saying that “they didn’t care about safety [a ridiculous accusation, I thought] or else they would have closed the school earlier.”  The griping and blaming had already begun.

Once traffic around the school cleared, I headed home, lucky to have an easy back road route that took just a few minutes.  My wife and children were not so fortunate as the already infamous traffic in Atlanta yesterday snarled them in a nearly 4 hour round trip (their school is about 15 minutes away from our house).  They arrived home about an hour later, their eagerness to play in the snow extinguishing any flames of discontent sparked by long hours in the car.

As I learned about the full extent of the chaos – full school buses stuck, children stranded at school, friends stuck in traffic for hours – I imagined empathetically the vitriol that would be pouring into the superintendent’s office from the community and contrasted this with the joy of my students and my children in the gift of the snow and already announced school cancellation for the next day.  This got me thinking about the Bible’s teaching on the two fundamentally opposed orientations we can have toward life, specifically concerning how we relate to the Power we believe to be in control of life:  the principle of Law and the principle of Grace.   The next post (coming later today!) will attempt to lay out these reflections.

Blinded by Light: Analysis of “Head Full of Doubt/Road Full of Promise” by The Avett Brothers

My wife and I have “discovered”  this summer the beautiful music of The Avett Brothers (we’re not known to be ahead of the curve on the latest music trends).  A family duo from small town North Carolina, the Avett Brothers will soon release their 6th studio album, The Carpenter.   They emerged onto the national music scene in 2009, performing the late night talk show circuit, and famously appeared with Bob Dylan in a joint performance on the 2011 Grammy Awards.

After purchasing a few of their songs online, the lyrics of “Heart Full of Doubt/Road Full of Promise” (I and Love and You, 2009) immediately grabbed my attention.  The first verse (repeated at the end too) reads:

There’s a darkness upon me that’s flooded in light

In the fine print that tell me what’s wrong and what’s right

And it comes in black and it comes in white

And I’m frightened by those who don’t see it

The idea of “a darkness upon me that’s flooded in light” brings to mind a critical commentary I read recently on the artwork of Thomas Kinkade, who died earlier this year.:  “The Dark Light of Thomas Kinkade” by Daniel A. Siedell (patheos.com).  Siedell anchors an argument that Kindade’s work communicates a misleading even dangerous theological message in Kinkade’s own stated intentions: “I like to portray a world without the Fall.”  A world without the Fall, and thus sin, while appealing to our deepest nostalgia, is also a world without grace and redemption.  Siedell argues that Kinkade’s work “refuses to deal with the fallenness, brokenness, sinfulness of the world,” and consequently “refuses to take us to the end of ourselves, refuses the confrontations and disruption that could open us up to grace.”   In contrast, art that honestly portrays the depth of human suffering and brokenness that characterizes our condition “can and should at times kill us, destroy our pretensions to virtue, and thus help bring us to the point where we know our need for grace and can receive it.”

Thomas Kinkade’s A Peaceful Retreat

Darkness often does not look dark:  evil is most powerful and destructive when it looks like light.   In the context of warning the church against those who would use religion as a means to control and exploit, the apostle Paul exclaims, “And no wonder, for Satan himself masquerades as an angel of light.  It is not surprising then that his servants masquerade as servants of righteousness” (2 Corinthians 11:14-15).   Jesus refers to Satan as the “father of lies.”  The Evil One destroys by deceit and illusion, thus disguising himself as light.

One form of “light” that shrouds darkness is law-based religion.  Religion that centers on rule-keeping, that supplies us with pages of “fine print that tell me what’s wrong and what’s right”, gives us a deluded sense of assurance that our souls are right with God and distorted sense of pride that our adherence to the law makes us better than others.  When we narrowly construe evil as a property of child-molesters, genocidal dictators, corrupt politicians, and greedy tycoons (the evil that ‘comes in black’), we are blinded to the evil that is closest to us – the evil in ourselves and our families (that ‘comes in white’).   Such was the religion of the Pharisees whose strict preoccupation with religions laws and traditions blinded them to the darkness within their hard hearts and to the Light of the World, Jesus, who dwelt among them.  Jesus condemned such an approach to religion in the strongest terms:

Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!  For you are like whitewashed tombs which on the outside appear beautiful, but inside they are full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanness.  So you, too, outwardly appear righteous to men, but inwardly you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness (Matthew 23:28).

Darkness flooded in light is essentially wicked, but appears to be good on the surface.  Why should one be “frightened by those who don’t see it”?  Evil that looks evil is easier to run from and escape.  Evil that “comes in white” can destroy our lives and send our souls into forever darkness while we are totally oblivious to its devastation.  Furthermore “those who don’t see it,”  especially when they are in position of influence, will lead others on the same path of destruction.  Thus, Jesus also pronounces condemnation on the Pharisees “because you shut off the kingdom of heaven from people” and “because you travel around on sea and land to make one proselyte; and when he becomes one, you make him twice as much a son of hell as yourselves” (23:13, 15).  Think of the horrors of Jerry Sandusky, who was found guilty last week on multiple charges of sexual crimes against children.  What makes this case so frightening is that he used his charity, an organization established to help troubled children, something ‘white,’ as a vehicle to carry out his wicked schemes.  This same principle is at work in clergymen, teachers, or close family members that abuse children.  They are even more frightening because the darkness is concealed.

Just as undiagnosed disease is more frightening than diagnosed disease because nothing can be done about sickness that is hidden, so is hidden evil more frightening than evil that is exposed.  Only evil that is brought to light can be defeated by the grace of redemption.

The Quest for Belonging: The Social Network and “The Inner Ring”

Longing to get in

The Social Network (2010) tells the story of Mark Zuckerberg’s, founder and CEO of Facebook,  meteoric rise from a socially estranged computer-nerd, Harvard undergrad to the world’s youngest ever billionaire .  The main narrative structure is built on two lawsuits filed against Zuckerberg by fellow Harvard students who claimed a stake in Facebook riches: one brought by the first CFO of the young company (and Zuckerberg’s closest friend at Harvard); the other by a group of students who charged him with stealing the idea of Facebook from them.  This group belonged to an ultra-exclusive social club – the Phoenix S-K club – which essentially functions as an elite fraternity into which Zuckerberg craves admission, even to the point of obsession.  It is the young entrepreneurer’s obsession with belonging to the upper crust of Harvard society that forms the subtext of the plot.

The sudden, explosive success of Facebook on the Harvard campus makes Zuckerberg an instant campus celebrity of sorts.  Yet his success comes with a cost:  alienation from his truest friend and business partner, Eduardo Saverin.  Not surprisingly, this same desire for social inclusion fuels the popularity of Facebook  :  its main appeal initially was the exclusivity of belonging to Harvard, as only members of the Harvard community could connect on the site.   Even as it spread to other campuses, Facebook distinguished itself from its predecessors like MySpace in allowing users to choose who to include and exclude.

Though Facebook and other social networking media are 21st century phenomenon, the innate human drive for social acceptance is as old as human history, being innate perhaps to human nature.  Author and Christian apologist C.S. Lewis describes this drive in a speech, published as an essay, called “The Inner Ring” (1944), which, though difficult to describe precisely, is something we all understand intuitively:

“You are never formally and explicitly admitted by anyone.  You discover gradually, in almost indefinable ways, that it exists and that you are outside it; and then later, perhaps, that you are inside it.  There are what correspond to passwords, but they too are spontaneous and informal  A particular slang, the particular use of nicknames, an allusive manner of conversation, are the marks.  But it is not constant.  It is not easy, even at a given moment to say who is inside and who is outside.   Some people are obviously in ad some are obviously out, but there are always several on the border-line…one of the most dominant elements [influencing people’s lives]  is the desire to be inside the local Ring and the terror of being left outside.”

Such exclusive relationships are not immoral and dangerous in themselves:  all friendships, for instance, have a degree of exclusivity by nature.  The danger, Lewis contends, is “our longing to enter them, our anguish when we are excluded, and the kind of pleasure we feel when we get in.”  This longing may lead us to neglect and eventually reject “friends whom you really loved and who might have lasted you a lifetime, in order to court the friendship of those who appeared to you more important, more esoteric.”  This theme is portrayed starkly in the film as Zuckerburg follows the alluring Sean Parker (founder of Napster) to the glamour of Silicon Valley only to estrange his real friend Eduardo Saverin, who has provoked Zuckerberg to envy by his acceptance into the Phoenix club.

But the real danger of this desire, “one of the permanent mainsprings of human action,” lies in its deceit:  it inevitably fails to deliver what it promises.  Thus, Lewis observes, “The circle cannot have from within the charm it had from outside.  By the very act of admitting you it has lost its magic.  Once the first novelty is worn off, the members of this circle will be no more interesting than your old friends.  Why should they be?  You were not looking for virtue or kindness or loyalty or humor or learning or wit or any of the things that can really be enjoyed.  You merely wanted to be ‘in.’  And that is a pleasure that cannot last.”  Once we penetrate the Rings we long to be part of, the acceptance loses its allure and we search for other Rings to embrace us.

The vanity of this quest is illustrated in the film.  In the first scene, pre-Facebook Zuckerberg is dumped by his girlfriend (who did not attend Harvard) because he is an insensitive jerk.  The indelible emotional wound caused by this rejection is manifested at the end when he finds her on Facebook, by this time a worldwide success, and sends a “Friend” request, hitting refresh repeatedly to see if she “Accepts.”  Zuckerberg’s story, as portrayed in this film, reminds us of a timeless principle: “It is the very mark of a perverse desire that it seeks what is not to be had.  The desire to be inside the invisible line [of the Inner Ring] illustrates this rule.  As long as you are governed by that desire you will never get what you want.  You are trying to peel an onion:  if you succeed there will be nothing left.”

If this desire comprises such a profound aspect of our nature, how can we not be governed by it?  How cannot it not cease to be a fundamental motive behind our actions?  In the speech, Lewis only hints at an answer that points us in the right direction:  “Until you conquer the fear of being an outsider, an outsider you will remain.”  If becoming the youngest billionaire in history does not conquer this fear, what will?  The fear of being an outsider is diminished only by the strength of the security of the acceptance we live for.  The acceptance we gain from these Inner Rings is by its nature insecure because we have to continue to perform to keep it.  And in the end these Rings come and go.  But ultimately, there is only one Inner Ring that matters because it is the only circle that endures forever: the Ring of God’s family.  The Bible promise that all who trust in the redeeming work of Jesus Christ are given “the right to be called children of God” (John 1:12).   Inclusion in this ring is absolutely secure because it is not gained or kept by our performance, but entrance is merited by the work of Christ who alone deserves a place at the table.  When we live for the acceptance of this club, given only by grace and not by our merit, the security of God’s love conquers our fear of being an outsider.

The Grace of Breath

You can watch the above video if you click the “Watch on YouTube” link – for some reason I cannot embed it.

An NPR report this week explains scientifically the medical benefits of breathing (“Just Breathe: Body Has a Built-In Stress Reliever”, Morning Edition, December 6th 2010), especially as a means of reducing stress.  Focused, deep breathing is not only relaxing, but scientific evidence shows that it can benefit the heart, brain, digestion, and the immune system.  After describing these benefits, the report concludes, “And the best part is all the ingredients are free and literally right under your nose.”

This report reminds me of one of my favorite songs released in the last ten years:  “Breathe” by U2 (from No Line on the Horizon, 2009).  The two verses of this song capture the chaotic dissonance of modern life as we move throughout our days bombarded with messages of gloom and of the need to buy and spend to gain happiness and protect ourselves.  The lyrics are more rapped than sung in an irregular rhythm to convey the stressful cacophony of these messages.  The chorus breaks through resoundingly into this chaos with an inspiring, even defiant, melody sung to a soothing, regular cadence:

Walk out into the street
With your heart out
The people we meet
Will not be drowned out
There’s nothing you have that I need
I can breathe!
Breathe now!

“Breathe” is a metaphor, I believe, for grace.  Grace is a gift that cannot be purchased and once received lost.  The ability to breathe life-giving air is given freely to all and cannot be controlled by the marketplace:  it is not nor should be a commodity to be bought and sold.  In our media-exhausted lifestyles, we are constantly receiving impressions on our souls of fear and want which are the motivators of economic decisions.  The goal of advertising, after all, is to make us aware and insecure about deficiencies in our lives and convince us to believe that buying such and such will make us complete.  Maybe this is reason why the Christmas holidays have become the most stressful time of the year for so many:  it is the season when we are most bombarded by the message:  “You need what we have to be happy, to be approved, to be accepted.”  We rush around frantically responding to this message.

This song provides a simple, liberating reply:  “There’s nothing you have that I need.  I can breathe.”  It affirms a simple truth:  life, and the ingredients needed to sustain it, is a gift.   The act of a deep, relaxing breath reminds us of this basic reality, a reality that the Christmas story wondrously affirms:  in the lowly manger, we see God’s greatest gift to the world, the gift of His Son who offers to “whosoever believes in Him” the grace of forgiveness and eternal life.

Whenever you feel stressed and perplexed, especially this Christmas season, pause often to Breathe and remember that life, physical and eternal, is a gift from God.