Can you wrestle ideas of grace away from toxic theology?

After receiving some potentially life-changing (annoyingly so) news this last week, writing this series became even more personal for me.

I never really understood grace. Even though I grew up in a small Pentecostal AOG church in country NSW Australia where grace was sown into the tapestries flung high around the hall, and the word fell out of the pastor's mouth like a broken record every Sunday for years on end, it just reminded me of overeating cake. It was something special. Delicious. A sometimes food. But we always overindulged, over extended… grace, grace, and more grace… never held accountable, never asked questions, just grace, and grace, dripping down our fingers, smudged across our face, giving us a spiritual high that left us sick when we were alone in our homes with our lives and bodies.

The unmerited favour of God. What does that even mean?

And what does it mean after you've peeled away the layers of who you once believed God to be and now hold a different collection of ideas about love and the universe and ultimate reality and the benevolent energy that is the foundation of all things…

What does the unmerited favour of that look like?

The ideas of grace that I was fed in Church would have me ask no questions, would have me forgive quickly without accountability, would have me not sink too deeply into complex nuances of trauma and difficulty, just grace, and more grace, apply it liberally, splashing it over the edge, drowning yourself in it.

Just as we are made mostly of water, and we need water every day to survive, it can be fatal for us, too; grace is the same…

Has anyone been able to clearly define for you what grace is? No abstract metaphors, but an actual boundary-driven, clear and concise meaning?

I'm sorry, but "the unmerited favour of God" doesn't cut it as a definition. It doesn't help me live it. Because listen, if grace is an ocean, I don't actually want to sink in it - what good are we if we're all sinking? I don't want to drown. I want to float, I want to flow, I want to swim, I want to harness its energy and gaze upon its beauty as the sun charts its course against the horizon it creates by simply being there.

Here in the App this week, we'll look at different ideas and concepts of grace and wrestle it from the hands of the fantastical and unrealistic, and find a way to work with it, live with it, let it live in us and all the spaces we live within.

It's my hope that if concepts, ideas, and poor practices of what people consider to be grace has left a bad taste in your mouth and a rock in your stomach, we might be able to find a healing path back from that place and make room for what truly is grace.

And for those of us who have been taught that grace has been given to save us from ourselves, from our humanity, from our essence and nature, it is my prayer (in whatever way you pray) that we can flip that script and instead reclaim our foundational dignity, as one of my favourite teachers, John Philip Newell says about grace:

"Nature is the "gift of being," says Eriugena [Irish philospher], and it is a sacred gift. Grace, on the other hand, is the "gift of well-being," given not to change the heart of our nature, but to release the true heart of our nature. Nature "forms" us, he says, and grace "reforms" us. In the Gospel story of Jesus healing the lepers, the lepers are not given new faces, says Eriugena. Rather, they are restored to their true faces. The medicine of grace is given not to banish our nature, but to awaken us to our nature, made of God. When someone has made a mistake or been untrue, we often say, "Well, that's just human nature." But in Celtic wisdom, these actions are not viewed as human nature. They are a betrayal of our nature, a denial of what is deepest in us, the sacred essence of the divine. The invitation is not to become something other than ourselves. It is to become truly ourselves."

MEDITATE ON THIS: You do not have to become something other, or more, or larger, or holier than you are. Your mistakes aren't what they are because you are fallen, no. Your work is to become truly yourself, and the mistakes along the way are invitations to redirect your steps on your journey there.

See you in the App, xo

Liz Milani
Instagram: @thepracticeco 

From this week’s series titled "Practicing Grace," with a subscription in the App. Hope to see you there.