The eCrozier

Human nature is so faulty that it can resist any amount of grace and most of the time it does.
– The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor

When I was reading again some of Flannery O’Connor’s letters the above quote hit me like a 2×4 up the side of my head. “Yes,” I said out loud (and I usually don’t speak out loud when I’m reading). Ms. O’Connor’s insight into human nature and God’s grace has always walloped me. We resist grace because it comes to us not on our own terms. In a culture that rewards achievement and merit, grace makes no sense. Thus, we rebel against it as if it were foreign to our experience, which of course it so often is. We can’t earn it. We can’t claim it as our own. We can’t rationalize receiving it as a just reward. It’s a pure gift from God through Jesus Christ in which we must trust.

One of Ms. O’Connor’s characters in her short story, A Good Man is Hard to Find, says: “Jesus thrown everything off balance.” That’s what grace does. It throws “off balance” a world based on personal achievement or self-justification. And of all things, our cultural celebration of Christmas helps distort our comprehension of grace. I’ll explain. Let’s say at Christmas we receive a gift from someone from whom we didn’t expect to receive a gift. To our discomfort, we really love the gift. What’s our first reaction? Exactly: We didn’t get that person a gift of equal or greater value. Grace is the gift for which we can give nothing in return to even things out. That’s why “Jesus thrown everything off balance” is on point. Grace undermines our assumptions about how life should work.

Elsewhere Ms. O’Connor writes: “The operation of the Church is entirely set up for the sinner; which creates much misunderstanding among the smug.” The “smug,” the self-justifying, the pull-yourself-up-by your-own-bootstraps types don’t care much for grace. It doesn’t fit into their worldview of how things should be. They prefer to divide the world into worthy folk like themselves and others who are sinners. They’ll in most cases acknowledge their own sin, but see it as small potatoes compared to others. It’s easy to find someone else who’s a worse sinner. It aids one’s self-justification.

Ms. O’Connor writes in Everything That Rises Must Converge: “She was a good Christian woman with a large respect for religion, though she did not, of course, believe any of it was true.” While “the operation of the Church is entirely set up for the sinner,” often those who have “a large respect for religion” don’t believe the Church should really operate that way, because deep down, they refuse to believe in a God who would be that weak-kneed by letting sinners off the hook. Religion for such folks isn’t about the grace given to sinners through the cross of Jesus. No, for such folk religion is about controlling other people and making sure they follow the rules.

Trusting in God’s grace and practicing it with everyone else, changes us. Ms. O’Connor writes: “All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us.” But when we let go of our resistance to God’s grace we’ll come to realize that such grace isn’t only God’s way of changing us, it’s God’s way of transforming the world into God’s likeness.

+Scott