Saturday, November 5, 2011

Grace, again

We were swept up with love last weekend. If you read this blog, chances are, you were doing some of the sweeping last Sunday at the wonderful, marvelous, Cibo. If you were there then you know how delightful it was: the food, the wine, the music and the outpouring of love for SB. If you weren't there then you should know that it was truly overwhelming. Dozens of people and organizations gave their time and money to pull off an amazing fundraiser. (And a couple outsized souls who really made it happen.) I was asked to speak at the end and I just couldn't. I was able to say "thank you" to the crowd but I couldn't muster anything else. I was choked up with tears.

In fact, there were several times during the event when I began crying. Once, I couldn't stop. I was talking to an old friend of SW's about how amazing the whole event was. She had donated her time and money to the event (btw, to see what she does, go here if you're in Phoenix: Churn), and I was only trying to thank her. Well, I instead broke down and only came around after she offered me chocolate gelato. 

I've already written about disorienting acts of love in terms of "grace." I wrote about how grace is a thoroughly unmodern idea that contradicts most every facet of modern social life. We live in a world of contracts, efficiency, bureaucratic rules and regulations. We easily come to see others and ourselves as data points, customers, and constituencies. In the modern world, we are "forced to become individuals," as one well-known sociologist has said. So much is this the case that we are mostly unaware of how tightly bound to communities--how de-individualized--humans have been for most of our history. 

It's little wonder then that Protestantism, with its intense focus on grace and its individual nature (Amazing grace . . . saved a wretch like me. I once was lost, but now am found, Was blind but now I see) spread like wildfire in the modern world. To me, grace is an idea that makes the most sense, that is most necessary, in the modern world. In a tight-knit pre-modern community, your destiny, life-chances, success and failures, are completely bound up with your community's destiny, life-chances, success and failure. What would unconditional love mean in a community like this? It would be worthless because your recognition, acceptance and care in that community would never come into question. (Of course, hardly anything else would come into question--and this is part of the modern trade-off.) In any case, unconditional love only makes sense when love is a scarce resource.

We give up a lot to live in the modern world, but obviously we think it's worth it. However, some of the things we give up are impossible to replace through substitution. The unconditional social love and care of an unreflective and organic community is something we moderns simply can't generate, at least not for long. All in all, that's ok. There's a lot that comes with these bonds that we find suffocating. But in those moments when we taste what we've been missing, when we are swept up in love and care by others into something that transcends our isolated individuality, the modern trade-off begins to look a like a bad deal.

And so an idea such as grace strikes us as sublime and transcendent. It strikes directly at what we have lost in the modern world and can't get back. But then, in moments like last Sunday, we see that it's still here with us, waiting, ready, and willing.

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