Grace: A Portal to the Fullness of Life

 

Grace: A Portal to the Fullness of Life

April 4, 2022

 

Let’s face is. We humans usually fear the unknown. We can usually deal reasonably well with what we know. We do substantially less well when we are or may be faced with something we do not know. Most of us fear the dark, for example. We can’t see what’s out there in the dark. We think maybe or even probably there’s nothing there that’s a threat, but what if there is something threatening there? So we’re frightened or at least apprehensive. We seek safety by getting out of the dark into the light where at least we can see what’s around us that we might have to deal with. I don’t, but I understand that many people enjoy being scared when it’s perfectly safe to be scared. That’s why campers tell ghost stories around the campfire. That’s why people watch horror movies. Perhaps experiencing fear in those safe ways helps people process and learn to deal with fear in a way that is on one level frightening but is actually safe.

There’s another fear that most if not all of us have. Like fear of the dark, it too is a fear of the unknown. It is the fear of death. Dying is after all entry into the ultimate darkness. Just what death is remains always a mystery to us. We don’t know what if anything lies beyond death. Indeed, we can’t know what if anything lies beyond death. That’s because human knowledge is always grounded in and arises from human experience. No one has ever experienced real death and returned to tell us what if anything there was to experience there. Yes, we’ve all heard stories of what are called “near death experiences.” However, those stories don’t really tell us about death. They are after all near death experiences not death experiences. We can hope that there is some sort of blessed life of the soul after death. We can trust that there is. What we can’t know is what, if anything, lies beyond death.

Fear is a powerful force in our lives. When we experience fear, we will do almost anything to get out of it. We don’t usually go walking alone in unknown dark places out of fear of what may be lurking there. If we must walk through an unknown dark place, we’ll do it as quickly as we can. We can usually (though not always) avoid ending up in scary places in this life. We’ll do whatever we can to avoid as much fear as possible, and we usually are able to avoid most of it.

What we cannot avoid is death. In my culture, the dominant white culture of the United States, we don’t avoid death of course. We just avoid thinking about it, talking about it, and accepting its inevitability for ourselves and for everyone else. When we do think about death, many of us react to the prospect of our death with fear. We may have other reactions too. We may resent death because it ends the life we would rather keep on living. On rare occasions we may welcome death because it ends the suffering of a terminally ill loved one. But mostly we fear death. We fear it because we don’t understand it. We fear it precisely because we don’t and can’t know what if anything lies beyond it. That’s why we suppress awareness of death and fear of death out of our conscious minds and into our unconscious, into our shadow. That way we won’t have to think about death and face its reality, not consciously at least.

We can force awareness and fear of death out of our consciousness. What we can’t do is make those things really go away. Things that we suppress into our shadow, into the unconscious part of our psyche, work to come back into the light of consciousness. When they do break through into consciousness, they usually do it in destructive ways. They can and often do affect our behavior in ways of which we aren’t even aware. We find ourselves behaving in some way that we think isn’t really us, and we don’t understand why we’re doing it. We’re doing it because of something in our shadow of which we are not consciously aware. Good inner work can help us live with the things we have suppressed into our shadow by bringing them into our consciousness so that we can come to terms with them. Unfortunately, few people ever do that kind of deep psychological inner work.

So we live with an unconscious fear of death, and that fear affects our lives in negative ways. Fear makes us play it safe. Fear, even or perhaps especially unconscious, unreconciled fear, makes us timid. It stops us from taking risks. It limits us. It restricts us, and in doing so it impoverished our lives. It keeps us from grasping for the brass ring of life because we fear that if we do we may fall off the horse. Yet great reward never comes without risk, sometimes great risk. A life lived in fear of failure, pain, darkness, or death is an unfulfilled life. It is a life full of what could have beens. It is a life that at its end is more likely filled with regret than with peaceful satisfaction.

When we come to know that powerful dynamic of repressed fear of death we have to ask: Is there anything we can do to replace that dynamic of fear and impairment with one of courage and fullness? Indeed there is. Psychological inner work with a good therapist can help. Beyond that, all of the world’s great religions have within them powerful ways of helping us with that task. Asian traditions like Buddhism and Hinduism use spiritual practices like meditation to open people to a serene acceptance of death. Sufism, a mystical sort of Islam, has practices that can produce the same result. Many people who may not otherwise be Buddhist, Hindu, or Sufi find those practices to be beneficial. Let me suggest that, if you do not already have a daily spiritual practice that works for you, that you learn and try some form of transcendental meditation. You can learn a powerful type of meditation called “centering prayer" in the works of Thomas Keating. They are definitely worth reading.

Father Keating was a Catholic monk, but he was hardly a typical Christian. So what about Christianity for more ordinary sorts of Christians like us? Tragically, a great deal of conventional Christianity has functioned not to allay the believers’ fear of death but to exaggerate it. Christian churches have used fear of death to manipulate people for a very long time. They have told people that unless they do whatever it is that their particular church tells them to do to avoid it, they will spend an eternity in the horrors of a fiery hell. Christianity has most typically told people that they face two possible fates after death, one blessed and the other horrific. Christian churches could hardly have done more to generate fear of death in people.

Sin, forgiveness, heaven, and hell may be what most Christians talk about. They may be what most Christians think the Christian faith is all about. Well, if that’s what they think, they are just flat wrong. There is something else in traditional Christianity that can, if we’ll just at long last understand it, get us beyond our fear of death so that we may live as fully, richly, and freely as God yearns for us to live. That magic key to spiritual health and fulness of life is grace.

Christians sometimes talk about grace, but for the most part they get grace all wrong. Most Christians understand grace as mostly having to do with divine forgiveness of sin. Forgiveness is of course part of what grace is about, so most of us get at least something right about grace. Yet we still make a colossal mistake about it too. Most Christians think grace is something they have to earn. They think they have to earn grace by believing the right things and not believing the wrong things and/or by doing the right things and not doing the wrong things. This misunderstanding of grace contributes greatly to Christians’ fear of death, not to their reconciliation with it.

Here's the truth: Grace is not something we have to earn. Grace is God’s free and unmerited gift of love to everyone who has ever lived, everyone who lives today, and everyone who will live in the future. Grace is not a payment or a reward. It is a free gift of God’s love in action. God’s grace is unconditional, universal, and irrevocable. If it weren’t those things, it would not be grace. It would be diluted into a payment. People who are supposed to know about such things have told Christians for a couple of millennia that grace is not free, that it is indeed something we must earn. Yet Christianity makes no sense if grace is not truly grace. Christianity is merely a worldly construct not a divine one if grace isn’t grace. The world works according to the rules of earning and reward. God doesn’t. God works according to the rules of a love so vast, so much greater than the greatest human love, that we can’t really understand it. We can however trust it. We can entrust our lives to it. Doing so is what Christian faith really is all about.

So, what does God’s free, unmerited grace have to do with handling death and the fear of death constructively? Everything. Grace has everything to do with handling death and the fear of death constructively. It is in God’s grace that we can trust we are existentially, eternally safe. It is only in God grace that we know that glorious truth. We feel fear when we think we aren’t safe. But when we truly know God’s grace, we can live in trust that we are indeed always safe. We are even safe in death. We, all of us, are safe even in death because we trust that whether we live or whether we die we belong to God. We trust that we stand eternally in God’s grace, in God’s love in action. In God’s grace we trust that we have nothing to fear because we trust in God’s limitless love for us and for everyone. We trust that God will never harm us, not in this life, not in whatever comes after this life. Even we humans try not to harm people we love. God doesn’t just try not to harm us. God never has and never will harm anyone.

God’s grace is the greatest gift, the best good news, that we have or ever could have. And one of grace’s greatest benefits is that it frees us from fear, especially fear of death. Because it frees us from fear of death, it frees us for life. This life. The abundant life that Jesus came to bring us. John 10:10. Because we trust that we are eternally safe in God’s grace, we can take risks for our faith and for our lives. We can stand up and stand out for God’s love, mercy, and justice for all people when our whole world mocks us for doing so. We can have the courage to be at peace in a world that knows so little peace. We can face whatever challenges come our way calmly and confidently because we trust that no mistakes we make will ever damage our relationship with God. We can even face death calmly, serenely, because we are confident that our God of grace will be there to welcome our spirits home.

So please know this. You need not fear death. You need not stow fear of death away in the shadow of your psyche where it can so limit your life. Trust that you stand eternally in God’s grace. From that trust take the courage to live as fully, actively, generously, and creatively as you can. God’s grace can be your portal to that life. Thanks be to God!