God Made Into Flesh

Grace means suddenly you’re in a different universe from the one where you were stuck, and there was absolutely no way for you get there on you own. Anne Lamott

A few years ago, Jeanne surprised me for Father’s Day by taking me to a concert in Maryland by one of my favorite musicians. I discovered Fernando Ortega’s music many years ago after plugging the name of one of the few Christian artists I can stand into Pandora. After playing a few of that artist’s songs, the Pandora elf decided that something by Fernando Ortega was close enough. The song, “Grace and Peace,” caught my attention sufficiently for me to find some more of his music—suffice it to say that I now have over six hours of Fernando’s music on a Spotify playlist. I brought all of my Fernando CDs to the concert and grinned like a groupie as the diminutive Ortega signed them.

This tune kept looping through my mind as I was away a few months later at a retreat in Minnesota called “Prayer in the Cave of the Heart.” When at a retreat, I’m always wondering what the take-away will be. What will this several day escape from real life give me that will be applicable to the daily grind when I return as I inevitably must? Two words kept jumping out at me during our liturgies and conversations at the retreat: Grace and Peace.

Which, of course, caused Fernando’s setting to bubble up as I sat frequently in silent meditation with my twenty-or-so fellow retreatants. Grace and Peace. I’ve learned something about peace over the past decade as I have learned incrementally to trust my cave of the heart. I learned from reading Psalms with Benedictine monks that Psalm 131 is a good internal retreat in times of stress: Truly I have set my soul in silence and peace. As a weaned child at its mother’s breast, so is my soul. And my heart rate slows—every time.

Grace is more of a challenge. I recognize moments of grace more clearly than I used to; using Jeanne’s spiritual vocabulary, I usually call them “Big Bird Moments,” those times when, as Anne Lamott writes, suddenly you’re in a different universe from the one where you were stuck, and there was absolutely no way for you get there on you own. But the philosopher in me wants to explore grace, to define it, to map out the lay of the land of grace.

How does one tap into the transcendent energy of unexpected gratuitous moments in order to energize all the days, weeks and months until the next Big Bird moment? As Christian Wiman writes, To experience grace is one thing; to integrate it into your life is quite another. That, perhaps, expresses better than anything else why I write this blog—how does one build a daily life around occasional grace?

As Jeanne and I watched my favorite Christmas movie, “The Nativity Story,” for the umpteenth time a couple of weeks ago I was reminded that at the heart of what I believe is a foundational story of grace and peace. Given that human beings have turned Christmas into one of the most stressful, hectic, and unmanageable seasons of the year, it is easy to forget that the original story is wrapped in simplicity and human ordinariness—but infused with transcendent grace.

That’s how I think grace happens—it emerges in the most ordinary corners of our reality, taking its time and surprising us when we discover that nothing has changed, but everything has changed. There were probably more animals at the manger than humans; in “The Nativity Story’s” beautiful rendition very little is said. “God made into flesh,” one of the magi whispers. “He is for all mankind. We are each given a gift,” Mary tells an old, grizzled shepherd, encouraging him to touch the newborn child. And we are each given a gift—incarnated grace. That’s the mystery—God continues to use human flesh to be the divine conduit into the world.