20 Minutes
I find the spiritual-not-religious ideas of grace being an impersonal, blind force of good moving through the universe wildly unsatisfying.
I wanted to write a bit about Amazing Grace, a hymn first sung on New Year’s day. I scribbled down notes on a legal pad, I typed them up in my notes but nothing came quite as I hoped. So I’m giving myself 20 minutes to wrap up what I do have drafted, and hopefully make it coherent.1
So the post I wanted to write about Amazing Grace? Maybe January 1, 2027. Instead, I’ll point you to this article from Mere Orthodoxy which is a beautiful reflection on and breakdown of Newton’s original text.
Setting my timer for 20 minutes to edit and format what I have then hit send… ready… set… go.
I find the spiritual-not-religious ideas of grace being an impersonal, blind force of good moving through the universe wildly unsatisfying. I think this view of grace is summed up in quotes like this one from Louise Penny, writing about her (and my) beloved Armand Gamache.
“Armand Gamache had always held unfashionable beliefs. He believed the light would banish the shadows. That kindness was more powerful than cruelty, and that goodness existed, even in the most desperate places. He believed that evil had its limits.”2
While I certainly think Penny touches on true aspects of grace, beliefs like this left on their own are incomplete, inadequate, and incessantly wanting when I consider the suffering of the world around me. When you’re in the doctor’s office receiving life-altering news? When you’re abandoned in a close relationship? When you’re standing in the cemetery watching a beloved lowered into the ground? I’m not interested in vague, detached ideas of evil having limits and goodness somehow prevailing.
Unsurprisingly, I also don’t think the concept of grace is a feeble attempt to make meaning from a mere, material world. A belief cobbled together to ease the burden of being humans who are walking toward our own annihilation.
No.
I believe in grace—in unmerited favor given from divine love, given in the face our human-propsensity-to-muck-things-up.3 And I believe grace is radically personal. Because grace has a locus: the triune God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. The Father above. The Mighty Wind and Great Comforter. The Word became Flesh who dwelt among us.
If you want to meet the locus of grace this year, a good place to start is simple and embodied. Go to church; sit among the singing saints (add your voice if you want), confess your sins, hear God’s Word preached. Open your Bible at home, and maybe, join a Bible study. Pray, not to “the god of the philosophers and learned,” but the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.4
What are my resolutions for 2026? Well, re-read that paragraph above. And I’m obliged to add, that all of the things listed above? They’re available to you, wherever you find yourself in the story of faith.
The song we know as Amazing Grace was originally titled “Faith’s Review and Expectation.” As I look to the past year, I can see grace’s prevailing power, even through valleys of death’s shadow, especially through all of the many ways I’ve mucked things up.
As I look to the future, there will be grace, whether I want it or not.
“All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful,” Flannery O’Connor.
We can opt to resist grace. That is one way to live. The change that grace ushers in is painful in many ways precisely because it is personal. The Lord knows I’ve done my share of grace resistance. But, in my almost-36-years of receiving grace, I’ve decided I’d rather put myself in the way of it, and that most often happens through ordinary means listed above.
“By frequent prayer, and close acquaintance with the scripture, and an habitual attention to the frame of our hearts, there is a certain delicacy of spiritual taste and discernment to be acquired,” wrote Newton to a nobleman.5
Though Newton was offering this nobleman guidance on cultivating wisdom, there is sparkling simplicity in his summation of the pursuit of God. Or the means of grace, as some would say.
“Amazing grace, that saved a wretch like me… The God, who call’d me here below, will be for ever mine.”
Good thoughts on the 20 minute mentality from Jen Pollock Michel and Meredith Hinds.
From “How the Light Gets In” which is likely my favorite Louise Penny book (and probably among my favorite books) though I do find her writing on spirituality beautiful but unsatisfying.
My paraphrase of Francis Spufford’s definition of sin, from his book “Unapologetic.”
Newton, J. Cardiphonia; or, The utterance of the heart: In the course of a real correspondence. Balfour & Co. (Original work published ca. 1781). page 150
Amen! Thank you for this illuminating post!. It is impossible to "make meaning from a mere, material world" - there IS no "meaning" to such a world. So it was the Existentialists, not the Enlightenmentists, who were right after all (you are welcome, Jean Paul Sartre and Albert Camus). Only when the God who is the Holy Other becomes the Immanuel ("God with us"), and imparts that irresistable grace, does any meaning become self evident (even if still a bit murky, like "through a glass darkly"). If you can't resist such grace, be grateful He chose YOU. Because if you somehow, some way, some where, can resist such divine grace, God have mercy on your soul!
dang this is good.