Relationships don’t work without grace!
Relationships can’t be healthy without grace!
Any community – be it a marriage, a family, friendships, neighbourhoods, town, province, country, world community – needs tons of grace shared among the people or it will not nurture fulfilling and joyful life for them.
Most unfortunately we in Canada as well as most other democratic countries have somehow allowed ourselves to descend into a heightened atmosphere of amplified anxiety, factionalism, hatred of the ‘other’, confrontation, strained relationships, derisiveness, online lynch mobs, violent protest marches and violent reaction to them, inflammatory rhetoric, unstable people feeling justified in doing violence to those who are ‘other’ – need I go on? We have all seen and experienced this on our TV screens and in our own neighbourhoods.
We are in this muck so deep that, for example, many feel we should hang our heads in shame instead of celebrating Canada Day next week. Not a few of us worry and wonder how we can ever emerge out of this – the worst societal turmoil any of us have experienced in our lifetime.
There is no healthy future in continuing along the road we are currently on. Nor in maintaining that they – the ‘other side’ – is to blame and need to recognize that we are right. Nor in silencing voices we don’t agree with or that hurt our feelings. For sure not in closing our eyes and ears and pretending all is good. Nor in seeking to silence people by making them feel guilty for the past. Nor in blaming people who have been victimized for their plight. Nor in trying to win the arguments by shouting louder than our opponent or silencing them.
And very importantly, there is no healthy future possible if our politicians continue to seek political advantage by taking sides, using inflammatory rhetoric, and stoking the fires of factional divisions to garner partisan political support.
For a healthy future we need grace. Lots and lots of it! But in the current turmoil it seems that our political leaders are unable or unwilling to lead us in embracing grace and bringing grace to bear to bring comfort, healing and new life to our communities and country.
What do I mean by grace? To be open to relationship with someone; to show kindness, courtesy, respect, humility; to be ‘good’ to someone even when it is not deserved; to be willing to forgive someone; to think the best of someone; to give someone a second chance; to try to understand the other’s feelings, beliefs, opinions; to value the other as a person worthy of care and respect; to be willing to work cooperatively with the other and to have difficult conversations with them; to recognize the need for mutual compromise.
Consider that “grace” list and tell me that you would rather have the confrontational turmoil that we have been ‘enjoying’ for the past several years. But how can we get there?
Part of the problem in our day and age in that so many of us think that if we change the system we can get rid of problems like racism, other prejudices, injustice, hatred, violence, etc. One of the genius insights of the Bible is that changing the ‘system’ may help a bit, but the real source of disruptive evil in this world is elsewhere.
Jesus once said “It is what comes out of a person that defiles. For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come: fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly. All these evil things come from within.” (Mark 7:20-23)
Jesus’ statement is a sobering reality check for each of us. We are all and each capable of and often prone to do bad things, sometimes very bad things. Changing the environment will never rid humanity of this imperfection.
The Old Testament prophets Ezekiel and Jeremiah said that what people needed was a heart transplant: “A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you; and I will remove from your body the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.” (Ezek. 36:26) “I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts.” (Jer. 31:33).
The change we want in our world can/will only begin in your heart and mine. We need to recognize and confess that we are part of the problem as much as those other guys. We need divine help and the support of people around us to tame the “evil things” that we are capable of.
For this to happen we all need grace: to be loved and cared for, to be respected and listened to, to be forgiven when we make mistakes, to be allowed second chances, to work cooperatively with others and to compromise with others, to be able to have difficult conversations/debates with others, etc.
The more all of us do this with the people we share daily life with, the more grace will grow beyond our small circles of community. And as grace becomes more and more rooted in our communities we can move on to ask our politicians to likewise learn and live grace, or they will not be voted for. And any person or group that asks your support for their cause or opinions, ask them whether/how they are nurturing grace first and their cause second.
O how we need more grace! As the song we all know says, it is “amazing grace” that “saves a wretch like me?