Grits, Grace, and Goodness
By Charles Wellborn
[Dr. Charles Wellborn is Professor of Religion Emeritus, Florida State University, Tallahassee and for 20 years was Dean of the FSU Overseas Campus in London where he still lives.]
The alliterative "G`s" in the title of this article are probably a carryover from the sermonic experience of my years as a pastor. Be that as it may, the three terms–grits, grace, and goodness—have become linked in my recent reflections.
I am a Southerner, born and bred. Across the years I have observed that first-time visitors to the "hallowed ground" of the American South experience a number of culture shocks. One such shock is the first encounter with that omnipresent ingredient on the Southern breakfast plate–grits. Southerners take grits for granted; not so our Yankee friends.
Years ago a friend of mine from Massachusetts came to Tallahassee, Florida, where I was living. On his first morning in town I picked up my friend at his motel where he had just eaten breakfast.
"What`s that white stuff they put on your plate?" he asked. "That stuff that tastes like wallpaper paste and, if you leave it long enough, turns into concrete?"
My friend`s question reminded me of an oft-told story. A traveler from the North, making his first visit to the South, stopped for breakfast at a roadside cafe in Georgia. From the smiling young Georgia Cracker waitress he ordered bacon and eggs. In a few minutes she brought his order to the table. on the plate were bacon, eggs, and grits. Puzzled, the man called the waitress over and, pointing to the white glob, inquired, "What`s that?"
"That`s grits," the waitress replied.
"But I didn`t order grits," the traveler protested.
The waitress had an explanation. "Grits ain`t something you order. Grits just come."
"Grits just come." By some trick of mind those words remind me of grace–that mysterious, almost indefinable working of God in human experience. Through the centuries Christians have struggled to understand the full meaning of grace. Seeking a terse definition, theologians have defined it as the "unmerited favor of God." Those words hardly begin to plumb the depths of the concept. Christians attribute their salvation and forgiveness of sin to "Amazing Grace." Even that is not enough. Christ died not only that men and women might be rescued from their hopeless human predicament but also that his followers might have aid and assistance in their continuing struggle to be "good." We call that assistance grace.
Grace is not something we can bargain for or purchase. It cannot be triggered by repeating some magic incantation or carrying out a prescribed sacred ritual. Grace "just comes."
We are sometimes frightened by grace, for it often arrives at unexpected moments or in unlikely circumstances. We frequently find the workings of grace difficult to understand. It doesn`t always seem to make sense. We play the part of the Elder Brother in the parable of the Prodigal Son, protesting to the Father that his open-armed reception of the prodigal violates all the canons of reasonable common sense. We constantly forget that what we humans call "sanity" does not always accord with the "Divine Sanity" of God.
Clearly, Christians are called to the task of being "good" in every area of life, both personal and corporate. Christian ethics, at rock bottom, is all about goodness, and we should never underestimate the difficulty of the assignment. "Being good" is a rough, tough, dangerous job.
In the seventh chapter of Paul`s Epistle to the Romans, the Apostle makes a profound confession: "For the good that I would I do not, but the evil that I would not, that I do." Paul obviously speaks here out of the depths of his own moral struggle. He points us to the two great difficulties in that struggle. It is often difficult to know what is right, and even if we believe that we know the good thing, the job is far from over. It may be even more difficult to do the right.
All of my Christian life I have puzzled over the implications of the ethical teachings of Jesus–the parameters of a truly good life. Some people seem to find these moral dimensions simple. My experience is different. I am constantly impressed with what I, and others, have called "the hard sayings" of Jesus.
Let me give a few examples out of many. Jesus said, "Love your enemy. Do good to them that persecute you." As a World War II combat veteran, trained and ordered in that conflict, not to love my enemy but to kill him, I find that injunction disturbing. Jesus said, "If a man strike you on one cheek, turn the other." I wrestle with the seeming contradiction between that statement and my natural inclination to defend myself and my children against unjustified violence. Jesus said, "Let him who is without sin cast the first stone" and "Judge not lest ye be judged." Painfully aware of my own moral shortcomings, I find it uncomfortable to speak words of condemnation on my fellow human beings. Jesus said, "If a man ask you for your coat, give him your cloak also." How does that fit in with the apparent necessity to provide for my own material needs and those of my loved ones?
Unhappily, I have no glib answers for those moral dilemmas. Indeed, I distrust the simplistic solutions and the exegetical cartwheels of those who explain to me that Jesus did not actually mean what he seems to have been saying. We are told that the appropriate moral guideline is to hate the sin but love the sinner. That impresses me as an easy out–a convenient moral escape hatch. In everyday life the sin and the sinner appear inseparable, and to claim to hate sin and love the sinner allows many of us to twist the meaning of love into contorted shapes. Once we get our dirty human hands on the word "love," we can make that word mean what our baser nature wants it to mean. Thus, we are allowed to do misshapen things–actions which seriously contradict the essence of God`s love as revealed in Jesus Christ. In the extreme, for example, individuals who classify all abortion as a grievous sin may hate that sin so much that they respond by murdering abortion doctors and blowing up abortion clinics, all in the name of God and "goodness."
True, most of us do not go to that extreme. But is not the difference between many of our actions and that one a matter of degree, and does not the extreme case at least raise the red flag of moral danger?
The truth is that all through Christian history those persons who have sought to take the words of Jesus seriously and to act on them at face value have been judged by most of the world as, at best, mentally unstable, and, at worst, insane. When Jesus willingly "emptied" himself and gave his life on a cross, he did what the world would call an insane act. When Francis of Assisi divested himself of all worldly possessions in order to identify himself totally with his needy and oppressed brothers and sisters, he violated the standards of common sense. How does one make sense of the choice of Father Damien to submit himself to the perils of a deadly disease for the sake of a few miserable lepers, or of the decision of Albert Schweitzer to use his manifold literary, medical, and musical talents, not for the advancement of his personal career, but for the needs of a few hundred African natives?
I have concluded that the moral teaching of Jesus constitutes what I will call "the ethic of the overload." Again and again we Christians make our "sensible" moral decisions, only to discover with a cold shock that the Jesus-ethic requires much more. When Jesus counsels us to "turn the other cheek," he is clearly ruling out any tit-for-tat revengeful response. The "eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth" syndrome has no place in the ethic of love. Many of us believe that we can make a rational case for such restraint in our one-to–one personal relationships. But Jesus seems to be saying that our laudable refusal to react violently is not enough. We must go further and, apparently, invite even more violence from the aggressor. We must actively demonstrate that absolutely nothing another person can do to us will destroy our love for that person as one of God`s children. That`s the ethic of the overload.
When we follow our Master`s instructions to give our needy neighbor our coat, Jesus says, "Not enough! Give away your cloak also." The ethic of perfect love–the ethic of the overload–constantly demands from us more than human reason or common sense would justify. To respond adequately to that ethic requires a sort of reckless faith in the power of God and, beyond that, the willingness to suffer as a result of our actions.
This brings us back to that "Divine Sanity." We must remember our human limits. We are, all of us, enclosed in a box, bounded on every side by the restrictions of time and space. Those restrictions affect everything in our experience, including both our language and our logic. To make matters even more difficult, a pervasive moral corruption is at work in that box and us. We cannot ignore the fact that evil taints us all. Christians believe that God, in an act of unlimited love, has invaded that box in the person of the Christ. God`s invasion was carried out not only to achieve the salvation of the human race but also to confront men and women with the moral challenge of perfect, unqualified love. The "Word made flesh" speaks ultimate truth. It transcends in incalculable ways the inadequate time-space language and understanding of a corrupted humanity. God`s ethical language is the language of the moral overload. To be good, in the fullest Christian sense, is to live out a moral pattern which is defined for us from outside the box.
Where does all this leave the committed Christian who sincerely wants to be good? I have learned much from the teaching and example of Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the World War II German theologian. Faced with the choice between the demands of perfect love and the unspeakable evils of Nazi Germany, he finally entered into a plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler. He did not make that decision easily. He agonized over it. He chose to act with a painful recognition of his own limits. Assessing the concrete situation as best he could, he did what seemed to him the "most right" thing to do. But the knowledge of his own fallibility forced him to pray, even as he acted, "Father, forgive me where I am wrong." His decision cost him his freedom and, eventually, his life. I believe he faced that terrible personal outcome with a sure reliance on the overshadowing grace of God.
As men and women living in a fractured world, we do not have the option to be moral spectators. We must choose, and we must act, often without any real certainty that we are totally right. Because our God-given fate is to be creatures of free will and choice, our responsibility in the face of the "ethic of the overload" is dismaying. Nevertheless, that confrontation is necessary if we are to make any progress toward the goal of being good human beings in a good society. Our choices cannot be made solely on the basis of a rational, mathematical calculation of "the greatest good for the greatest number," viewed through human eyes. God has not supplied us with a moral rule book. We cannot find our answer by referring to page twenty-four, paragraph five, sub-section fourteen. To think like Jesus, and then to act upon those thoughts, is a risky, dangerous, and difficult task.
I am writing these words during the week just after Easter. In my meditations on the events of Passion Week, I am struck by the profound gap between two of the last sayings of Jesus on the cross. An awful moment comes when Jesus enters into the full despair of the human condition, crying out, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" (And, make no mistake, Jesus was not play-acting. His despair was real.) Yet, not long after those words, he faced the final moments of his human existence with calm confidence: "Father, into your hands I commit my spirit." What filled that awesome gap and gave him strength? Somehow confidence and assurance arose out of despair. It was grace that made the difference, and that same power is still at work in our world.
We cannot command nor manipulate grace. Grace "just comes." What we can do is to be open and receptive to its coming. How can we be most open to grace? When we strive within our human limits to be the kind of men and women God wants us to be–when we struggle to be "good"–we are in the prime position to hope for grace.
It does not appear to be our destiny to achieve perfect love here on earth. That culmination awaits the time when we are released from our time-space "box" and see truth and virtue, not as "in a glass darkly," but "face to face." Meanwhile, our task is to take seriously the demands of the moral overload. Relying always on grace, we must dare to act–to do in each concrete moral situation what seems the "most right" thing to do, even as we pray, "Father, forgive me, for I know not what I do. "
