The purpose of showing grace

A cartoon I saw years ago in a magazine haunts me still. It pictures a young boy doing his times tables in a classroom. His math teacher’s bending over to look at his work. The teacher sees the right answers and says to the boy, “Pretty good!” The boy, irritated, looks back at the teacher and exclaims, “Pretty good? It’s perfect!”

The cartoon haunts me because this cultural moment reduces our lives to a formula — a transaction that needs to be perfectly balanced so that no one gets more than they deserve.

Decades ago, I helped an elderly resident near my apartment bring in her groceries. She insisted on paying me a quarter, but I — thinking myself so chivalrous — refused to take it. Her expression was one of consternation. I had brought imbalance into her life, and she had no other way to square things up. The next time I helped with her groceries, I took the quarter. She looked relieved, and I realized how a simple grace upset the balance of things. We are not used to feeling vulnerable.

Grace has its own mathematics. Grace multiplies love. As writer Frederick Buechner says, “Grace is something you can never get but only be given. There’s no way to earn it or deserve it or bring it about any more than you can deserve the taste of raspberries and cream or earn good looks or bring about your own birth. A good sleep is grace and so are good dreams. Most tears are grace. The smell of rain is grace. Somebody loving you is grace. Loving somebody is grace.” *

We graciously give to the poor and vulnerable not because we pity them or condescend to them but because we recognize our own poverty and vulnerability. I felt so noble not accepting the offered quarter; now, I see it not as threatening someone else’s balance but my own. We give because it unbalances us, and in so doing, the neat formulas are upended, and, perhaps to my surprise, where my giving goes, there’s where my love grows.

Grace multiplies love.

What is our purpose in giving? To extend grace to the world and to be agents of grace. It’s never a quid pro quo, full of expectations. We don't give to get, we get to give. Love gives. And when we do so, our sense of a purpose — beyond the daily grind — is simply divine.


* Quotation from Wishful Thinking: A Theological ABC by Frederick Buechner (Harper & Row, 1973; pp. 33-34).






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