“The Kind of Grace that breaks the human heart.”

H,

There is no place for goodness in the way that God saves us. Grace does not highlight that we are great or good but details that we are sinful and weak. It does not speak to ego but to the fallen soul. We are not allowed to glory in the recovery because that is always incomplete. We are always aware of our flaws and how quickly they can consume us. We are on a life-long trajectory to be cured. We are never quite there. This is how God saves; it is the kind of Grace that breaks the human heart.

One of my earlier breaks from purely religious ideas about God was when someone said that a little of your soul is not enough to give and the work of grace is not a repair but a demolition. We are not making little adjustments here and there; we are learning how to die. The whole person is seeped in the darkness that cannot save. The whole person must go into the water and the fire and the bread and the wine. The temple was going to all come down, Christ said.

I should note that this process is not the gloom and doom that many would like to think. It is absolute joy. God is absolute, furious, and everlasting joy. Many would like to focus on the thorns but those are just the symbols of atonement. Many would like to think of it as a difficult thing we share with God. There is only one in the Glory of it. We are often hapless instruments being made into children of God. Even the discipline, mostly in some things and never in everything, comes by the Grace of God. They, our holy trinity that saves, leave no allowance for false ideas that we are partners in progress. We are pilgrims in process. This is the grace that breaks the human heart: we are not the heroes of the story but the humans in peril. By the time we approach the heroic, as we see it, it will no longer matter.