(A theological reflection in 7 (rather long!) parts. This article is very much about my experience, so the word “I” appears rather a lot. There is a huge range of experience amongst Christians, so many people will see things quite differently, but I am hopeful that my experience is sufficiently understood to strike chords with many readers)
Why do I believe I am surrounded by God’s grace?
Part 1: Grace is certainly a real and wonderful experience, but do we need God for it?
I realise that I made a bold statement when I said that I feel strongly that I am surrounded by God’s grace. This raises the obvious challenge: “That’s all very well for you, but what if I don’t feel that?”. So, I will try and explore as honestly as I can what this feeling of grace is.
In previous posts, I often try to translate my faith beliefs into secular equivalents. I am doing my best to understand what my faith is. To consider if it might be understood in an entirely secular manner – in the sense that I might admit that I was mistaken in embarking on a life of faith because I could have found the same – very precious – experiences through an entirely secular route. I don’t want to belittle secular beliefs, but I hope that I can find something extra that faith adds to human existence. So, I will consider alternative understandings of what I consider to be the experience of grace, and then look at what a faith perspective might add – even if there is profound validity in the secular point of view.
So, what might an experience of God’s grace actually be if there is no God? Let me go back to my teenage years and investigate my own experiences, for that is when I feel I was strongly encountering God for the first time.
It could be an experience of the wonder of life, of how wonderful it is to be alive. As we move from childhood to adulthood we develop new mental faculties. So, I was overwhelmed to discover how beautiful the natural world is. I can remember staring at cherry-blossom and daffodils, scarcely believing how anything could be so beautiful. Of course, I had seen such things before in childhood, but I had not noticed them in the way I was now able to.
It could be an effect of the growing self-awareness we develop. Whereas, as children we take many things for granted, or unthinkingly, as we move into teenage years, we develop an ability to reflect upon our own experience, and to realise that, although things are so, they might not have been. We sense – and much of this will be unconscious, though in other respects we will be consciously aware of being inspired by new principles and values that we have just discovered – the wonderful potential of life. We are free, independent agents with the opportunity and possibility of charting our own particular course through life. There will also be a lot of unconscious, as well as conscious, awareness of the possibilities of sexual and romantic attractions that open up an entirely new realm of existence.
I can appreciate that all these factors can combine to give an extravagantly wonderful and extremely powerful sense of entering a new realm of existence, a new way of being. As it is a new faculty of mind and spirit and body that we are entering into, it strikes us as a wonderfully – almost magically – enchanting new way of life. For anyone with familiarity with a religious life of faith, it is the most natural thing in the world to associate this new experience with the experience of meeting God. In this train of thought, we are putting forward a suggestion, not simply for what the experience of God’s grace is, but a suggestion for what God is, in himself. This is not as big a step as I thought a couple of sentences ago, as, if there is any validity in the thought, then what we are saying is that the reality of God is “simply” an experience of being surrounded by grace. We have mistakenly thought that this grace is an effect of being in relationship with a person we call “God”, but really grace is an experience of becoming aware of the wonder of life.
Spiritual Devotion 