Greathidden Grace
Grace is a great and terrible paradox. Although hidden, it is ever-present. Beyond our grasp, it is intimately close. Being unearned, it is not right to presume or expect it, and yet it is poured out with a reliability that exceeds our receiving even of what we do justly deserve. Like a game of divine hide-and-seek, grace invites us by the troubling fact of its present absence to engage more fully, look deeper, and experience the thrill of discovery; to seek with wonder and awe, rather than with anxiety or shame. “If with all your hearts you truly seek me, ye shall ever surely find me,” saith our God.
The playfulness of grace is not trivial. It speaks, rather, to the nature and depth of God’s desire for relationship with us. Like a parent playing peekaboo with a child, delighting in the joy of each “revelation,” so too God seems to delight in our discovery of His presence in a world around us where he seems to be absent; to be found by us, shrouded in “clouds and thick darkness.” There is no glory – no fun! – for Him in being revealed in the merely glorious. He delights in being discovered in ruination and disaster. He shrouds Himself in a form in which there is no beauty nor comeliness that we would desire Him, indeed, a visage nearly too terrible to look upon.
Grace permeates existence. Even in moments of doubt or darkness, when the Divine seems most distant, grace is there. It is the very air we breathe, the ground beneath our feet, the steady rhythm of a beating heart. It doesn’t require earning or performance. It simply is, hidden in plain sight, waiting to be noticed and received. In it, we live, and move, and have our being.
The Gospel, viewed through this lens, is not a set of doctrines to be believed or propositions to be accepted, but an adventure to be embarked upon. It is an invitation to dive deep into the mystery of divine love, to lose oneself in the unutterable, immeasurable riches of grace. No one needed to tell the man who had found a treasure hidden in a field to go sell all that he had to buy it. He went with joy. With joy! His feet were carried on wings of desire. His heart pounded with all the passion of a lover, whose instincts attach themselves to the possible impossibility that there might somehow, some way be a way to attach himself, to unite himself to the object of his love, if he only throws himself into it with utter self-forgetfulness and abandon.
But such is our forgetfulness, that we forget it is His idea, and we (being fools) think that WE must pierce in into the veil, that WE must run, WE must persist, forgetting that He has hidden Himself for the sheer delight of His Love. This is the strangeness of it! That even His hiddenness is a pursuit of US! O what wonder, what strangeness is this! But this is the length, the breadth, the height, the depths of His love, that is beyond any boundary or boundlessness. “O where can I go from your spirit? Where can I flee from your presence?”
We have a strange way of transforming everything into a law. But how can there be a law in this? That God is so delighted to delight in us? That He laughs, whose throne is in heaven; that He desires to play thus with us? That it is He who pursues us, with the vigor of a Lover whose Love is spelled in stars and galaxies, in the ceaseless dance of quarks and atoms, hidden in every strange dance of love and loss, desire and discovery? Every strange motion of reality is His, and every cadence, a part of this one, secret ineffable poetry, whose theme is our Belovedness, a Belovedness so deep and so secure that He has fully poured out His Blood for it, turned Himself inside out, given Himself over to destruction, and defeated death and hell and all the terrors of nonbeing to transform our mortality into ever being capable of ever-receiving the ever-unending, molten magnitude of all the rapids and cataracts of the sweet ceaseless tides of HIs all-creating, all-sustaining ominamor.
To be sure, it’s discomfiting to think that we are “toyed with” by God. These are not encouraging thoughts when we find ourselves in our deepest pits and lowest hells, when we are perched upon the dungheap of the destruction of all our dreams and desires. Often we feel ourselves the victim of fate or circumstance – at best! if we are able to crawl out from under the suffocating intuition that we might in fact be directly and immediately under the flame of some sort of sadistic Divine persecution; our troubling suspicion that God – for some reason – likes to watch us squirm. “Like a moth, you eat away all that is dear to us! … O turn your gaze from me, that I may be glad again, before I go my way and am no more.” And again, “Why do you hide your face and consider me your enemy?”
But these are exactly the words we are given to cry out! We are given – it is a gift!! – groans unutterable; a grief that seizes, our heart, our mind, our soul, our whole being. The invitation is not to some project of self-improvement, or even peacemaking with the terrors of existence. In fact, the impulse of terror and the impulse of love are one and the same, one torrent, one ecstasy, one experience of being utterly torn apart and reconstituted by the all-suffusing, incomprehensible, and unbearable Beauty that hides itself in the heart of existence.
In this way, even atheism itself is a gift from God – that we would be graced to descend to such a place of utter meaning-evacuating, reality-bending depths of paradox, as to deny that the life with which we curse our life has source or cause. God loves us, not only in our unlovability, but in our unloving, when we rail, with every fiber of our being, against Goodness and Truth and Beauty itself; when we with fervor deny, not only that these things exist, but that they are even possible; when we swear in our anger, that even if they did exist (which – just to be absolutely clear – we do not believe), we would mercilessly and recklessly and with full, ruthless abandon pursue them and tear them apart.
There we are, in the midst of the storm, struggling all night, in our little tempest-tossed boat (for it is shortly before dawn) against the wind and the waves, bearing His terrors with a troubled mind. We are not comforted – we are terrified! – to see that figure walking upon the water; His familiar face, luminous and serene. It must be a ghost! It must be a demon! A lie! A delusion! He comes to us: and we cannot stop our struggles, even to look up and contemplate this coming vision; if we let go, even for a moment, we will be submerged in these darkcrashing terrors; the thunders, and the lightnings of this darksome night will tear us full apart.
He comes to us, and it is as though He is going to pass us by. As though He would add His impassivity to the impassivity of all nature, and all humanity: no one cares about our little storms, and our struggles. This is not a global flood, but a tempest, as it were, in a teapot; a little weather system, over a little lake, in a little corner of the world, appearing in no almanac, unknown and unnoticed. And God is in it, and God is through it, and God is present to us here, in spite of all this? In spite of both the struggle, and the smallness?
Yes. Yes, Beloved. Yes. The Lord is here. Here. Even here. Especially here. His Spirit is with us.
This is precisely the full playfulness of theophany. That the Lord is not in the wind nor the earthquake. That he would hide us in the Rock, and pass us by, and allow us to see the backside of His Glory as it recedes, in its strange, unknown, and unknowable majesty, before which we remove our shoes and veil our faces.