puregrace

What I think

People can manage grace in pieces — partially, for a while, when it suits them. Pure grace is different: nothing held back, nothing required in return. I don’t think that comes from people at all. I think it comes from God. If you name that differently, I am not going to argue about the label.

That includes the professionals. If all have sinned, then the clergy are standing exactly where everyone else is standing. Nobody gets to hang their hat on it.

But that is a belief, not a finding. I have held it a long time, and ungrace has not shaken it. If anything, I needed the ungrace to really believe it.

I am still open to being wrong, genuinely and not politely. If there is a person out there who has truly offered it, I would like to know.

Where the name came from

I bought this domain in 1997. It was the first one I ever registered — harder to do back then than it is now, and exciting for that reason alone. I was finishing graduate school and had just read The Ragamuffin Gospel by Brennan Manning. It was the first time in my adult life that the idea of grace actually clicked. The phrase pure grace resonated, so I bought it.

For a while I lent the domain to my local church, which seemed like exactly the right use for it. That church was full of grace then — hopeful, reaching for people who hadn’t found it yet.

It ended ungracefully.

They were not worse than anyone else. I had wanted something from them that I no longer think anyone has. I kept the domain anyway, and twenty-nine years later I am still working it out.

Two things I have kept

How you climb up the mountain is just as important as how you get down the mountain. And so it is with life, which for many of us becomes one gigantic test followed by one gigantic lesson. In the end, it all comes down to one word. Grace. It’s how you accept winning and losing, good and bad, the darkness and the light. Author unknown

The truth is, what one really needs is not Nobel Laureates, but love… So just practice loving. George Wald, letter to the Boston Globe, 1980

What I am actually asking

• What is grace, let alone puregrace?
• Can anyone give it before they have received it?
• Does it survive being withheld?
• Is it religious, or does it just get talked about there?
• Does it show up at work?
• What is it to you?
• Have you found grace after ungrace?