By Andrea Lingle

Through learning to love each other in communities, we live into our nature as the reflection of the image of God, fulfilling the desire of God, which draws us closer to God.

–Larry Duggins, Together, p. 25

Your breathing is called tidal.

Your heart has a variable rate.

Your eyes have bright light receptors and low light receptors.

Your nervous system has two modes.

Life is not static.

So why does it throw me so much when my emotions dance a piggy polka all day? Life cannot be called anything but variable right now. Planning for the future means dinner (baked spaghetti in zucchini) not the autumn (I have no idea).

A few weeks ago I spent a whole Saturday trying to work out a classic math puzzle called Concerning a Check. At first glance it seems like an easy algebra word problem. It isn’t. There are too many unknowns.

Right now it feels like there are too many unknowns. Life feels like it has problems with infinite solutions but no answers. How do Communities of Grace operate if people cannot gather, if tribalism has hijacked our language, if no one is listening? How do Communities of Grace operate is puzzling enough, but add the confusion of global disruption and there are just too many variables.

OR…isn’t there always an OR…

OR, a global pandemic, a rupture in the social fabric, a digression into tribalism, a total unlacing is the perfect time to be digging around in what it means to be a Community of Grace. What is a Community of Grace without gathering? Gathering is important. Vitally. But it must not be ultimately important, or a Dispersed Community could not exist. So, there is an OR built into all of these unknown variables.

Pithy side note: I am capitalizing the OR because I am referencing the word as a boolean operator. Which, as my research classes in college taught me, is used to open up a search to find more information. OR makes the discussion bigger. It is not meant to diminish either option, just open your search up. Now, it is not a boolean that makes your search easier, but it makes it richer. OR resists specific definitions and introduces complexity. Perhaps it even reveals hidden connections.

Could grace inhabit OR?

I have been wrestling with a satisfactory definition of grace for a long time. It is like trying to define where one breath starts and another begins. You can’t even wonder about the question without altering your breath. The instant you think about it, you change the way you breathe. Grace seems like an easy thing to define, but it lives too firmly in OR to reveal itself in prose.

Is it, then, ridiculous to ask the question: What is a Community of Grace? Yes! It is ridiculous. As ridiculous as a shepherd leaving ninety-nine sheep to find the one. When Jesus spoke of the Kingdom of God it was in parables and mysteries. There is an openness, an OR, to grace. Grace asks us to become part of the Community of Grace which is much, much broader than our specific community.

Grace requires pause. Grace requires listening. Grace requires that we step away from action and let all the pieces fall down around us. Not waiting. Just being. Like flowers in a field. Does the Community of Grace also act, yes, but, first, pause.