By Andrea Lingle

I cry unto heaven, let thy will be done…and heaven answers, “Indeed.”

Karl Rahner, a priest in the Greek Orthodox tradition, describes grace as God’s self-communication. The Missional Wisdom Foundation has spilled some serious ink over the concept of grace. I have spent a few thousand hours trying to figure out what a sentence like, “Community is a means of grace,” (Duggins, Together) might mean. I am used to the unmerited-favor-style definition of grace, which always left me feeling like grace was something that might get handed out at the end of a wedding. Perhaps an embossed bookmark or a gauzy bag of butter mints.

Believe me, I enjoy the slow melt of the butter mint as much as the next girl, but grace needs a bit more grit and grind. It needs to stand up to the altar and the world. It needs to inhabit the hallowing and the harrowing. If community is a means of grace, grace needs to help me through community.

Because I have been thinking a lot lately about grace and pilgrimage and potential energy, but I have also been reading the news.

Last week I claimed that one could position oneself in such a way that you could hear the whisper of grace. I had planned on mentioning today that what’s more, one can create a portal through which all that pent up potential grace and love could flow. You and me, paying attention to God, create little gateways for grace to become present in the world.

But, I can’t. Not this week. It is very difficult to understand the essence of how any species so capable of violence can be said to offer anything to the universe besides trauma.

The trouble is, if Grace is the self-communication of God, and God is Love, it feels like love should be more visible. Instead it seems like the earth will with sigh with relief when we are gone.

How do we make room for love next to altars built of machine gun casings soaked in the libations of ninety-six 1-11 year olds killed by gun violence in 2023. Could Daniela Mendoza and James Cho hear the hum of grace over the report of powder and hammer. Do their families?

I wanted to write a few hundred words about how God is Love, and how we loving God creates a way for God as Love to inhabit the world, but the 532 teenagers between 12-17 who have died by gun violence this year have broken my sentences.

If grace is God’s self-communication, and community is a way by which grace is brought into the world, I can think of nothing else to say today other than, surely God weeps with us. Surely the flow of grace is tinged by the ferrous tang of our violence.

Kyrie Eleison

Christe Eleison

Kyrie Eleison