Angels and Grace

Personally, I’m glad to be able to simply say “What happens, happens”.  I don’t need metaphysical explanations such as Inshallah (if God wills it). Or poetic extravagances like the fall of Lucifer from the angels to end up as Satan, to explain the existence of evil in the world

I’ve always thought there’s more to reality than what the rationalists claim. Call them scientists, atheists, humanists or sceptics, you know what I mean. Take away belief and you still have the raw experience.

I could tell you things from my own life that I could call Grace—undeserved gifts full of kindness and love from “nowhere”. I could speak of angelic assistance and what I see as miracle. None of it is supernatural, for there cannot be anything above Nature, which I perceive as All. Where would be the benefit. There is nothing to sell or persuade. Only the recipient can value the blessing received. It would take to long to describe these events and why they were so special. Perhaps I shouldn’t even use such words as angels, Grace and miracle, when they carry the baggage of so many religious traditions. What else can one do but take existing coinages to one’s own use? Communication works in the same way as money: we use what’s available and accepted as currency. Needs must. On a freezing day, I’d be glad to don the robes of a Bishop to cover my shivering nakedness.

There’s a scene in Franco Zeffirelli’s film, Brother Sun, Sister Moon in which the young Francis, in a gesture of renunciation of his merchant father’s wealth, strips naked in a piazza in Assisi. The bishop, shocked by this indecency, takes off his own cloak, richly embroidered in gold and silver, and gets his sidekick to place it gently over the shoulders of this shivering youth..

The notion of angels in some manner fits experience and provides a handy way to account for otherwise inexplicable happenings. Grace is a kindred word, and I used to love the idea of a gift from God which we cannot earn by effort. It seemed my only hope! Some twenty years ago, involved in a religious cult, I read Treatise on Grace by Jonathan Edwards, an 18th century “saint and metaphysician, revivalist and theologian”. At the time I interpreted it in a manner which fitted the beliefs I held. As the Rev Vera I. Bourne writes, “Grace is a free gift. It cannot be earned by any effort on our part — by fasting, celibacy, acts of kindness or by prayer vigils.” So far so good, but Edwards goes further and touches on a secret belief of Christians and cult members everywhere: “The reason why natural men have no knowledge of spiritual things is because they have nothing of the Spirit of God dwelling in them.” Well I’m proud to be “a natural man”, just like everyone else. The idea of being one of the elect is one of the most tempting but yet the most poisonous there can be.

But these ideas – angels, grace and so on – don’t just hang unsupported from a blue sky. What happens to us is a mess of inchoate reality that we spin into a tidy coherent pattern, complete with its own aesthetic value, positive or negative, and its own meaning. I try, but I can’t help constructing reality in this way. All art, all language, all falling in love or hating one’s enemy tidies up reality to make a pattern.

So I would say to the members of religions & cults who consider themselves the elect: “No, you are just natural men and women like me, no better no worse.” And I would say to myself: “I’m as tempted as any fundamentalist or indeed any scientist, to tweak the evidence to fit an attractive theory when it comes along.” And if I had been suckled by a wolf, and lived in the jungle on all fours, my perception of reality would be constrained partly by wolfhood.