Post Script | March 13, 2023

The Common Grace of Surprise

Don’t miss news about my rule of life intensives at the bottom of this letter!

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It has been a season of serendipities. This letter would be much longer if I tried to list them all. I’ll simply let these last weeks speak to the reality of life: that we receive the unsummoned, unbidden, unpetitioned, and unsupplicated.

Serendipity, then, might be another word for grace.

Regular readers here were quick to notice that on the heels of writing about disagreement, I was flung into public controversy, which I tried addressing here last week. (Thank you, by the way, for your charitable engagement on last week’s post. And no, I’m probably not headed back to Twitter quite yet.)

The timing of that letter was not lost on me either. I’d been thinking about the necessary goods of disagreement—then suddenly it was time to put my big-girl pants on and practice it. That was a serendipity, and I am grateful that God’s work—of deepening in me a greater courage—had begun long before last week, especially as I’ve been reading meditatively through the Gospel of Matthew.

It was weeks ago now that I’d been reading the baptism of Jesus. The text makes clear that Jesus wasn’t baptized like a good Presbyterian: “And when Jesus was baptized, immediately he went up from the water, and behold, the heavens were opened to him, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and coming to rest on him; and behold, a voice from heaven said, ‘This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased’” (Matt. 3:16, 17).

Behold is a word that says Look! To follow the looking of Jesus in this passage is to see what he saw as he came up from the water. The heavens opened. A dove descending. To follow Jesus’s line of sight is, I think, to inevitably hear what Jesus heard.

Reading this passage as slowly as I was, over the course of days, suddenly helped me to notice something I hadn’t before.

You can only look—and hear—one thing at a time. If you want to drown out the noise of the crowds, you must listen to Jesus.

If you want to need their approval less, mind your looking.

That insight was a work of deepening. Deepening is, of course, the word for the work of God in our lives that so often feels recurrent rather than new. Deepening is also to say something about the nature of learning. As C.S. Lewis said so aptly in the The Chronicles of Narnia, learning isn’t always setting out for new frontiers. It bids us to the closer scrutiny of the only partially known. Deeper up and further in.

Another serendipity of this last week had, in fact, to do with learning. I had woken up one morning with a fever of agitation. I was frustrated with the disheveled state of my writing organizational systems. I was feeling that despite all the words I seem to produce, I’m not finding my ways to the essays I was hoping to publish as part of my MFA program.

I noodled around the internet. I google-searched how to organize my writing and came up with articles about structuring arguments, which isn’t the help I was exactly looking for. Then somehow, I stumbled on a book that I bought on my Kindle and started to immediately read: How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning, and Thinking. I knew it was exactly the book that I needed, pushing me to some better habits for not only keeping track of my fleeting ideas in a more careful and deliberate system, but also for articulating my ideas with a greater precision.

And wouldn’t you know: on the same day I start to read How to Take Smart Notes, I join my small writing group on Zoom that afternoon and discover that my colleague has read the same book and started the same system nearly two months ago. Even her small degree of experience helped answer some of my questions and give me the confidence I was lacking to plunge ahead.

The common grace of surprise.

Surprise, I think, is often at the heart of things: of the human life, of the Christian life, of the writing life.

Two images I’ve used here are borrowed from the poetry I’ve been reading throughout Lent in Malcolm Guite’s The Word in the Wilderness: A Poem a Day for Lent and Easter. They were images to happen upon, in the roving that reading often mimics.

The first image—deepening—echoes from the opening image of Gwyneth Lewis’s poem, “Homecoming.” It’s a poem about prayer, and it begins, “Two rivers deepening into one.” The rivers are, of course, the two voices of prayer: God’s voice and mine. I liked the poem, but I suppose I was struck most by Guite’s reflection on the image of the conjoining of those rivers and what happens when we meet God in prayer.

“At any and every moment of prayer that river meets ours,” Guite writes; “they flow together, and then indeed in that union the channel of our own life, which might have been running shallow and babbling for a while, suddenly deepens.” I couldn’t help but wonder if the din of social media is more often related to lives running shallow, foaming up and babbling opinions. I wondered what it meant to submit myself in new ways to the habits and practices that deepen human life.

The second image—of the “unsupplicated”—is borrowed from Coleridge’s “The Pains of Sleep.” It is also a poem about prayer, and it begins:

Ere on my bed my limbs I lay,

It hath not been my use to pray

With moving lips or bended knees;

But silently by slow degrees . . .

No wish conceived, no thought exprest,

Only a sense of supplication…

I recognize this vague kind of praying, the barest articulation of what we might need or want. Sometimes I pray this way because I’m tired. Sometimes I’m wrung out by doubt. And sometimes I simply don’t know what to ask. Supplication doesn’t always take its fullest form on our lips and in our mouths.

Guite took this first part of the poem to mean that as an opium addict, Coleridge had to fight to arrive at a different, more mature understanding and experience of prayer. As the poem turns, he explains, “we realize that Coleridge’s purpose is not to promote this vague and hazy spirituality but to reveal its utter inadequacy.”

If I may, I’d like to disagree—politely, of course. What is the true nature of prayer, as Jesus describes in the Sermon on the Mount? The point of prayer, he says, isn’t confidence in the long list of (polite) demands we might make of God and the fineries with which we’d drape them, disposing him to be kind. The point is that our Father can be trusted: to know and provide all that we need. We must beware of the heaping empty phrases, the vacuous imaginings of what will make our lives good.

In prayer, in other words, we’re invited to babble less and be deepened. To be disposed to receive what couldn’t be asked or imagined.

Serendipity, in other words.

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Thanks for reading these letters, which allow me to try one some new ideas as well as deepen others. I’m especially glad for the inauspicious frame that a letter provides. These are not my unqualified assertions about the true; they’re my essai, my sense of things.A special welcome to those of you who have more recently subscribed.

Before you go: Registration is NOW OPEN for my rule of life intensives. All the information you need is here. Writing and keeping a rule of life has become a deepening practice of faith and faithfulness, and I’m looking forward to gathering these small communities for half-day workshops. I hope you’ll consider joining.

Readers here are offered a 25% discount. The code is FRIENDS25. Finally, a very special shout-out to @blakecjohnson13 for his artful collaboration in all the new graphics for this venture!

Yours for another week,

Jen