'By grace you have been saved' - May 27
Today’s Readings: AM Psalm 85, 86; PM Psalm 91, 92; 1 Sam. 2:1-10; Eph. 2:1-10; Matt. 7:22-27
Today’s Reflection
Earlier this week, I decided to go look at a bookshelf that I have rarely looked at since I moved all my belongings into my office at Saint Stephen’s two years ago. The shelf in question is filled with books of poetry—many of them souvenirs of my first two degrees, which focused on literary criticism. I decided to bring a few home with me, to re-engage with this aspect of my imagination and intellect that I have felt distant from in recent years. Something about being in a new home and a new phase in life has my heart and mind open again to the beauty of poetry, and the different lens on life it offers us. So, I brought home an eclectic mix of William Blake, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and James Fenton.
Fenton’s poetry collection is called Out of Danger (Farrar Strauss Giroux, 1994). This collection of poems was once quite dear to me, given by someone who held a special place in my life at the time (my now former spouse). It felt a little strange to take that book off the shelf again, but it seemed an important step toward reclaiming poetry for myself in this new chapter in life.
One of my favorite poems in the collection, when I first read it in 1997 and still today, is a poem called “The Ideal.” Given all the ways life has unfolded since then, it seems drenched in significance. Reading back over this poem again this evening, I am all the more aware of the truth Fenton so well captured in these three stanzas:
This is where I came from.
I passed this way.
This should not be shameful
Or hard to say.
A self is a self.
It is not a screen.
A person should respect
What he has been.
This is my past
Which I shall not discard.
This is the ideal.
This is hard.
The passage we read today from Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians connects in my mind with the sentiment of Fenton’s poem. Paul is reassuring his friends that God has saved them through his kindness and grace:
All of us once lived among them in the passions of our flesh, following the desires of flesh and senses, and we were by nature children of wrath, like everyone else. But God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ*—by grace you have been saved (Ephesians 2: 3-6).
In these lines, Paul is acknowledging how we all have a past—we all can look back and see where we made some mistakes “like everyone else.” But no matter what we have done (or left undone, as we say in the Confession), God sees each mistake or regret as an occasion to “show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness towards us in Christ Jesus.”
In another poem, “The Mistake,” Fenton articulates how we can look back at our choices and see them ever so much more clearly in retrospect:
With the mistake your life goes in reverse.
Now you can see what you did
Wrong yesterday and wrong the day before
And each mistake leads to something worse
And every nuance of your hypocrisy
Towards yourself, and every excuse
Stands solidly on the perspective lines
And there is perfect visibility.
I, for one, can easily look back at any number of points in my life and see so clearly how if I had made a different choice at point A, B, or C, I could have avoided several complicated and unfortunate situations. It can be easy, when caught in this regretful frame of mind, to be hard on oneself for not knowing better or not choosing better at the time.
But here is where our faith in Jesus makes all the difference. No matter what regrets we may have, no matter what choices we wish we could undo, what moments we wish we could re-live differently, God in his unending kindness offers us unending grace through Christ Jesus. We are loved by a God who does not expect perfection from us. Rather, we are loved eternally and unconditionally by a God who loves us, imperfections, ill-informed choices, and all:
For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God—not the result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life. –Ephesians 2: 8-10
Becky+
Questions for Reflection
What choices in life do you look back on with regret? Have you ever prayed to God to help you let go of your regrets and embrace the gifts of grace and forgiveness? Do you find it easier to forgive others and understand their mistakes than to forgive and understand your own?
Daily Challenge
Write a letter to yourself in which you allow yourself to put some great regret into words—and then allow yourself to put forgiveness into words. Loving yourself requires not only forgiving yourself but accepting without qualification the forgiveness God offers you.