There Go I

There but for the grace of God go I.

The phrase has been around so long it barely registers anymore. We say it when we pass someone sleeping in a doorway, or hear about a relapse, or read about a life that came apart in some recognizable way. It is meant to be humble. It is meant to remind us that we are not so different, not so protected, not so far from the edge as we might like to believe.

And it does do that, a little. There is something in it that reaches across. Something that at least tries.

But listen to what it actually says. There but for the grace of God go I. It says: I received grace and that person did not. Or not enough. Or they received it and somehow lost it. It draws a line between the one who made it and the one who didn't, and then credits God for which side of the line you landed on. The humility is real but the geography is wrong. You are still here. They are still there. Grace is still the thing that separates you.

I don't think that's what grace is. 

—————

The world had become transparent. I could see through things to the meaning underneath them, and the meaning was always urgent, always personal, always part of a pattern I was on the verge of deciphering.

I thought I was being tested. I thought I had to show that I understood the assignment. I didn't know what the assignment was, mind you, but I was supposed to demonstrate that I was in on it. I was being recruited by the FBI, you see, and they wanted to know if I knew that they knew.

I was on a mission. I was dragging a bubby cart, collecting things from the side of the road. Mostly trash. A scrap of paper with half a word. A particular rock. Each one was a sign, a piece of a larger message being assembled for me specifically. I carried them carefully.

At one point I found a crushed aluminum can lying in the road. I picked it up and turned it over. My husband had designed it. I had done the production. I recognized our work, distorted, flattened, lying in the street, and I understood it immediately as part of the mystery. Of course it was there. Of course it was mine.

I know what that sounds like now. At the time it was as real as anything I have ever known.

—————

When I see someone who is clearly unhoused, yelling at the air, in conversation with something no one else can perceive, I do not think: there but for the grace of God go I.

I think: there go I.

Not as a figure of speech. Not as a therapeutic exercise in empathy. As recognition. I have been in that frequency, or something close enough that the membrane between their experience and mine is very thin. I know the urgency. I know the signs. I know what it is to be receiving transmissions that no one else in the room is picking up.

The difference between my life and theirs is not grace. It is housing, diagnosis, medication, insurance, a family that knew what to do, a city with adequate services, the particular configuration of stressors in the year it broke open. Luck. Scaffolding. I did not deserve more grace than they did. I did not receive more. The grace, if that is what we are calling it, was the same for both of us.

—————

Here is the thing I have noticed, though. The phrase only ever gets used in one direction.

We say it looking down, or across, toward suffering, toward the edge, toward the life that came apart. We never say it looking up.

But I want to. Because when I hear Richard Rohr say that everything is a child of God, something moves in me that is not admiration. When Ram Dass describes loving awareness and the part of us that is always already watching, always already at peace, and something in me rises to meet it and says yes, that, I know that—that is not me recognizing a superior. That is me recognizing myself.

There go I when I hear Rohr say that the false self is not destroyed but relativized, that it can become small enough to stop running the show. There go I when Ram Dass says we are all just walking each other home. I have been in that country too. Which means the phrase has to work in both directions or it doesn't work at all.

—————

Grace, I am increasingly convinced, is not what protected me. It is not what kept me from one thing or delivered me toward another. It is not distributed unevenly among the deserving. It is not the reason some people make it and others don't.

Grace is the membrane itself. The thin place between my experience and the person yelling at the air. The thin place between my ordinary life and the life of someone who has found words for what I have always known. It is the substance of the connection, the fact that the connection is possible at all.

When I picked up that can and recognized our work lying crushed in the road, and felt the universe speaking directly to me through it, there was something real in that, even inside the illness. 

The world was not actually sending me messages. But the longing underneath—the intuition that nothing is entirely separate, that meaning runs through ordinary objects like current through wire—that is not a symptom. The symptom was the certainty. The intuition is much older. And it was pointing, however sideways, toward the same thing Rohr points toward. The same thing grace points toward. The fact that the can and I were never not connected.

From The Universal Christ by Richard Rohr:
The whole of creation—not just Jesus—is the beloved community, the partner in the divine dance. Everything is "the child of God." No exceptions.