Well, isn't that prevenient!

"But how can someone be born when he is old?" asked Nicodemus. "Can he enter his mother's womb a second time and be born?" Jesus answered, "In very truth I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born from water and spirit. Flesh can give birth only to flesh;it is spirit that gives birth to spirit. You ought not to be astonished when I say, 'You must all be born again.' The wind blows where it wills; you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit." "How is this possible?" asked Nicodemus. "You a teacher of Israel and ignorant of such things!" said Jesus. --John 3:4-10

This was part of today's Gospel reading. Father Miller's sermon on it touched on the concept of prevenient grace -- a part of Christian theology that denies that all you have to do is strain and then you will create yourself some faith. No; faith is a gift, just as life itself is a gift. It cannot be calculated, engineered, or narrated into existence. God's grace goes before and makes the way, like those people in the game of curling with their brushes, arranging for faith to arrive.

I have noticed from this narrative that Nicodemus's "ignorance" is not that he doesn't know that Jesus is somehow special, but that he is unaware of the living metaphor that a life of faith embodies. Nicodemus, as one of the preeminent teachers of his generation, ought to know already about the second birth. After all, as the Romans reading points out, Abraham's specialness comes from exactly this: "Abraham trusted God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness." Abraham was born from above, because he met God with faith. Abraham received three gifts, the gift of faith, the gift of righteousness, and the gift of his promise that he would be the father of nations. Dorothy Sayers would find a "trinity" in this, I am sure: a conception of faith, a being born into something good, and a fruitfulness to pass on further -- like the God who gives birth to us, the Son who justifies us, and the Spirit who makes us fruitful in our turn. Notice that this prevenient grace really is prevenient -- it exists fully before the Christian era, or Jesus would not have been able to hold Nicodemus accountable for his ignorance of it. So it is not true to say that being "born again" is only the act of confessing Christ as Lord; people were confessing their gift of faith long before Jesus was born, and Jesus expects people of faith to understand what he means when he talks about it. Being "born again," or "born from above" is just the beginning, incomprehensible till it happens and then later marking a beginning lost in the mists of memory as the autobiographical memory of the spirit takes over.

When I was six, my parents took me and my sister on a ski trip to Keystone. My sister was very small and stayed in the nursery, but I was big enough to join the first-grade beginning ski group. They marked the number of our group on blue balloons and pinned them to our pompom hats, so everyone would know what class we were in. The teacher of my class was named Elvira -- nothing like the Mistress of the Night but rather plump and cheerful, with flyaway dark hair. We went up the slope making "big 11s and little 11s," then learned to shuss down. Elvira was teaching me: "Now, put your weight on one foot, and then on the other." I lifted one heavy ski and tried to put it on top of the other, though that didn't seem right. "No, no, it's more like you put your weight on your hip." I blinked at her. "You lean over, like." I leaned over and she had to stop me from toppling onto my side in the snow.

We went down the slope a couple of times, but I never did get the concept of shifting my weight to shuss down. About six months later I was playing on the kitchen floor, and the light dawned. "Ohhhh!" I knew what she meant, though of course it was too late to use my knowledge to ski with.

In matters of faith, I imagine myself to be a lot like Nicodemus and like my six-year-old self, struggling with bodily metaphor in order to learn to do something graceful and thrilling. It is here that I am grateful for prevenient grace, grace that goes before me and makes those "Aha!" moments possible.

Just pin a blue balloon to my hat, and show me the bunny slope.

Thoughts about Lent, etc.

Gosh, it's been awhile. I think I am going to try to post things I think as I think them -- just get my meditations out there before I forget I ever had them.

Sunday was the Transfiguration, and it occurred to me in church while hearing the reading that the Transfiguration has always been one of those things for me. When I was nine or ten and trying to take up the practice of our religion as best I understood how (this was the period of time during which I once tried to get my family to use Oreos and water for home Communion, as we had no matzah or grape juice), I decided to read my way all the way through the New Testament (I ended up getting bogged down in Acts). There were a few things in the Gospel story that I just didn't understand, and the Transfiguration was one of them. Oh, I understood the words, and their import: but I couldn't explain to myself why I felt shut out of the meaning. How complicated could it be, I wondered? Jesus and his favorite three disciples go up a mountain, and Jesus is "transfigured" -- suddenly wearing white, and conversing with Moses and Elijah, and God speaks; and then the glory drops away and the three Galileans are babbling and silent by turns. What was so hard to understand about that?

But I continued to tell myself that I didn't understand it, because I knew that that story spoke to something that was other than what I knew about life with God.

It was interesting, in passing, to encounter the word (with a capital letter, too!) in the Harry Potter books, meaning the magical science of changing one thing into another, or making it disappear or appear. Was that analogous to what happened on the mountain with Jesus? Obviously miracle was involved somehow. Was it just too simple for subtle people to get? Was it one of those things Paul talked about that shames the eggheads while speaking to the simple? Was the significance of Jesus's clothes turning "a whiter hue than white" in Jean Rhys's phrase and the appearance of Moses and Elijah and the voice of God, was the significance of all that just too obvious for me?

Occasionally I wondered if not grasping it meant I didn't believe it, and therefore wasn't really a part of Jesus' family. But belief and apprehension seem to be different things to me and I never did feel a complete terror of possibly not being acceptable because of the way my mind worked -- or didn't work. In any case, I put away the Transfiguration on a small shelf of the things I couldn't mur up in comprehending words -- my first experience with the death of a friend being one of its fellows, for example -- and went on with life.

I still don't "understand" the Transfiguration, but I'm glad we celebrate it and talk about it once a year. Perhaps some time Jesus will reveal me my own mystery, like that white stone with our secret name on it in Revelation.

Meanwhile Lent has come: today I had ashes put on my head and heard the words, "Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return." It has always been a great comfort to hear that line from Psalm 51: "He remembers that we are dust." He remembers, even if we forget and get perfectionistically above ourselves. There seems to me to be a lot of knowledges that God carries for us this way, and Lent seems like a season in which God lets them down for us, simple, unadorned, unveiled, immutable, without the fug of our rushing about and anticipating this, that, and the other. On the Sunday of the Transfiguration, reading the Ash Wednesday service in my pew, anticipating, I almost had tears at the words. "Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return." All the things I have in my life to grieve over, the "if onlys" and the losses -- that is dust, and the things I try to make out of my life, those are dust too. They are the same. It's comforting because for a moment I can think, not that my positive attributes and actions are as mutable and fleeting as my body, but that my negative actions and attributes are just as dusty as everything else I will ever lose. For a moment, I can let go.

There are things I don't understand, but I don't have to understand to be grateful, which is a blessing.