Since we’ve had a reading break this past week (for all you non-Canadians, that’s French for “No School”), I took the opportunity to try and squeeze all the work I was supposed to get done in the first half of the week, then take a lightning trip down to Salem, then see friends in Seattle, then be back in Vancouver by Sunday night. While it is definitely good to see both family and friends, I think I will probably forbear from doing that again. At 25, I’m starting to feel my age, and travel just doesn’t seem as easy as it used to. J

This past few weeks have been quite pleasant, though relatively uneventful. The sun actually made a premature appearance in Vancouver for most of last week, which meant that the annual ritual of an entire city coming out of hibernation took place a few months earlier than usual. I got back on my bike and took my first ride that wasn’t to school and back down to the waterfront, where happy crowds soaked up long-deprived Vitamin D. (Some perhaps soaked up more than they should have in public and with pasty winter skin, but that’s kind of to be expected in the northwest). Life at the house continues apace. It’s been really cool to see how we’ve bonded even since the semester started, with impromptu sing-alongs, potlucks, and movie nights (although, for those who have not seen it, Tree of Life is not the best choice for a Friday night movie). School as well has been good this semester, although I’m consistently frustrated that, no matter how hard I try, I can’t seem to get as much done as I intend. I’ve been attempting to be a library troll this semester and spend at least 40 solid hours doing some sort of school work, whether in class or in the library, so that I can have evenings and weekends free. However, usually by the time Friday rolls around, I’m just about spent, and take all day to for what should be a two-hour task.

I guess, in the realm of epiphanies, this semester has also shown me a lot about grace. My whole life, I have tried to be the person who never really needed it; I tried to push myself hard enough that no one else could have anything really bad to say about me. This semester has reminded me of the limits of those capabilities. I try to organize things obsessively, and still lose things. I try to get ahead on schoolwork, but never do. I try to start a project, but like a puppy with ADHD, am quickly distracted by the next interesting thing comes along, and so my notebook is littered with initial ideas and attempts to be (possibly) picked up again later. I tried to get my rent paid early, then left my checkbook at home and only just retrieved it, so I am much in the debt of the grace of my long-suffering landlords.

This realization of the need for grace at a personal level has been complimented by the driving need for grace at a cosmic level. (Michelle, if you are reading this, you might want to skip this paragraph.) A few weeks ago, one of my housemates and I went to see the documentary “Surviving Progress.” It was a fascinating look at the human and environmental cost of the technology and economic luxury that our culture depends on and demands. What particularly fascinated me about it was that I have never seen a non-Christian production that so powerfully confirmed what I see as the Judeo-Christian meta-narrative. I’m reminded of the parable of the prodigal son: boy takes dad’s money, skips town, squanders inheritance on prostitutes, gets desperate, goes back home chastened; father welcomes unworthy son back home, and though the boy does not deserve rescue and can do nothing to rescue himself, the father accepts him without reserve. Like most everyone else, I’ve always read that story in an individual sense as talking about how I am “prone to wander, Lord I feel it,/prone to leave the God I love,” and I am fairly certain this was the principal sense in which it was intended. But walking out of the theatre, I wondered if it might also be apropos for human society as a whole: provided with a richly endowed planet, we had what we needed, and were bid to use it wisely for our good and to the glory of the Father that had given it. However, we thought ourselves too clever to be bound by his silly rules; we thought that our reason had figured out ways to avoid the consequences of our actions. (When, for example, was the last time you heard a sermon on usury? How about proper agricultural practice? What about the value of simplicity?) So we squandered those gifts for our own increasingly insatiable appetites, changing the “truth of incorruptible God for a lie, and serving the images of created things: beasts, and reptiles, and birds,” and I might add, possessions, wealth, status. (I feel that the language of exchanging “reality” for its “semblance” or “image” is particularly powerful since the dawn of the Virtual age, but that’s just me). However, it is only now becoming clear that there was no avoiding the cost. We just managed to debit it away to somewhere we couldn’t see it: a future time, or a distant place.

Those of you who have talked with me in the past few months know that it’s not difficult to get me launched into an apocalyptic rant these days. I feel like a crazy-haired Jonah proclaiming the imminent end of the world and the need to “repent”: literally, to change the way we think about everything. But I was reminded today that this is only half the story, and not the important half. The important part is the reality of grace that intervenes when we can do nothing for ourselves. The world doesn’t need more prophets of doom; we seem to have those in abundance. Nor do we need blind optimists, continuing business as usual in willful ignorance. What we really need now are people who, in the words of Brothers Karamazov, will “not be afraid of man’s sin, [but] love man also in his sin, for this likeness of God’s love is the height of love on earth.” To “love man in his sin”—not just others, but in ourselves as well—to both show and receive grace where it is not deserved—this is the true instrument by which the world may be changed.