Doctrine and Covenants 163
Commentary Series

Be Vulnerable to Divine Grace
By Barbara Howard

Collectively and individually you are loved with an everlasting love that delights in each faithful step taken. God yearns to draw you close so that wounds may be healed, emptiness filled, and hope strengthened. Do not turn away in pride, fear or guilt from the One who seeks only the best for you and your loved ones. Come before your Eternal Creator with open minds and hearts and discover the blessings of the gospel anew. Be vulnerable to Divine grace.” —Doctrine and Covenants 163:10a, b

“There is a balm in Gilead that makes the wounded whole….”

She excelled academically and starred as one of three girls on a boys’ high school swimming team. She was shy and, like most fifteen-year-olds, struggling with her identity. I sensed her anxiety and wanted to bear it for her. One night, as I leaned over to kiss her goodnight, I whispered, “I wish I could take all your pain and carry it myself.”

She shot up in bed and angrily whispered, “Momma, leave my pain alone. It’s my pain, and I want to learn from it.” I was stunned. We held each other close for a moment. Then, as I started out the room, I heard her whispered question, “Mom, what exactly is grace?”

Back, seated on the side of her bed, I tried to explain how I understood grace as unconditional love. I was in seminary, and Paul Tillich’s beautiful statement that begins, “Grace strikes us when we are in great pain and restlessness…” seemed to fit our moment. I tried to remember the words, some of which I’d memorized: “Sometimes…it is as though a voice were saying: You are accepted. You are accepted, accepted by that which is greater than you…. Simply accept the fact that you are accepted” (The Shaking of the Foundations, pp. 161–163).

I told her that whenever I realize that we all are loved exactly as we are, with no requirements, the way I feel about myself changes. I shared my experience of grace, struggling to remember the rest of what Tillich had written. When I turned, I saw her smiling, tear-stained face. “Like Helen Pearson,” she said.

Immediately I remembered that just the week before I had seen her talking with Helen—Helen, leaning forward, saying little, and Joy, pouring out her heart to her friend.

“Helen makes me feel like I matter, like I am really OK, and, Mom, then I don’t feel angry at the kids who close me out. Helen is grace.”  Helen, with or without words, was grace.

“There is a balm in Gilead that heals the sin-sick soul…”

Every human being walks through dark nights of the soul. The angst of adolescence is just one of those times when we feel unacceptable, unloved. That sense of unworthiness can, and does, come at any age.

“Everything is broken,” wrote Bob Dylan, contemporary songwriter. A response to that might well be the affirmation of another modern lyricist, Leonard Cohen: “There’s a crack, a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in” (“Anthem”).

Cohen’s premise echoes the apostle Paul’s theological summary of grace: “Where sin increased, grace abounded even more” (Romans 5:20 NRSV). We rarely classify our treatment of ourselves or of others as sin. Yet one clear definition of sin is the refusal to love.

The poetry of the words, “Be vulnerable to divine grace,” is set in the counsel to come before God, whose love is everlasting and who yearns for relationship with us. God seeks only the best for us and calls us to love with open minds and hearts. To do this is to be vulnerable. C.S. Lewis affirmed,

To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one…avoid all entanglements. Lock it up… in the…coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket…it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. —The Four Loves, p. 169

The great mystics wrote about “the dark night of the soul,” and each affirms a deep, abiding relationship with God. “A love affair,” as some students of mysticism describe their relationship. Genuine loving requires an open mind and heart. This is a central quality of vulnerability, because openness requires letting go of judgment, trusting, listening, and being willing to change. Often the prologue to openness is our own silence.

An enormous value of silence is the gift that comes from stillness—letting go of all our ego needs—simply being. Often in such moments, we are moved from a place of judgment of self and others to a deep awareness of God’s constancy of boundless grace.

“Sometimes I feel discouraged and think my work’s in vain…”

We sometimes know unbelievable tragedy, loss, or betrayal. In the face of such trauma, we are drawn into a darkness that seems overwhelming. We may feel abandoned by everyone, including God. There seems no escape from the pain and grief. Then, without asking, we become aware of the truth of the scripture, “My grace is sufficient” (2 Corinthians 12:9 NRSV). John Cassian, a sixteenth-century Christian, believed this scripture is the answer to unanswered prayer.

The assurance of the power of vulnerability is emphasized in this scriptural promise: “My grace is all you need; power comes to its full strength in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:9 NEB). This affirms vulnerability’s durable strength. We bring our broken selves to God. We stop trying to control everything around us. We stop our scriptwriting for self and others. Waiting in silence, we find God’s love healing us in surprising ways.

There is no explanation for this, no formula, no works that can bring this sense of divine grace to our awareness. We are apprehended by a God whose love for us finally breaks through our ego-centered behavior, our nationalistic pride, and our stubborn claims of infallibility over the wrongness of everyone who disagrees with us. Divine grace breaks through to open our hearts to others. Tillich wrote, “We experience the grace of being able to accept the life of another, even if it be hostile or harmful to us.” We are able to see the other as belonging to God, just as we belong to God.

But then the Holy Spirit revives my soul again…

Grace is gift, making no demands or conditions. But the remarkable aspect of experiencing grace is awareness of the strength it gives us to become bearers of that same grace. In moments of empathic trust with another, we become channels of the divine Presence.

God’s Presence embodied in the human Jesus helps us, Tillich wrote, to “accept ourselves, because we feel that we have been accepted by that which is greater than we….” The story of Jesus and Zacchaeus, the rich tax collector, shows Jesus’ grace-filled presence of God in personal relationships. Jesus looked up and saw him in the tree, called to him, spent time listening to him, and rejoiced in Zacchaeus’ transformation (Luke 19:1–10 NRSV). Whenever we experience this quality of encounter, our own insecurities, self-doubts, self-loathing vanish. Like Zacchaeus, we realize that we are God’s beloved.

Karl Barth asserted, “Grace and gratitude belong together like heaven and earth. Grace evokes gratitude like the voice an echo. Gratitude follows grace like thunder lightning...” (Church Dogmatics, Volume. 4, Part 1, p. 41). This statement shows the inseparable relationship between grace—charis—and gratitude: eucharista. That grace and gratitude have the same origin in language can help us understand how gratitude is essential to our human expression of grace. “Grace should be the central principle of our theology and gratitude the driving force of our ethics” (World Council of Churches Newsletter, 9th Assembly, February 14–23, 2006).

Our pride, our certainties, and our desire to control separate us from the presence of God in ourselves, and from an awareness of the Divine in others. Divine grace, then, frees us to love others and to love ourselves. If we truly accept that we are loved without condition, our attitude toward others reflects the healing power of grace. A genuine community grounds its life in keen awareness of, and gratitude for, the power of divine grace to keep members from alienation.

Theologian Marjorie Suchocki believes that whenever there are tensions in our community, we need an attitude of gratitude:

…we can never regard the community apart from the gifts it has received and internalized from God…. All conflicts, disagreements and egregious sins …are like an overlay that is continuously correctable because of the internalized gifts. One does not abandon the community of faith, or argue for splitting the congregation on the basis of irreconcilable differences.…the way to respond to the problems…is to express thanksgiving to God for the community and its faith, love and hope.” —In God’s Presence, pp. 117–118

To grow is to change. Change, however, sometimes is difficult in our faith community. We become content. We are comfortable. Then, some new opportunity comes, and we resist. That resistance often is expressed as criticism, anger, and even hostility. Divine grace stirs us to change direction, to move into new places without fear. Grace frees us to love those who think or act differently from us. “Grace is not a strange, magic substance,” wrote Thomas Merton, “subtly filtered into our souls to act as a kind of spiritual penicillin. Grace is unity, oneness within ourselves, oneness with God” (Parabola 27, no. 3, Fall 2002: 62).

We are a diverse, multicultural community with members speaking many languages. We will change and grow as we listen and respond to one another in love, as we become vulnerable to divine grace.