Grace and All That

Wowza has it been a long time since I posted. I knew I was neglecting my blog, but I didn't realize that it was quite this bad! I'd like to promise to do better, and I think that promise would be as much for myself as any readers, but I don't make promises I'm not sure I can keep. So I'll try, but that's the best I can do.

So anyway, my thoughts this morning are on grace. I recently had a conversation with some folks about grace, and salvation, and hell, and faith. It was exhausting, as much of that part of my theology is still developing, but it was also exhilarating. I believe it's necessary to wrestle with these kinds of things. We didn't come to too many conclusions, but the wrestling has stuck with me over the last couple weeks. Just how big is God's grace? It's not earned, but aren't there some requirements? If there is no hell, then what is the point of salvation? What DOES Jesus mean when he says, "I am the Way, the Truth, and the Light, and no one gets to the Father except through me?" If non-Christians receive God's grace too, then why did God send Jesus? Can you be a Christian if you don't believe Jesus was divine? If so, is there still a trinity?

Seriously, they are questions that can keep someone like me awake at night. And as I told those folks, my life would be infinitely easier if I were a black-and-white kind of person, if I could just accept pat answers, memorize them, and spit them back out as truth. Salvation from sin comes through atonement and the cross alone, and it means salvation from Hell. Good people who believe Jesus Christ is their Lord and Savior do not go to Hell. Being "good" means following what is written in the Bible, and what is found there is infallible.

However, I'm not that kind of person. I am much more aware of nuance and different perspectives. I struggle to figure out what place the really crappy stories and and instructions in the Bible have in our faith lives today.  I shudder to think that the beautiful, loving non-Christian people I know will go to Hell while vile, hate-spewing oppressor Christians get the Eternal Good Life. It's not all clear. The Bible contradicts itself. It was written by fallible humans, and as someone who frequently attempts to write and speak with the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, I know first hand that sometimes we get in the way or screw it up or spin the message to our liking.

Here's my mini-morsel of insight that has occurred to me on this hazy, hot and humid summer morning in Massachusetts: if God's grace looks like our human ideas of justice and fairness, we're probably not getting it right. I don't know exactly what God's justice looks like. I do know that I don't believe in an eternal separation from God in a fiery underworld. That being said, I think we must be accountable for our actions--or inaction--in this life. How that plays out, I just don't know. My human sense of justice is that of course Mother Theresa and Jerry Sandusky (making an assumption of guilt here, although of course he's still in court receiving his fair trial) would end up in different places. That's only fair. A life lived ministering to the poor vs. a life lived inflicting horrific abuse on children? Duh. 


And yet. I have no doubt that anyone who is a perpetrator of abuse--and particularly abuse against children-- will have to answer to her/his Creator. I have no doubt that God has little tolerance for such evil. And yet, something in my gut twists a little to create such an absolute, such a limit to God's grace. Where is the line? Is it rape, murder, abuse? What about stealing? What about not caring for "the least of these?" In Jesus' famous speech about feeding the hungry and clothing the naked and visiting the prisoners and in doing such, doing so for him and being blessed, we tend to stop reading before we get to the second part about the people who DON'T do those things facing damnation. Or there's that line in Mark about most sin being forgivable except blaspheming against the Holy Spirit, which is eternally unforgivable. 


I think God's grace is big. Bigger than we could ever imagine. And while we certainly must strive to live in obedience to God and God's commandments, I think we'd do well not to say for certain, "This thing is beyond God's grace." Somehow, I just picture God's response to such a limit to be something along the lines of, "Oh yeah? Watch me."

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An African is Not Just a Brown White Person

I got all excited just now poking around Etsy, "window" shopping for stuff for my as-yet-to-be-found new place, when I came across these pillows.

I was just ready to add them to my favorites when I took a second look. Something wasn't right. And then I realized: these are not the silhouettes of Africans.

Ok, now I know that there are white people in Africa...but these silhouettes are, in my opinion, not meant to be of white Africans. They are composed of brown fabric, and the accessories are clearly meant to be, ahem, "ethnic." They are meant to be native Africans. They're not.

I know I'm probably treading into sticky territory here, but their features are clearly white. The one that clued me in first was the male. Look at his hair! All of them have pointy, up-turned noses and itty bitty mouths. Now, I'm not saying they should go overboard and end up with with the type of caricatures that commonly portrayed Africans and those of African heritage in the past, but let's be real.

The problem goes back to the fact that white people are still the standard, the norm, not just in our society, but globally. So a silhouette of a white person (since you can't see the skin color) can be made African by making it brown. Dolls can be made "diverse" just by changing the color of their skin and leaving all other features the same (if they even move beyond simply blonde hair and brown hair).

Of course, race isn't the only place where this happens. Gender, too, brings it out. Only just now are companies researching how drugs affect women differently than men--usually, women were just treated as smaller men. Um...NO.

A woman is not just a man without a penis,

and an African is not simply a white person with brown skin.

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Wednesday Grammar Gripe

Excuse me for a moment while I get up on my soapbox.

Ok, people, seriously. I know that I'm a grammar nerd. I accept the fact that most people are not going to hold themselves to the high grammatical standard to which I hold myself. I understand that how we speak in casual conversation is different than how we might write a formal paper, for example.

That being said, I urge English and Language Arts teachers across America to stress the difference between LESS and FEWER. Again, casual conversation is one thing. But I have seen a plethora of misuse of these words in advertising and corporate settings lately.

Before I go into the examples, let's have a little grammar review. We use less to describe uncountable quantities, or the degree of something. The item described is usually singular. We use fewer to describe things that can be counted, and they're usually plural. So for example, we'd say less money, but fewer dollars; fewer hours but less time. Got it?

Ok, so it started at my bank in NY, Washington Mutual. They had a new advertising campaign (nicknamed the "whoo hoo" campaign) and a bunch of flashy new posters all over the walls. One said something to the effect of, "More benefits. Less hassles." Every time I went in, I would stare at that poster and get annoyed. I almost filled out a feedback form about it. Eventually, they moved on in the campaign and removed those posters. I wondered, though, how such a huge error could have made it that far?

Then there's the cable broadcast network TNT. In their promos for the movies they air, their new tagline is "More movie. Less commercials." See the problem? Fewer commercials. Fewer. Makes me not want to watch TNT. Who is writing these things--and who's letting them air?!?

Finally, last night I saw a print advertisement with not one but TWO incorrect uses! The ad is in the Good Housekeeping insert, Your Good House, and is for Culligan water filtration systems. Under the first picture, it states (bold mine): "SAVE ENERGY by using filtration systems that dramatically extend the life of your appliances, conserve water and allow for less detergents." Then, under the next picture, the caption reads: "USE LESS CHEMICALS AND CUT CLEANING TIME by installing a high-efficiency water softener..." Ugh.

Please, I'm begging all those in the advertising and all other media industries: use correct grammar! This is not so -called high-education complicated stuff, like using "whom" or not ending a sentence with a preposition. I get that those can sometimes just sound too stuffy and wordy in the "quick and dirty" world of media. But less and fewer are not interchangeable, and saying "fewer commercials" takes up one more syllable than "less" and does not make it sound stuffy, just makes it seems like the company actually knows English.

I'll step down from my soapbox now. Have a good day.

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