That all-surrounding grace

What we lose with our inflated sense of agency

The Avowal

As swimmers dare
to lie face to the sky
and water bears them,
as hawks rest upon air
and air sustains them,
so would I learn to attain
freefall, and float
into Creator Spirit’s deep embrace,
knowing no effort earns
that all-surrounding grace.

—Denise Levertov

1.

Do you know how much time I spent? 

Standing in shopping aisles, inspecting ingredients. No parabens, no phthalates.

I never smoked. Never ate meat. Gave up Diet Coke, smoked salmon, hair dye, nail polish. Anything that could cause cancer I cut out. 

All that time and energy spent. 

Was it wise? Was it necessary? Was it right? 

2.

Over coffee I catch up with a dear friend, a theologian whose prayer practice has shaped my own more than anyone else’s.

How are you? She asks.

“It’s grace,” I shrug and shake my head, laughing. I have nothing else to say.

But she pushes back gently, as only a wise theologian friend can do.

You put in the practice. You invested in the relationship. Faith doesn’t just arrive, unbidden. 

I twirl my straw and wonder how to explain that it does.

That every good thing I experience now, grace upon grace upon grace, has nothing to do with anything I did to earn or achieve or even welcome it.

That I can see with eyes wide open for the first time: the all-powerful all-surrounding abundance that wraps thick around us, that buoys us like water, that breathes in our lungs like air.

Yes, I tried to learn to pray and read, to serve and believe. But all I can tell you is that unearned, unmerited grace pales every hour of practice and every year of effort into distant perspective.

When the bottom falls out, we realize we were never in control. We lean back. We are held. 

Grace is the only answer. I am as delighted and agitated by this reality as anyone else.

3.

Still I anguished and angsted in every doctor’s office, early on. Was it that medicine I took? That decision I made? That risk I didn’t realize?

But to a person—not one or two but every oncologist and surgeon I met, in three different cities and as many major health systems—every single one shook their head and looked me straight in the face.

It’s the environment.
The environment.
How your genes interacted with the environment.
How everything is impacted by the environment.

They told me how heaps of young people are showing up in their offices, how cancer rates are skyrocketing among Americans under 50, how lifestyle choices or risky behavior or complicating health factors can’t come close to explaining the increases. 

And there I stood at the kitchen sink, scrubbing the peanut butter jars while corporations dumped toxic sludge into the oceans.

What choice did I have?

4. 

An avowal is an admission of the truth.

The poet invites us to lean back into surrender. But deep down we do not want freefall or float. We prefer shovels and bootstraps. Pick yourself up. Do it yourself. Become the best version. Live your best life.

Turns out the truth is like trying to teach yourself to see in the dark. Then suddenly someone turns on the light. Your effort was not lost, but neither was it gain. 

From the dawn of humanity, from the first pages of Scripture, our collective call was to care for creation. How ironic that its downfall could bring our own: the gradual undoing of Genesis, if we do not heed its warning.

We are in this together. Salvation, too, is communal. You cannot be here or there alone, on earth as it is in heaven.

The nouns in Levertov’s poem are plural: swimmers, hawks. Most verbs in Scripture are, too: you (all). English loses the communal in translation, of course. We lose everything when we lose sight of each other. 

Not that we should shrug off small decisions or dismiss our daily stewardship of the places and people around us. But if we do not lift our eyes from the kitchen sink to see the swirling smoke from the factory, the wildfire haze hanging over the highway, the exhaust spewing from the trucks, the vultures circling the dump, we miss the forest for the trees. 

If our best efforts at agency are only individual (quit that habit, kick that pill, check that label, eat that kale), we are still not safe. 

Only when we come together does change happen. Community, communion, compassion, conversion.

No effort earns. But grace is waiting to lift us—all, always. 

When the arm is outstretched, will we take it?