Today I was thinking about how grace is the poetry that transforms our stories into open-ended adventures.
I mean this:
Say the stories we tell are rooted in ourselves, originally. With them, we
strive to organize the world in relation to us in order to make meaning from it and to make ourselves safe. We adopt some of the bigger stories we hear around us (‘meta’stories; ‘metanarratives&rsquo
to help us do this, some of which are pretty convincing, but at the end we still keep ourselves at the centre of them.
But the thing about the story of jesus is that it points to a poetry outside itself, a grace that existed before it, a love that gave life to it in the first place (so a ‘mesa’narrative instead of a metanarrative? An inner story pointing outwards instead of an outerstory that tries to contain all...).
So as people in the bible experienced the poetry of grace through an encounter with his otherness (his radical love, his miracles and, the topsy turvymess) like peter they hit the ‘oh I see’ moments which allowed them to see what his stories (or 'parables') were talking about. The stories heard and poetry experienced gave their lives new and transformative meaning – they were freed from their fixedplaces in me-centred stories and filled with a desire to follow Jesus, the person: to GO.
And this is not the finished meaning of a closed story, but the open beginning of a new journey: a
creative journey; an adventure, a pilgrimage through the process of which we become more and more
ourselves as we move closer to jesus. Because the poetry is like water that pours into us from the outside, or like an eternal spring that bubbles up inside us, pouring out of us again and again into the lives of others in the form of meaningful stories and loving actions and grace all over again...
