A Subterranean Presence of Grace

Day 22

Reflecting on the connection between God’s story and our story, Buechner suggests that grace is beneath the surface of our lives and invites us to notice the times and ways we are touched by the presence of God.

“As a writer also of stories besides my own, I've tried to do just that, to present the stories of human beings as honestly as I can - people who are born as we are into the world, who are just as messed up by it and screwed up by it as the rest of us, and have all sorts of adventures the way we all have adventures, and yet who are touched here and there by the presence of God in all sorts of unexpected ways, and often in ways that the people who are touched by God might not identify as Godly ways… they don’t know it’s God, necessarily, but it is.

I think it was François Mauriac, the French Catholic novelist, who said of Graham Greene that he, in his books, dealt with a subterranean presence of grace. That's a wonderful way to put it. It's beneath the surface, it's not right there like the brass band announcing itself, but it comes and it touches and it strikes in ways that always leave us free to either not even notice it or to notice it and draw back from it, because life is complicated enough, and if God is somehow put into the complexity of it, it becomes more complicated, so we just look the other way. Like those people in Candid Camera who, when fantastic, miraculous things happen, look the other way because it is just too disturbing. It's hard enough to get through a day without believing that a car can drive down the street with no driver. It's hard enough to get through life without thinking there is really a God who is here moving among us to take us somewhere.

But that's what I try to do, to speak about human beings and the rough-and-tumble of human existence, human beings who are here and there touched by grace through people they come to know or through things that happen to them or things that don't happen to them.”

Frederick Buechner, The Remarkable Ordinary: How to Stop, Look, and Listen to Life, Grand Rapids: Zondervan, pp61-62.

To help you reflect…

Sit with the phrase “the subterranean presence of grace”. How might you image that? What thoughts, feelings or questions bubble up for you if you consider that grace is - and always has been - beneath the surface of your own life?

When have you been “touched by grace” through the people you’ve come to know or through things that have happened to you or things that didn’t happen to you?

Photo by Jeffrey Hamilton on Unsplash