From the book “Original Grace”, Adam S. Miller shares:
If God’s grace is an active and original cause—rather than a passive and belated effect—then what is grace?
The morning my father died, I felt Benjamin’s nothingness. I felt it open—as I have many times before—like a hole in my chest. I felt it rush through that hole like a wind from nowhere, cool and intense, dissolving my heart and lungs and organs into a subtle burning static that pulsed behind my ribs and gathered with the weight of a smooth stone on my solar plexus. I can feel it even now as I write this: a still, small, radiating silence that burns in the pit of my stomach and quiets the noise in my head, that both grounds me and unmakes me at once.
The morning my father died, I lay on the couch next to him, wrapped in a sheet with this nothingness whistling through me. In the grey, predawn light, I opened my eyes and saw him in his wheelchair, perfectly still, his head tilted just so, his chin on his chest, his shoulders slumped. Was he dead? I told myself I was imagining things. I told myself he was just—for once—resting and that I should let him rest.
I knew that, regardless, this nothingness wasn’t going away. I could try to run and hide, but it would endure, and, enduring, it would leave—like a mute bruise on my heart—the same impression it always left. It would imply what it always implied. Regardless of the circumstance, the nothingness would whisper: you’re not going to win.
Such whispers from the void no longer come as a surprise. They’re routine and familiar. For some time now, even on ordinary days, the same impression has been the first thought to cross my mind in the morning and the last thought to settle in my head at night. What’s more, sheer persistence has steadily condensed this whisper into a little prayer that, independent of my own intentions, I now find myself repeating throughout the day. This bright echoing silence has looped itself inside my head as an invocation. Surrender. You’re not going to win. Life cannot be won. It can only be loved.
That Saturday morning, in the shadow of that nothingness—in the shadow of my father’s life and suffering—the same message was stamped on my heart again. I was not going to win. My father was not going to win. None of us were going to win. Curled up on that couch, with my eyes fixed on the slack of my father’s head, I felt the very idea of winning die inside me all over again—and in that dissolution, as so often happens, that nothingness was also transfigured. That nothingness became a door, already pressing hard against the latch, was the full weight of creation.
Einstein worked out his theory of relativity in two phases. In 1905, he first worked out a “special theory” of relativity that only applied to certain sorts of motion. Then in 1916, he published his “general theory” of relativity that extended that first to all forms of motion. Whereas Einstein’s special theory offers a limited and localized version of relativity, the general theory fuses that local element into a global framework that applies universally.
This shift from special theory to general theory is analogous to what happens when we exchange that logic of original sin from the logic of original grace. When we default to the logic of original sin, God’s grace shows up only as a localized effect, as an exceptional case, a special atoning response to a narrow set of sinful problems. Governed by the logic of original sin, we only get a special theory of grace.
But when we adopt the logic of original grace, that special theory gets generalized. When Grace comes first, it shows up as a fundamental force that is now original, global in scale and universal in impact. Instead of being a special name for a rare kind of divine intervention, grace becomes a general name for how God, as a rule, continually acts in the world. Grace, rather than being an exception to the rule, becomes the rule.
If God’s grace is an active and original cause, then what is grace? As our Bible dictionary defines it, Grace is “enabling power.” But in the context of a general theory of grace, this divine power is no longer restricted by special conditions to a limited set of applications. Rather, in context of a general theory, grace comes into focus as the original enabling power. And this original enabling power is, of course, the original expression of God’s divine power: creation itself. This is how Benjamin connects the dots between our nothingness and God’s grace in Mosiah 2. God’s grace is general and inescapable because he not only “created you from the beginning” but ” is preserving you from day to day, by lending you breath, that ye may live and move and do according to your own will” (Mosiah 2:21). Unavoidably, then, no matter how hard you try, you “are still indebted to him, and are, and will be forever and ever” (Mosiah 2:24). And God’s grace, manifest in the fact of creation, not only formed us in the beginning but also continues—palpably, here and now—to preserve us from day to day. Grace as an enabling power, is manifest first and foremost in the fact that I am created, that I am alive, that I can live and move and choose according to my own will. Nothing is more enabling than life itself. A world filled with life is a world radiating grace. ~Adam S. Miller, Original Grace (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2022), p.79-82 (continued)
