"Added Unto You"
Sometimes, grace meets us where we're at...and waits.
Last week, I had the privilege of reading Andrew Boryga’s essay on how becoming a father made him a better writer. Boryga was already on my radar after I read a review of his debut novel, VICTIM, in the New York Times last month. As a Girardian, and as a person mightily concerned with the currents of culture and politics in 2024, I was immediately interested in the premise and have been meaning to pick up a copy.
But while I’d already been piqued by the thematic content of his writing, it was really Boryga’s vulnerability and clear-eyedness about his own self and vocation that sold me as a fan. In his essay, Boryga describes a place familiar to me: the neurosis of writing based on what you think people will like, of constantly watching to see who’s watching you. It is a highly “mimetic” place to be: recognizing the degree to which we receive our identity through our relationships with others, and turning that up to a frenetic degree. Creatives especially feel we simply don’t exist unless certain people (and we never really know who those people are) are paying attention to us.
So when Andrew turns that around by the end, when he experiences the revelation that the only people who matter–who should be allowed to construct his identity–are the people right in front of him (or curled up in his arms), I felt my soul opening. What he’s describing is a liberation; the closest thing to chains breaking that many of us moderns will ever feel. He’s recognized his vocation as a writer and the fickle “success” that comes with it are not things to be guarded zealously. They’re things that flow around the more meaningful parts of life. Once, his idea of himself as a writer was a kind of draconian master; becoming a father set him free to really be a writer.
I am several steps behind Andrew. He has already published his debut novel (something I’m working towards as well), but he is also living according to insights I haven’t quite appropriated yet. You could say I want to be where he is. These are things I’ve always known, on an intellectual level, but for a long time, something has held me back from feeling them.
Last week, I introduced Bernard Lonergan’s understanding of sin as bias, or the refusal to have certain insights. We know they are there, begging to be understood, but we carefully dance around them, making our lives a little less real at every turn in the process. And when we finally grow tired of that un-reality (or the “underground”, as Dostoevsky called it), when we want to be set free from the little echo chamber we’ve created in ourselves, we find it’s actually very difficult to crawl our way back into the sunlight. The bias has ingrained its patterns in us. “For I do not do the good I wish,” St. Paul writes in the Epistle to the Romans: “instead, the evil I do not wish, this I do” (Rom 7:19).
This is certainly still true of me. I’m still defensive, still easily scandalized by the state of the world, and trying, from that heart-place, to speak my own, limited truth to power. I’m often writing for an imaginary person who is appraising and judging me, wondering when I will have “succeeded” at my vocation, and comparing myself to others I think have done it better, who are more beloved and lovable than I am.
I want it to be different. I want, finally, to have the insights I’ve resisted for a long time: that coming to terms with being lovable on my own is not the same thing as “hiding my talents in the earth.” That my path is my own, that “success” is not a sure (or even definable) thing, and that anger and wit aren’t as deep of wells as wonder and love. Not that I don’t know these things instinctively, and work regularly to keep my guard up; but “the evil [or stupidity] I do not wish, this I [often] do.”
Paul also had his mysterious “thorn in the flesh,” a story passed down to us in a way that invites us all, without even trying, to find ourselves in it. Like Paul, I’ve “implored the Lord” that my anxiety, my anger, my defensiveness, the impatient just-in-time-ness with which I tend to operate, might depart from me.
We all know where this story goes, of course: “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is perfected in weakness” (2 Cor 12:7-9). But there’s a deeper lesson here, I think (and mighty thanks to
for helping me see it). One that doesn’t simply read as God saying “No” to Paul in his torment, and thus we should expect the same. The lesson here is that the grace of God which liberates us from the constraints of our egos, our angers, our resentments, is additive and not subtractive. Paul prayed for the thorn to be taken away. What God gave instead was perspective; an insight. A “reordering of the totem pole,” as Andrew writes. An entirely new cosmic picture that flips weakness and strength on their heads.The people I work with every day at unRival are in similar boats. They’re leaders facing burnout, writers facing backlash, artists who wonder if their work will ever make a difference. This fall,
and I will be working specifically with Christian leaders whose fidelity to the Gospel has placed then in conflict with their own communities where people do not want the insight that “power is perfected in weakness,” feeling threatened by what this implies about the weak, and about about their own pursuits of power.
All of us have thorns in our flesh. All of us have prayed “please take this from me.” But maybe a truer prayer we can pray together–one that more totally sets us into the stream of grace, the momentum that is saving the world–is, “Give us bread for the day ahead. Help us ask, seek, and knock for things to add to ourselves. Open our hands to receive the life, joy, peace, and togetherness that makes all the rest of this easier to bear. Help us be the insights for one another.”
As I write this, I’m preparing to head to Nashville for a week-long retreat with my team. I am at my keyboard, breathing through my own anxiety, still wondering about whether I’m doing things right and knowing that, just around the corner, something else is going to happen that makes peace feel impossible–both in myself and in the world. Anger will try and pass itself off as vocation and I will have to struggle for the patience to pick at the complexity of the wrong with the precision of the good.
But at the same time, I have all the ingredients I need for a new perspective. My colleagues are brilliant and dedicated; I can slow down and ask questions with them. My kids are upstairs, taking their naps after visiting farm animals all morning. My 1-year-old daughter scared a poor little lamb by growling at him in delight. My 3-year-old son is getting too big to be rocked to sleep anymore, and my wife and I are both a little teary-eyed about it.
There’s another way of living within reach here, one that doesn’t take the pain away but reconfigures its place in me. Helps me see it as only part of a whole and much more wonderful picture of my own interiority, which is a gift both from and for others. I’m stretching my hands, trying to make them supple, preparing to reach again for the insights I’m in the habit of resisting and finally, finally making them mine.
I probably won’t get it exactly right this time, either. “I am a man in torment–who will deliver me from the body of this death?” (Rom 7:24-25). I announce as much to my wife after a bad argument, or after I’ve forgotten to empty the vacuum filter again. A bit dramatic, maybe, but it’s also true, and either way, if Death is conquered and swallowed by life, then I think it's fair to laugh about our finitude, and about the silly, splintering failures that eventually add up and make us see our need to be saved at all.
“Grace to God through Jesus the Anointed, our Lord,” who works through death and weakness. Who doesn't lift their burdens from us, but is always adding to us the eternity that can bear them.
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