What is That in Your Hand

I’ve been thinking about what it means to walk in the fullness of the particular graces you have been endowed with.

By a particular grace I mean something that is synonymous with gifting but also carries some of the gravitas of calling. Being set apart for a specific task or role and therefore being equipped and prepared for it.

One of my particular graces might be the courage to step into the unknown. To take risks. To venture down the unconventional path. To sit in uncertainty. To be okay going alone if there’s no one there to go with me.

This is what is being mirrored back to me in the words lifelong friends and acquaintances alike are speaking into my life this season. It is not a realisation of epiphanic proportions, but it is something I have needed reminding of. Something I am glad to be reminded of.

I don’t know if we are wired to see what others possess that we lack but not to see what we possess that others lack. Maybe it is that we spend so much time with ourselves that we become blind to what is exceptional about us. Maybe it is by divine design, a feature, not a bug.

I do know I sometimes marvel at graces in others that I recognise as lacking in my own life. Like deep wells of social energy, always available to feed and nourish the souls of others. Or the steadfastness that toils in a place for two, three, four decades, devoted and constant, without restlessness and roiling.

I also know that we don’t pick our graces: we are equipped for them by God, our nature and our circumstances. But we can cultivate them to bear fruit, even the ones we carry reluctantly. (One such particular grace I carry reluctantly is mature life singleness. I did not choose it, but it is an important part of my story. I carry it with peace, gratitude and the knowledge that it has shaped me into the person that I am today.)

I use the term particular grace to denote a God-given capacity because it seems to me more grounded and gritty, more sober, less frilly than gifting. It’s the reason I went on a layman’s quest to try to understand the biblical and ecclesiological use of the language of graces and giftings over time.

I learnt that Paul wrote in Koine Greek and used the word charisma to connote both a general gift, such as redemption, and a specific endowment given to a person so as to be used in service and enrichment of a community.

Turns out the word charisma is etymologically rooted in the word charis, that is, grace. Charisma, a thing of grace. A gift of grace. Jerome of Stridon’s translation of the Bible into Latin, the Latin Vulgate, used the word gratiarum, also grace, which influenced the discourse for the next millennium, Latin being the dominant literary language in Western Europe in that period.

Then along came William Tyndale. In 1526, when he translated the Bible into English, he rendered charisma as gifting. This in turn influenced the King James Version and set the trajectory for the entire English speaking Bible tradition.

This is an oversimplification by a novice, of course. I am skipping over a slew of theological debates between the protestant reformers and the Catholic church about the nature of spiritual gifts that almost definitely influenced these linguistic choices. Suffice it to show that I am not inventing the delicate dance between gifting and grace, and then to step aside and let the river flow where it goes.

My favourite find was a sermon by a Victorian Baptist preacher named Alexander MacClaren. Translating charisma as grace rather than gift, MacLaren contended, preserves a connection Paul saw between the charis (grace) given to us and the charismata (graces) that flow out of it. And then he added this nugget of brilliance: As a candle plunged in a vase of oxygen leaps up into a more brilliant flame, so all the faculties of the human soul are made a hundred times themselves when the quickening power of the life of Christ enters into them.

Every Christian, said MacClaren, possesses in some form, that grace which gives graces. Therefore each one possesses graces that flow out of that grace.

The challenge before us is to live fully in our particular graces while recognising that others have not been given them to our measure, while at the same time encouraging and freeing others to walk in their graces.

I think here of one of my favourite characters in the Chronicles of Narnia, Reepicheep. I’m no rodent aficionado but I am a great admirer of Reepicheep, of the tribe of the talking mice of Narnia.

Fearless and full of valour. Ready to take on anyone or anything, be it giant or dragon. His particular grace derives directly from the natural challenge of his tribe: their diminutive size. He says as much to Aslan when Aslan accuses him of being a little too fixated on his honour. Yes, he concedes, but have you seen how little we are, we have to be. Fair enough.

Reepicheep’s valour is constant. It does not change according to the hour, the object or the surrounding. When Eustace goes missing on Dragon Island, Rhince mutters that it is good riddance. Understandably so because Eustace has been a nuisance the entire voyage hence. To everyone’s surprise Reepicheep, towards whom Eustace has behaved particularly atrociously, rebukes Rhince. Eustace is one of their fellowship, Reepicheep declares, therefore he must be found alive or avenged. This is the code by which he lives and the code by which he is ready to die.

His valour is his destiny. When the travellers learn that the only way to break the enchantment over the three Narnian Lords asleep on Ramandu Island is to sail close to the world’s end and leave one of their party behind, Reepicheep’s particular grace meets its moment. Of course he is the one of the party who will be left behind. It goes almost without saying. He will go to the utter east and sail in his little coracle into Aslan’s country, never to return.

When the time comes, the sword that he has wielded with relish ever since we met him is thrown off. He shivers with happiness. He was made for this. This is his ‘This is where I go alone.” No one tries to stop him: they see clearly that this was his designated path.

Then there’s that other story near the end of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the cautionary tale.

When they get to the Utter East, King Caspian’s sense of adventure is awakened. He gathers his fellow travellers and announces that he is going with Reepicheep to find out what lies beyond. He proceeds to detail the plans he has laid out for how the band of travellers under his charge will return to Narnia without him and how his kingdom will be run in his absence.

He makes this pronouncement fully expecting everyone to align. He is, after all, their King. Fortunately, they do not. Not even when he becomes irascible. He is the King of Narnia, they tell him firmly, and he has a duty to his subjects. What’s more, if he continues to threaten to abandon his duty they are ready to disarm and arrest him in order to prevent him from going off with Reepicheep.

“You shall not please yourself with adventures as if you were a private person,” they scold.

Reluctantly he stays and has to suffer watching Reepicheep, the Pevensie children and Eustace head off where his heart longs to go.

There’s a bittersweetness there. In Prince Caspian, the book preceding the Voyage of the Dawn Treader, all of Narnia had come together to restore his kingdom to him, following which he had taken on the mantle of King bestowed on him by Aslan. A triumphant moment for Narnia and for the once Prince, now King. A new Narnia born.

Then of course follows the nitty gritty, knee-deep, elbows in, business of ruling. Not quite so glamorous as being hunted down, coalescing an army and facing an enemy. But it’s what one does when one is called to be a ruler. And the ruler of Narnia is who King Caspian is.

My favourite part of the Caspian stumble is that in that critical moment when he wants to cast off his calling and be damned, he is surrounded by people who know him. Keepers of his truth. The ones who remind him who he is when he has forgotten.

This is why I pay attention to the common thread that runs through the words spoken by those God serendipitously places in my path. Especially the longtime keepers of my truth. When they reflect back to me my relative level of comfort with ambiguity and uncertainty, I give it serious consideration. Perhaps this is the thing that I have in hand, just like the ordinary rod Moses held in that desert millennia ago that became a vector for the miracles that God performed for his people.

A while back I read something on LinkedIn that has stayed with me: One person’s acceptable level of ambiguity is another person’s swirling chaos. It came back to me recently when we went through a personality assessment exercise for a women’s group that’s in the early stages of its formation. A solid majority of our small band of women scored high marks as nurturers. Reader, I did not. Creative Pioneer is where I landed. Off the normal curve, but right where I ought to fall. Once upon a time I might have squirmed at what I do not have. Now, I am grateful for what I have.

Because in the end our accountability is for what we do with the particular graces that we have been given, not the ones we wish we had.