Ordinary Grace

By Rick Ganz

All the dying that summer began with the death of a child, a boy with golden hair and thick glasses, killed on the railroad tracks outside New Bremen, Minnesota...by a thousand tons of steel speeding across the prairie toward South Dakota. His name was Bobby Cole

Bobby used to help me take care of the cemetery sometimes. He liked the quiet. He liked the grass and the flowers. To me and you he wasn’t much of a talker, but he used to whisper to the headstones like he was sharing a secret with the folks buried there. Bobby had a secret. You know what it was? It took nothing to make him happy. That was it. He held happiness in his hand easy as if he’d just, I don’t know, plucked a blade of grass from the ground. And all he did his whole short life was offer that happiness to anybody who’d smile at him.

That’s all he wanted from me. From you. From anybody. A smile. Is it possible that in this mess of a world that we have been experiencing we have let ourselves become so appalled at the intractable cussedness of fellow human beings that we have completely forgotten what God the Creator can do with chaos? It was from the very start of this created world that God proved Himself more than a match for it, for chaos, for the ordinariness of us.
(from Ordinary Grace by William Kent Krueger)

These quotes come from the novel, Ordinary Grace, recommended by my sister. Over the two chapters that bring us to his funeral, we have learned that Bobby is “simple”, a “dreamer”, a “retard” (to use the language of his peers), a kid quickly the object of scorn out of the cruel mouths of bullies. No one wanted to be as ordinary as Bobby Cole was…until the town drunk, Gus, made the townsfolk see him as he spoke on behalf of his life that day by the coffin. Suddenly, by the awful grace of God, they wished that they had even some small portion of that boy’s luminous ordinariness.

His telling is a demonstration of the book’s oxymoronic title: “ordinary” (natural) and “grace” (super-natural, or extra-ordinary). What is ordinary and what is extraordinary perfectly meld within a single experience, or best of all, within a single person. Bobby Cole was an oxymoron, an apparent contradiction. I recall a famous expression in the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas, “Grace does not destroy nature, but perfects it”.

One way of understanding this is that the true holiness of life happens inside of its very ordinariness…not beyond it, or above it. Grace is God bringing a particular ordinariness to its highest and most lovely realization. Bobby Cole was ordinary like that.

And so what we seek to do is to let God have us–freely offering ourselves as we are to God, Who, Creator always and still, reveals to others (we rarely are able to see this in ourselves) the holiness, hidden but now seen, in our particular form of ordinary.

We must often be reminded that if God as Creator proved Himself able to bring such unceasing glory--the elegant and ever-expanding universe--out of primal chaos, a most singular example of ordinary(!), then what glory can God our Creator delight to bring out of our most confusing and intransigent experiences of ordinary? Bringing glory from within chaos is what God is especially good at.

“In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth and the earth was without form or shape [i.e., chaos], with darkness over the abyss and a mighty wind sweeping over the waters” Genesis 1:1-2 (NAB)

And the more “ordinariness” we suffer, the greater is God’s zeal (we might guess) to reveal the divine Beauty “all in hiding” within us. 

There is a danger, and a temptation, stalking us when we would endeavor to make ourselves more extraordinary than we are. That “extra-'' is God’s work alone. One of my wise sisters once said to me, “Rick, you have to get out of the way, and let God do His good work in you”.

Blessings,
Rick Ganz
The Faber Institute

Rick Ganz is the founder and director of the Faber Institute, a partner of City of Focus, based in Portland, OR. He came to this role after over forty years of distinguished service as an educator and administrator in both high schools and universities, but also during these years being a widely sought after speaker on religious and spiritual topics, and a retreat master and spiritual director. Just prior to his coming to the Faber Institute, he served as Special Counsel to the President and Vice President for Community Relations at Marylhurst University in Lake Oswego, Oregon.