Who Nose About Grace?

Fact: I am a man with a prominent, distinguishing feature: a protruding schanze. Apart from the occasional silhouette scare caused by peripheral glances at my shadow, I’m fine with it. When is comes to nostril proportions there is no room to be a post-modern relativist. Just call me a nasal modernist; Truth is singular, and I have a big nose.

An ancient Gregory of great proportions wrote, “A man with a little nose is one who is incapable of discernment, for by the nose we discern sweet odors from stench.” What great encouragement this is. I must have heaps of discernment. That’s much more promising than my adoring wife and caring mother’s encouragement; “Oh Ryan, your nose is in perfect proportion with the rest of your head.” Translation: I have a big head; something else I have been known to have (although I don’t think my head is out of proportion with the rest of my body).

If I do have any tendency for cranial swelling, I promise the additional space is mostly dormant and sleepy. I think I barely understand enough to know there is a growing pie slice of brain matter labeled, “Who Knows?” I think this is mostly due to the sojourner’s path I’ve walked to answer key questions of life, and my years of mulling through the mysterious mess of meaning has done little to answer even one of my questions. Fortunately though, I have being burdened with weighty questions to which I also have no answers. Lucky me.

I grew up in a tradition of the Christian faith that said, while God has placed his free gift of grace on the table of salvation, it must be opened and cherished by those willing to accept it. Regardless of whether or not this analogy adequately explains grace, my question pertains to the theological implication for persons unable to understand the gift in the first place.

Those mini-humans called infants/toddlers are a popular group of people in this category. Apart from Jesus’ quiet words that one must be like a child to enter the Kingdom of God, Scripture is relatively neutral regarding infant salvation, but the Church has provided its own answer to the question in typically one of two ways.

Way One: Better Safe than Sorry. Lest a child be dammed to eternal fire, throw a little water on the child; that’ll quench that pesky flame. Without scriptural resonance, what other motivation do we have for this than to quench our own unrest? Way Two: All Kids Go to Heaven. God must accept children into heaven because they all lack the mental wherewithal to understand the gift. Then at some mysterious age, which could be a young a 5 or as old as 20, a switch is flicked and people are eternally held accountable for rejecting such a striking deal as grace.

Either way, God’s got to care for children, right? They are so adorable with their half toothless smiles and staggering gait. How couldn’t he?

In reality, we may believe such things to make ourselves feel at peace about a God too big to fit our logic. After all, we have no qualms saying humans are born into sin, and the wages of that sin is certain death. I’ve never seen a footnote denoting the eternal “no child left behind exception.” Forgive me for being flippant about deeply meaningful theological matters, but the question of infant salvation seems to arouse another question that has recently come to mind.

The question has been stirring within my enlarged cranium for a few years now, and it begins by asking if there are any other groups of people who are unable to understand the gift, at least in a similar way we think children cannot.

You may not consider it if you have never had a relationship with them, but people with mental illness should at least be considered contenders. Mental illness is by far one of the greatest mysteries of creation for me and they are not a group of people who easily fit into our usual categories. And as such no gender, ethnicity, race, or social-class is exempt from for the bondage of mental illness.

Apart from familial care, little seems to be done for those individuals on a societal scale unless they are considered a danger to themselves or others, in which case they are safely stored away in psych-wards. Those who pass the litmus test of “no societal risk” are released to roam about the city only to be rejected from various shelters and social service agencies, arrested by irreverent law enforcers, and retested for risk. The cycle is never ending. It seems that socially, we just don’t know what do with them. Theologically though, I feel the same way.

Some time back, I had a conversation with a new friend at The Station (the downtown church I [air quotes] “pastor”). It was his first night in Corpus, and he swooped into a tense situation between two other gentlemen. Wielding a large “persuasion stick,” he resolved the situation (sort of) and came inside. During the service, my guardian angel (as he explained) seemed unusually restless pacing and sitting, pacing and sitting for nearly 30 minutes. After his impromptu sermon following our Bible study, I was able to sit down with him and find out a bit more about what he was all about. Without going into the details, I’ll summarize our chat by saying I have never heard such insanity spoken so sanely. With clear thoughts and words, he told me his lengthy story of where he’s been and where he’s going, and my only explanation for him is that he is either a liar, a lunatic or the Lord.

My guess is that he is delusional, something I am somewhat familiar with now. But he has a special breed of delusional, because who he believed himself to be was heresy, and I’m not sure what to make of that. Essentially the question is this: “How does God’s grace cover a person whose mental illness makes them a heretic?” Honestly, the only thing I am sure of is that the “Who Knows?” slice is growing again.

I have spoken to many people who quickly convinced me that I could not properly converse with them in a way that they may understand who Jesus is. This is sometimes due to intoxication of some sort, sometimes it is mental illness, but usually it is a combination of the two.

Will Campbell, in Brother to a Dragonfly, is advised by a close friend that “it is very, very difficult to tell where [mental] illness begins and sin leaves off” and warned “to make sure which side of the line . . . [he] was dealing with.” These striking words have echoed in my cavernous cranium for some time now. How do we distinguish the two.

Perhaps though this is little more than a rhetorical dilemma, and whichever light you want to hold it in, a more accurate description of the situation is the word bondage. Jesus told his disciples, “Whatever you bind on earth is bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth is loosed in heaven.” Our interest in this matter is then to act as God’s loosening agents, working to untie individuals from their bondage as we ourselves have been freed.

So, what of our Guardian Angel, without a vial of holy water to avail him, who would make the case for his entry into the Kingdom along side infants and toddlers; and believe me, he had the same aforementioned smile and gate. Yet, I have never heard anyone argue for the salvations of individuals such as these. Are we to believe that if a person can only clearly communicate nonsense, St. Peter will scratch his head, stamp a red-lettered “rejected” on their forehead and point the person to the “Down” escalators?

I must simply be resigned to know God’s ways are greater than my own, but forgive me for remaining unsatisfied until I hear word from theologians with heads bigger than mine. In the end, I have a feeling that the simple words of Baptist Hymn #329 are true.

Grace, grace, God’s grace, Grace that will pardon and cleanse within.

Grace, Grace, God’s grace, Grace that is greater than all our sin.