Love as Grace

Marriage as a window into the divine

I tend to be cagey about what I believe when it comes to God, faith, etc. This is because I haven’t quite worked it out for myself, and the pieces that I do have some confidence about are not really compatible with other people’s ideas of the metaphysical element of the world. This doesn’t mean I have fascinating novel theological ideas that people can’t handle, it simply means that I struggle to add more clarity to my own ideas when I talk to people about theirs.

Mormons - the tradition I grew up in - are often criticized by other Christians for their beliefs on Christ, and among these criticisms is that we are insufficiently concerned about grace. It’s easy to see why they came to that conclusion: most traditions believe that because it is only through Christ that anyone is saved, “real belief” and “true conversion” are defining for salvation.

Mormons agree that belief is necessary, but if you ask them whether it’s sufficient, you’re likely to get uncomfortable hemming and hawing if not an outright no.

This is inconvenient for them, because they do believe the following, from Ephesians 2:8-9:

“For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast.”

They also believe the following, from the Book of Mormon, in 2 Nephi 25:23:

For we labor diligently to write, to persuade our children, and also our brethren, to believe in Christ, and to be reconciled to God; for we know that it is by grace that we are saved, after all we can do.

“…after all we can do.”

Anyone who serves a proselyting mission for the Mormon Church who runs into Christians is likely to have at least one very lengthy conversation with a Christian who is not at all impressed by this phrase. For members of the Church, grace is indeed available to all, regardless of what they do. They also believe that what you do matters, to God and for your own sake. I get the impression that on this point, they actually aren’t strictly all that different from most Christians, who would generally say that what you do matters a lot, it just doesn’t help you get into heaven.

I’m not here to make an earnest theological case either way, merely to give you a sense of where I come from on the concept of grace. In my tradition, it is not as heavy a focus as it is in many Christian traditions.

I’ve been surprised by how many times I’ve returned to the concept of grace after meeting and marrying my wife. Things I’ve heard from Christians about grace spontaneously occur to me as part of our life together. “What could I have possibly done to earn a love so easy to trust?” followed immediately by thoughts like “I could never have done anything to earn this, it was simply given to me, a gift.” It humbles me to feel that I have consideration and care from someone wonderful that on some level I feel I never could have earned, even if my behavior toward my wife is obviously important.

As it was when I was forced to reconcile other Christian concepts of grace with the one I knew from childhood, I don’t know what to make of the contradiction, per se. My wife would be perfectly within her rights to leave our marriage if I acted in ways that broke our vows, so why do I feel like my behavior isn’t earning her love? I could make some cortex-level arguments about this - love must be conditioned on some basic standards of decency, and you can receive conditional love that you don’t deserve. Even the concept of conditional love is messy here when wrangled to confront grace: I would still be loved even if the marriage ended, of that I am certain. These internal debates hardly nick the surface of the feeling though; it’s pre-verbal, sensed, felt. On some level, I still use old frameworks to make sense of it.

For Mormons, grace is not a pure tool of salvation or even divine love, but in part a gift from God with a purpose of facilitating development and growth. This earthly experience is, for Mormons, a development ground where spirits are united with bodies for the education and improvement of those spirits. As the thinking goes, that training ground produces inevitable mistakes, and in part is only useful because mistakes are possible. These mistakes are incompatible with returning to God, making it necessary for there to be some way of making those who make mistakes whole again in the aftermath. Grace, in Mormon thinking, is the necessary ingredient for growth where mistakes are rendered non-fatal.

That too applies to my own sense of grace in marriage. When I am impatient, overdramatic, loud, overbearing, uncharitable, limited, there is a clear framework for me to correct instead of being lost over these (life-long) failings. The more often I correct, the better I get and the better the relationship becomes. I don’t know if I could say that I’m becoming a better person overall solely because of my marriage, but I definitely sense that I’m getting opportunities to strengthen my integrity, to act more the way I believe I should act, to correct myself where that wasn’t the case. I respect myself more because I have these chances to act the way I believe I should, have this safety on the occasions that I fail, and I see myself taking those chances a meaningful percentage of the time.

My marriage gives me a sense of being given an opportunity to grow, become stronger, through a sort of love that feels humbling to be given. It is an opportunity for my mistakes to help make me wiser, rather than being fatal. My writing reflects my belief in marriage at its best as something that provides opportunities to grow, to be happier because you grew up, became stronger, became more developed. At its worst, marriage is an excuse to ignore your limitations and try to blame their expression on someone else’s (real) failures. I still don’t know what I think about God, about salvation or the hereafter, but I am sincerely grateful for the grace in being loved well by a good person.