Grace is not the forgiveness of sin, but rather it is the space for sin. It creates the conditions under which creation can occur.
Spirituality is full of imagery of light and darkness.
The apostle John uses light and darkness imagery to describe God when he says God is light that contains no darkness at all (1 John 1:5, NRSV), and that all things are created through light that is Christ (John 1:3-4, NRSV).
Traditionally, and perhaps because of scriptures such as these, light has been equated to holiness, purity and righteousness and darkness has been synonymous with impurity, sin and evil. Access to God and God’s creative force has been understood to be a life in the light of holiness and an avoidance of darkness and sin. Julian of Norwich’s insights into the idea of sin were a beautiful glimpse into a type of radical grace that Christendom has largely missed.
She saw that God was in everything and for this reason, sin cannot be a thing.[1] This revelation that sin is no-thing is new to Julian and she asks Jesus about it. Jesus reveals to her that “sin is necessary,”[2] because it “purges us and makes us know ourselves.”[3] In this way, sin is not a darkness that is an antithesis to the light that creates, but is instead a creative force within us and the light-as-good vs. darkness-as-evil duality is broken down.
This is much like the biological principal of error on the genome which, although it has the potential to destroy, also contains the mechanism for evolution, adaptation and continued life.
Julian concludes from her revelations that “sin is not shameful to man, but his glory”[4] This view of sin takes us away from shame, and is the very definition of grace.
In this way, grace opens a space that allows for sin. Grace is not the forgiveness of sin, but rather it is the space for sin. It creates the conditions under which creation can occur.
Grace does not reject or erect walls through shame, it embraces and makes no judgement or condemnation. It is only through grace that we can hold our souls open to both good and error. It is only through a loving embrace of all that is, that Christ can create something new in us, even when the mechanism for creation comes through sin.
It is grace that releases judgement and takes us into the place described by Meister Eckhart where we have let go of our pre-conceived ideas.[5]
Grace lets go of all things and simultaneously opens up to all things. It opens the soul to accept every aspect of our humanity and the humanity of others – even our enemies.
In this way, light is not about a purity culture that accepts some things as good and rejects others as evil, but light takes on a new meaning – the meaning of grace – and darkness becomes nothing more than not consenting to grace.
[1] Julian of Norwich. Showings, trans. Edmund Colledge and James Walsh, (New York: Paulist Press, 1978), 136, 166.
[2] Ibid, 148
[3] Ibid, 149
[4] Amy Laura Hall. Laughing at the Devil: Seeing the World with Julian of Norwich (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 85.
[5] Eckhart, 34, 36, 49. 55.