Oh S*#&t: Grace and Responsibility

I spent a few hours today working on my paper for my Thursday night class.  You may recall that last week, I chose to explore the virtue of "self-care."  This week, I chose "responsibility."  Most of my paper focuses on the work of H. Richard Niebuhr, the Christian ethicist and younger brother of the well-known theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, and M. Scott Peck.  Both have much to say about responsibility, but approach it through different lenses. 

...But a reading unrelated to my course had me thinking of responsibility today.  In the Christian calendar, today's first reading is from Paul's letter to the Galations, in which he discusses his conversion from sinner to saint, from persecutor to proclaimer of the Gospel.  In this reading, Paul writes to the people of Galatia that "when he, who from my mother's womb had set me apart and called me through his grace" to bring the Gospel to the Gentiles, he did not immediately go to the leaders of the Christian community to share with them his great conversion and calling.  Instead, he went to Arabia.  It was only after three years that he met with these leaders....

I am exegetically out of practice, and my detailed knowledge of Scripture is starting to fade with each passing year.  And by all means, someone with better biblical smarts, please do let me know!  Perhaps it's the case that Paul decided to begin his mission immediately, not needing any conferral with the leaders in the earliest Christian communities.  But I like to imagine that after his conversion experience Paul needed some time to wrestle with what he was being called to do.  He was called to become more, called to greatness (and certainly not by the standards of the world)--but wasn't quite sure he wanted the effort and the responsibility it required.   

I like to imagine Paul in this way because it speaks best to my own experience of grace....

I have always believed that all people are called to be more than they are--this is the pull of grace. I think the pull leads us in the direction of greater responsibility--that is, more sensitive and compassionate responsiveness to people and the world around us.  Unlike Paul (unless, of course, Scripture doesn't paint the full picture), I have experienced this pull not in a single, extraordinary event or moment that changed me so entirely, but over a longer period of time, over many moments.  It happens slowly (as my spiritual director once said, "All real, good growth is slow.  Cancer grows quickly, and it is deadly.")  And I certainly have experienced setbacks and have regressed on more occasions than I can count.  But the pull remains and is persistent...   

And for as much as this all sounds lovely (as my husband would joke, I love thinking and talking about rainbows and lollipops), I'm with M. Scott Peck, who writes that "We are accustomed to imagining the experience of conversion or the call to grace as an 'Oh joy' phenomenon.  In my experience, more often than not it is, at least partially, an 'Oh Shit' phenomenon."  As he says, our response to the call of grace might be, "Thank you, Lord."  It might also be, "Do I have to?"