Living out of an economy of grace represents a grand experiment in human living that emerges variously and changes over time throughout the monotheistic traditions. Within a specifically Christian context, disciplines that cultivate the transfiguration of desire have existed as long as religiously affiliated people have practiced asceticism and mysticism, both as single individuals and in community with one another. Orthodox and heretic alike number among these practitioners, as do Catholic monastic orders and radical sectarian communities of Mennonites, Hutterites, Quakers, and Shakers. Their range extends from intellectual elites to illiterates. The disciplines and practices to which they have submitted have been more and less codified, varying according to circumstance. Variance in practice and circumstance has produced a plurality of human experiences.
Differences in circumstances, practices, and experiences, as well as commonalities in function, have captivated theologians and scholars of religion from Jonathan Edwards and William James to Dorothee Soelle. Scholars of religious and theological studies, however, with few exceptions have tended to focus particularly on individuals and communities that officially separate in some sense from their dominant or normative culture. Whether sectarian, priest, nun, or monk, they have entered a time-space carefully regulated from sunrise to sunrise, week to week, month to month, to structure a desire to live from God's desire. If sectarian, they live apart from the dominant culture in ways that allow them to rear their children according to their alternative culture's values. If they belong to religious orders, they have chosen to give up ties to immediate family and work in a social order unstructured by capitalism.
Establishing alternative communities in clear separation from the dominant culture and its practices and values requires courage and commitment. Life so designed also allows for a valuable critical distance in relation to the world. What of ordinary people who nevertheless wish to live intentionally according to a different economy? How they live out of an economy of grace yet do not withdraw from scarcity-driven dominant cultures is, sadly, often lost to history and for the most part remains obscure. Yet, if we attend with care to the lives of those around us, it becomes clear that people do live in but not of this world precisely because they are undergoing a transfiguration that relocates them, however partially, within an economy of grace. How does this transfiguration happen? What does it look like in ordinary human life in the midst of economies that produce fear, acquisitiveness, greed, and misery?
However circumstances may differ from time to time and person to person, living out of an economy of grace reflects a paradigm shift that may begin suddenly or gradually, but in either case, once begun, continues over time. This shift marks the transfiguration of human desire to conform to God's desire, namely the goodness of all creation. But, assuming that "God" is a fitting word to declare the limits and the transcendence of human imagination, I have posited a largely unknown and unknowable God. At the same time, we know more than we realize as the beneficiaries of all past human making, for better and for worse. From ancient texts to subsequent history to present life, there are clues everywhere that may draw us into the process of making up and making real a realm, the dimensions and effects of which reciprocate beyond our reckoning. And we do this as participants in the realm, not mere observers outside it.
Christians used to talk about this paradigm shift as conversion or as "justification" and "sanctification," and many still use such terminology. These conceptions bear a noble, if not always untroubled past. I nevertheless find them unsatisfactory for this discussion because they distract attention from what I think constitutes the proper object of desire, namely the good of all creation found first in the faces of the helpless and most vulnerable.
Paula Cooey is the Margaret W. Harmon Professor of Christian Theology and Culture at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota. Some of her numerous books include: Family, Freedom, and Faith: Building Community Today and Religious Imagination and the Body: A Feminist Analysis.
This excerpt is from her new book Willing The Good: Jesus, Dissent, and Desire published by Fortress Press ® 2006. It appears here with the permission of the publisher.
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