CHRISTOPHER JAMISON, former Abbot of Worth and now President of the English Benedictine Congregation, is well known as a gifted communicator in a variety of media. In this wide-ranging, accessible, and engaging work, he explores the language of grace, which he believes to be in danger of dying out.
Jamison understands Original Sin as “original mistrust”: a sense of being isolated in the world, at odds with one another, and suspicious of those around us. The remedy is grace: “God’s way of restoring our trust in the goodness of life.” Since this is God’s grace, it is not another thing in the world: “a quality, not a substance”, and that makes it intrinsically hard to grasp. Jamison points to St John of the Cross’s describing the peak of the spiritual mountain as Nada: it is like nothing that we have ever known.
Although we cannot see or pinpoint grace, we can be helped to experience it, and here Jamison, as an assured spiritual guide, helps us to be sensitive to the workings of grace in successive chapters on listening, speaking, writing, reading, and reading contemporary situations. Each one is full of insights woven together from an eclectic mixture of traditional and modern sources. My particular favourite was the description, drawing on practices such as lectio divina, of the way in which grace can be transmitted through reading, when we stop seeing this as an activity simply for acquiring information and start to see it as the source of healing and salvation.
The message of the book is that grace is untidy. Reliably transmitted in the Church’s liturgy and sacraments, it is not constrained by these. He commends authors, such as George Bernanos and Marilynne Robinson, who “describe grace turning up in the wrong place”. The practices of grace can be learned, however: each chapter ends with a series of exercises that can help us to attune ourselves more closely to it, become more fluent in the language, and open to a more hopeful future.
This inspiring and energising book would reward individual study for readers at any level, and would also be suitable for group reflection (the six chapters make it natural material for a Lent course). There are, perhaps, some secondary quibbles. I am not sure how comfortably “original mistrust” expresses what Original Sin means in the Christian tradition. Moreover, an increased awareness of grace may not always resolve fiercely contested questions of truth, in the way that Jamison sometimes seems to assume that it will.
The Ven. Dr Edward Dowler is the Archdeacon of Hastings, and Priest-in-Charge of St John’s, Crowborough, in the diocese of Chichester.
Finding the Language of Grace: Rediscovering transcendance
Christopher Jamison
Bloomsbury £14.99
(978-1-399-40271-2)
Church Times Bookshop £12.99