As If You Could Assist Grace

some thoughts on "The Cloud of Unknowing"

Let God’s grace do with you what it wants. Let it lead you wherever it wishes. Let it work and you receive. Look on it, watch it, and leave it alone. Don’t meddle with it, trying to help, as if you could assist grace.

The Cloud of Unknowing, chapter 34 (Translation: Carmen Acevado Butcher, Shambhala)

I absolutely love this line: “as if you could assist grace…”

For those of us who have spent all of our lives living by the rules, checking our boxes, and crossing items off a list, allowing grace to do what it wants is such a hard ask.

But when we fail to “cut [ourselves] off from needing to know things,” we end up meddling with grace and potentially rob it of its work and purpose.

We cannot approach God through techniques, special knowledge, or particular method. As the anonymous author of The Cloud says, “No routine leads to love.”

What does lead to God? Grace through Christ.

This is why Paul speaks of the eternal life we receive by grace as a free gift (Romans 6:23). Any amount of meritorious works would render the gift not a gift and then it would no longer be by grace (Romans 4:4).

With this in mind, let’s read a passage from the Bible:

For the love of God is this, that we obey his commandments. And his commandments are not burdensome. 1 John 5:3

I used to use this passage to say something like,

“Christianity isn’t that complicated. If we just read the Bible, apply what it says, and accept no other standard, then we would all have unity. It’s not that hard. The problem is that people want to uphold their own opinions and traditions which are contrary to God’s word. God’s commandments can be followed, and if you aren’t following them, then there is something wrong with you.”

Under this system, however, I secretly thought that God’s commandments were burdensome.

I figured I was lucky to be born into the right family who attended the right church and interpreted the Bible in the right way. We, out of all the people in the world, were the only ones who read the Bible purely.

So, to us, reading the Bible and following God’s commands was easy.

But when it came to personal sins, I was just as guilty as anyone else.

I couldn’t seem to shake the things I struggled with privately. And I often beat myself up for not being able to hold to my tradition’s high standard in my private life.

Perhaps I felt this pressure, however, because the system was messed up, not me.

“As if you could assist grace…”

Perhaps God’s commandments are only burdensome because we have made them that way.

“My yoke is easy and my burden is light…” (Matthew 11:28-30).

Does this ring true to you? Is this the message you picked up on growing up?

I think the burden seems heavy when we make it heavy. The commandments become grievous when we add to them, even when we think we aren’t.

When we take the two things John emphasizes in his epistles (faith and love) and we pile on a whole list of commands, examples, and necessary inferences, we make the burden too heavy to bear. We make the commands burdensome.

But God did not design the new covenant this way; we simply reinvented it because we need to be control.

Those routines, methods, and techniques are ways for us to feel in control and have a clear understanding of who is in and who is out. But in living in this way, we end up meddling with grace and feeling alienated from God.

When we love God with all of our heart and love our neighbor as ourselves, we can be confident that we are doing everything God wants us to do because love fulfills the law.