Grace at the Bottom of the Hole

A Reflection on Grace, Grief, and the Good News We Cannot Give Ourselves

One of the great misunderstandings about grace is that we imagine it as a reward. We speak about grace as though it were a heavenly incentive program. We get the promotion. We find the parking space. The diagnosis comes back clear. The stock market cooperates. The children behave. The vacation is sunny. We look around and conclude, “God must be smiling on me today.” But that is not grace. At least, not the kind of grace that has carried me through the darkest chapters of my life, nor the kind of grace that I have most often witnessed in the lives of others. Grace is not a currency we earn. Grace is what remains when the currency has run out.

One of the privileges of being a priest is that people rarely call me when everything is going well. For reasons I still do not entirely understand, people tend to call the priest when they have exhausted most other options. They call when the marriage is collapsing, when the diagnosis arrives, when the addiction wins another round, when the career they spent decades building suddenly disappears, and when grief enters the room and refuses to leave. I often find myself sitting with people at the bottom of the hole, and strangely enough, that may be the holiest part of my vocation.

Holy, because I am not a therapist. I am not a life coach. Most days I am not even particularly insightful. But I have seen the light of Christ illuminate some very dark places in my life and especially the lives of others. I have seen the light of Christ illuminate hospital rooms and funeral homes, addiction recovery meetings and therapists’ offices, empty houses and lonely apartments. I have seen it shine into years, even decades, marked by regret, shame, fear, grief, and uncertainty.

And I know what happens when it does. The endless soundtrack begins to quiet. The questions that loop day and night—How could I be here? What did I do wrong? What if I had chosen differently? How could I be this broken? How could I be this lost?—begin to lose their power and fade into the background. Even when circumstances do not improve. Even before pain disappears. Grace arrives!

I remember sitting in a therapist’s office in my twenties as I confronted the reality of divorce. It was the season of Lent. Everything felt stripped bare. Everything felt lost. Mid-sentence my therapist interrupted my pity party, looked at me with tenderness and assurance and said, “I bet you preach Good Friday differently this year…”

I will confess that I did not appreciate the observation. Not even a little bit. In fact, I was furious. How dare she suggest that my suffering might somehow become….useful? How could she possibly understand what it felt like to watch the life I had so carefully imagined collapse around me?

But she was right. I learned that I preached and served a suffering God, who didn’t run from human pain, but absorbed it and transformed it into my very salvation.

Years later, after life had unfolded in ways I never could have imagined, I ran into that therapist at a conference. By then she had seen on social media that I had remarried. She knew about Mallory and the messy, chaotic home full of children, laughter, endless carpools, long drives to and from school, waiting in pickup lines, forgotten backpacks, and all the beautiful disorder I had secretly longed for during those dark years. She remembered our conversation from years before. She looked at me and said only one thing: “I bet you preach Easter differently now too.”

And once again, she was right. There are some truths you can only learn by surviving them.

To know God is very different than to know about God. To know grace is very different than to know about grace. Perhaps that is why some of the most beautiful moments in ministry happen in the most ordinary conversations. I have watched it happen countless times in parish halls, Bible studies, coffee hours, and around folding tables after church events. Two people are talking casually. Then someone mentions a struggle, a loss, a disappointment, or a fear. Suddenly, there is recognition. One person’s pain recognizes another person’s pain. The conversation deepens. Masks fall away. There is an almost electric moment when two people realize they are not alone. There is a holiness in that moment because grace often arrives through other people’s willingness to share their own survival stories, the moments when they were overcome by God as the last and only option, the moments of awe, wonder, and unexpected relief.

Grace arrives as a hug instead of a handshake. A phone call from an old friend who knew you before your pain. A Facebook message from someone who somehow knew to reach out at exactly the right moment. A smile in traffic. A stranger’s kindness. A burst of strength that appears when you are convinced you have none left. Grace rarely looks dramatic when it arrives, but it changes everything.

If you are reading this and wondering why you have never experienced that kind of grace, I have both difficult and hopeful news. The difficult news is that no one gets through this life unscathed. Every one of us will eventually encounter loss, disappointment, grief, failure, illness, regret, or heartbreak. Everyone will need grace. The hopeful news is that God’s grace will meet you there in the suffering. Not before. Not around it. Right there in it.

And if you are reading this while still at the bottom of the hole, while still trapped in the tunnel, while still unable to see a way forward, and wondering why you haven’t gotten any of this grace yet, hear this: look up. Look up to God in prayer or just in silent wondering. Sit still, look up, see the grace of God waiting for you.

That is real grace. Not the grace of earned blessings. Not the grace of good fortune. But the grace that finds us when we have run out of options, run out of answers, and run out of strength. The grace that whispers, even from the bottom of the hole, you are not alone.

Perhaps that is why my understanding of ministry has changed over the years. Early on, I thought my job was to create hope in people. I thought I was supposed to motivate, encourage, inspire, persuade, fix, and somehow manufacture grace in the lives of others. After enough failed attempts, I finally realized something both humbling and liberating: God is infinitely better at that work than I am.

These days I think of myself less as a cheerleader, motivator, therapist, or sage—as if I was ever particularly good at any of those things—and more as a curator and a spy. A curator carefully positions a painting so that others can see what was there all along. A spy goes looking for things hidden in plain sight. Much of my vocation consists of helping people notice the grace they missed in the vast landscape of their own lives. I get to turn the canvas just enough for the light to catch it. I get to reposition the story so that God’s fingerprints become visible. I get to point toward the places where mercy has already been at work.

And sometimes I get to leave the chair entirely and go searching. I get to investigate. I get to sift through the rubble with someone whose life feels shattered and help them discover that God was there long before I arrived. I get to find the moments of tenderness, resilience, courage, friendship, forgiveness, and unexpected joy that seemed too small to matter until viewed through the lens of grace.

Here is mercy. Here is love. Here is belonging. Here is grace.

And once you have seen it, even faintly, even for a moment, it becomes just enough light to begin climbing out of the hole and into whatever new thing God is making next.

Pax et bonum,
Fr. Ben