Let's talk about the end of innocence, and "where is God in it?" A review of William Kent Krueger's novel, Ordinary Grace
A few months after her husband's death and marvelous Celebration of Life service, my neighbor and I were chatting about contemporary spiritual works of fiction we liked. We are very different in our faith backgrounds: she is Presbyterian and a retired Dean of students at a local seminary. I'm a Catholic/ Reform/Renewal Jewish hybrid and a retired pastoral therapist, now a spiritual director studying bioethics from both perspectives.
She'd just finished Ordinary Grace, a novel by William Kent Krueger, and offered to lend it to me. I set it aside for a bit, intending to start Jack, the last novel in Marilynne Robinson's series begun with the beautiful, prayerful Gilead. But this title made me want to take a look right away. Ordinary Grace? Christian readers will immediately understand that when an author writes about grace, there will be as many definitions of grace and its workings as there will be readers. And as it’s said Jewishly, "Two Jews, three opinions." The tent has to be large and tolerant of lots of personal stories, leaving outside any overconcern with doctrine: those hardened certitudes about what's grace and what's "just" human willfulness.
“The terrible price of wisdom...the awful grace of God”
Not knowing the novel is a blend of murder mystery and coming-of-age story, I quickly fell under Krueger's page-turning spell. Initially, a bit turned off by the similarity to Stephen King's short story The Body (from which the wonderful Rob Reiner film Stand By Me was taken), I surrendered to what might in fact be a common narrative of pre-Viet Nam era American small-town White church-going brothers at the far cliff-edge of childhood, about to be pushed off the cliff by their horror and natural curiosity over adult events in their midst.
Krueger tells us about boys and men and masculinity in a range of ages, against the backdrop of an unimposing, distant God as a point of reference toward a vague hope in good triumphing over evil and evil and trauma finally being explained. In this story the boys don't go about solving adult problems on their own; they discern which of the adults around them are capable of help or too fragile to be invited in, too damaged to be wise, or too 'pure' to be forgiving of their fumbling efforts. And like kids everywhere, there are out-of-bounds attempts to know: snooping and eavesdropping are readily employed, with good intent and then, disastrous consequences.
To know is sometimes to suffer, and to cause harm even while doing good. But to not-know is intolerable. The brothers, each in their different temperaments and developmental stages and with their own burdens (young Jake, about 10, stutters, and the protagonist/narrator Frank, 13, is hard at work acting the cynic, protecting his vulnerability as he takes the measure of what becoming a man seems to require.) Like the Adam and Eve motif, we must grow up, become conscious, and risk losing the childhood cocoon of home and its cradling naïveté. Jake the younger holds back and holds on to that safe place, begging Frank to go no further with disobedient plans to figure things out. But he always follows his older brother--where else can he go? Frank is cocksure and often mistaken but he is also good-hearted, and what drives his personal ethics is this urge to take care of things the grown-ups are just not getting done alone. What the boys find out is painful and mortifying. The wise adults call them back to doing the right thing with their knowledge, no matter the dishonest means of obtaining it, and the boys pay the appropriate price in this overall kind story.
The "awful grace" of Krueger's God is not only the painful cost of leaving behind one's naïveté. It is, of course, awe-some, the boys' dawning perception of God as mystery and unfathomable. By the story's end, we and the boys understand what happened and why, in human terms. Neither we nor they get a happy package with a bow containing the big-picture "Why" that we demand from God. What's ordinary about this grace is just that: ordinary explanations for terrible or hurtful actions by fallible human beings doing the best they can. There are no divine revelations, but there is the boys' conscious hope in a God who loves, who knows and holds the secrets, even if God doesn't step in and rescue individuals sometimes, like the superhero we wish God is. That's painful wisdom, but essential, or we never come of age.
God's awe-full grace in this story shows in the way that simple forgiveness emerges as the boys see their adults as vulnerable, hopeful, and well-intentioned. To be sure, some of the adults are not good men and do not redeem themselves. In the choices of all the characters, good and not so good, what is sown is reaped. Outcomes are unalterable. After all, things are settled, Jake and Frank and their parents and chosen adults find peace and acceptance for how even mis-spent human efforts turn out oftentimes to be where God can be found, there in the mess, where we find ourselves graced, even so.