Bright Shining: How Grace Changes Everything<\/strong>
Julia Baird<\/strong>
HarperCollins, $34.99<\/strong><\/p>\n
\u201cI have known a wine,\/ a drunkenness that can\u2019t be spoken or sung\/ without betraying it. Far past Yours or Mine,\/ even past Ours, it has nothing at all to say;\/ it slants a sudden laser through common day.\/\/ … Maybe there was once a word for it. Call it grace.\u201c<\/p>\n
Judith Wright\u2019s poem Grace<\/em> draws on the traditional notion of grace as a mysterious, numinous intervention; an unmerited taste of the peace that passeth all understanding but without the religious trappings. It is an experience that \u201ctakes over the depth of flesh, the inward eye\u201d, then vanishes, utterly reconfiguring everything you thought you knew.<\/p>\n When Julia Baird writes about forgiveness it is the most compelling part of the book.<\/span>Credit: <\/span>James Brickwood<\/cite><\/p>\n While this grace might be termed secular, Wright says that it seems to \u201crequire another element or dimension\u201d in order to make sense of it. Julia Baird, too, is mostly concerned with a non-religious understanding of grace, but rather than Wright\u2019s cosmic bolt from the blue, it\u2019s of a more ordinary, more quotidian variety.<\/p>\n This is grace as an expression of the best in humanity: forgiveness, kindness, openness to the sheer wonder of the natural world and to the gift of life. And there is still mystery to this version of grace because it cannot be measured in purely transactional terms.<\/p>\n Credit: <\/span> <\/cite><\/p>\n Given Baird\u2019s focus on questions of historical injustice, racism and sexism, you could call Bright Shining<\/em> a popular sociology of grace with an emphasis on how it can make us well, or at least healthier as a society.<\/p>\n She knows too well the precariousness of good health having endured multiple treatments and surgery for cancer, and this experience informs the acts of grace that feature in the book. Acts performed by carers and givers such as nurses, doctors, blood donors, mothers, siblings and friends. In a similar category are the lifesaving gestures of random strangers such as the holy man in India who appeared out of the darkness when Baird was being menaced by a group of men and escorted her back to her hotel.<\/p>\n The book\u2019s title comes from the famous folk hymn of hope and redemption Amazing Grace<\/em>, the \u201cbright shining\u201d of the sun a metaphor for the enduring nature of God\u2019s forgiveness. For Baird, the sun \u2013 the \u201cviolent star fuelled by chaos\u201d on which our lives depend \u2013 symbolises the paradoxical nature of grace as both an undeserved gift and something that is \u201chard fought, hard won, hard to give\u201d.<\/p>\n This section on forgiveness is the most compelling in the book as it rigorously grapples with the burden of expectations forgiveness can impose, especially on Indigenous people; the way it can be weaponised by abusers; the healing chemistry of restorative justice; and the mental health benefits of forgiving and being forgiven.<\/p>\n There can be no questioning the sentiments of Bright Shining<\/em>, its longing for a world governed by the better angels of our nature and its rousing call for each of us to allow grace to drive our actions. I do, however, have some reservations about the inner logic of the book. While it has more structural coherence than Baird\u2019s previous work, the bestselling Phosphorescence<\/em>, there are still whole chapters, her ode to the fire of teenage girls, for instance, that have only a tenuous relationship to the main theme and feel shoe-horned in.<\/p>\n At the level of argument, there is also a puzzling logic at play. While making a case for \u201cmoral beauty\u201d, Baird\u2019s first impulse is to reach for \u201cproof\u201d of its validity and value by citing scientific studies. This hunger for certainty, this impulse to nail a state that by its nature cannot be nailed leads her, on occasions, into the realm of pseudo-science.<\/p>\n The most striking example is when she canvasses the attempts by an early 20th-century doctor to prove the existence of the soul by weighing a human body before and immediately after death, concluding that the soul weighed 21.3 grams. While noting that these findings were met with scepticism, Baird never questions the premise that the soul might be something that can be measured in this way.<\/p>\n Towards the end of the book, she observes that \u201cscience can\u2019t easily measure grace, largely because ineffability and mystery are core to grace\u201d. But, she adds, many are beginning to try, citing a Franciscan priest who writes of the energy in the space between atomic particles and between planets and the stars. \u201cLikewise, grace occurs in the space between people,\u201d says Baird. Absolutely. But this is not a statement of scientific fact, it is science as metaphor.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
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