Grace Is Slack And Slack Is Essential

Slack: not tight or taut (Merriam-Webster).

Slack: something that you must have, the more of it the better (SubGenius).

Or as I see it, Slack: the ability to absorb shocks and strains without immediately failing. A bridge built to handle twice its expected load has slack. A submarine built to handle a significantly greater depth than its operating depth has slack. If the normal conditions are exceeded, there is time to recover; mistakes do not carry an automatic death penalty. It is essential for life to exist on a world where conditions are not constant. The fat your body stores up is slack, allowing you to survive for days and weeks should you fail to eat.

And grace is a form of slack applied to people.

People are difficult. Even when the person we have a relationship with is ourselves, or especially when, relationships are hard work. We mess up. Even when we aren't trying to be mean, we mess up and hurt each other. And without the slack afforded by grace, those mess ups would break the relationship. Grace handles these shocks and strains and stops them from becoming fatal injuries. When applied to the self, it permits us to keep going, to shake off the dust when we fail and get up again. We cannot keep the law in its totality; if we are condemned for the slightest failure, there is no hope for us and we might as well give up now.

But we are not condemned, not even for being monsters. And the truth is, we are all monsters. Not one of us is good -- how can we be, when we are embedded in a system where only monsters can survive? At that point, we have choices: we can beat ourselves up for it, becoming useless; we can embrace it and become nihilistic sociopaths...;

Or we can accept grace. Accept that we're going to keep stumbling, and moving forward despite that. Grace lets us fall, and grace helps us get up afterwards and try not to do that again. I know I do bad things. I know my current life is built upon a vast heap of human and animal suffering. But the only way I can change it is if I can face it without becoming a useless wreck.

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