Muriel Porter
27 April 2024
Julia Baird, Bright shining: how grace changes everything. Gadigal Country: Fourth Estate, 2023.
“Grace” is a familiar word to Christians. Anglican liturgies are redolent with it. The grace prayer – “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit, be with us all evermore”, from the concluding verse of St Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians – is in common use in many Christian circles.
What “grace” means theologically has been the subject of heated dispute among theologians since the days of the early church. But let’s not go down those complex rabbit holes, because this book about grace by eminent Sydney-based journalist and historian Dr Julia Baird is of a very different order. This is no theological tome or even, from this stellar scholar, an academic thesis.
Dr Baird though is no stranger to theological understandings of grace. A sometime Presbyterian, later an Anglican (a Sydney Synod member for a few years, no less), then a Baptist, she now worships with the Salvation Army, in a place that also operates as a soup kitchen. I have no hesitation in calling her a woman of faith.
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So, what is “grace” for Dr Baird? It is there in the main title, Bright Shining, words taken from a stanza added to John Newton’s supremely popular hymn Amazing Grace, and first published in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1852. “When we’ve been there ten thousand years/bright shining as the sun/we’ve no less days to sing God’s praise/than when we first begun”. They were words passed down orally by African-American communities for decades before the novel appeared.
The phrase “bright shining as the sun” sums up Dr Baird’s understanding of grace – grace that changes everything. And that’s what this collection of anecdotes and stories and reflections is about – it is a sustained meditation on grace emerging in acts of kindness, generosity, selflessness, decency, love and sheer goodness which shines out, transforming the potential ugliness of life. This book, in short, is a plea for more deep, loving kindness.
“Grace”, Dr Baird writes, “is like the sun: it warms us, fuels us and unerringly brings light”. While the world seems to have been drained of it, the pandemic meant that many “started looking further and asking for more, for better”. She continues: “We began to imagine a different way of life, of being, of relating to each other”.
Grace, she says, is more than simple kindness. “Grace is both ineffable and utterable, which is why so many thinkers have grappled with it for decades. It is not esoteric, it’s wrapped in the everyday, but it is still extraordinary. It spawns generosity, compassion and empathy. It involves understanding, recognising another person’s humanity and walking in another’s shoes, which can pave the way for forgiveness.”
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Dr Baird does not write out of a place of light-heartedness. She wrote it while “wrestling with the opposite of grace: my bodily gravity, the weight of a chronic, recurrent illness that keeps bringing me back to earth, that has filled me with despair, uncertainty, fear and grief”. She continues that it has made her search for grace “even more pressing – my search for the moments when we transcend the worst of ourselves, and witness or experience a moment of clarity or beauty”. She wrote “in between appointments with grim-faced surgeons…”.
So this meditation, glowing with the light of the bright sun, with the accessibility of the best of journalistic writing, nevertheless comes from a place of great depth.
It is a book to savour, and to share with those seeking a fresh expression of the grace of God.
Dr Muriel Porter is a Melbourne writer, and authorised lay reader at St Bartholomew’s, Burnley.
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