All we have is grace

Last week, I was one of the speakers at the very first Scholars Research Camp organized by the Department of Science and Technology Science Education Institute. The scholars were about to graduate from college, and they were being trained to do research from conceptualization to documentation.

I talked about science communication as both philosophy and human-centered design, always stressing how we need to go beyond disseminating information and assuming that people are simpletons who can be cured by an onslaught of knowledge.

At the end of the talk, the students had all sorts of questions.

One asked how he could converse with his family when they held such deeply entrenched beliefs, so that when he introduced topics, such as science or misinformation, his relatives shot him down.

Another asked about her university: she and her friends wanted to do an outreach program to orient children on handwashing, complete with discussions and demonstrations, but the school wanted her to simply distribute the handwashing kits and have a photo op.

Still, another asked what they could do if their thesis adviser was telling them to take shortcuts in their work and to not disclose part of their methods in their thesis document.

My fellow speakers and I could see the students letting go of their previous assumptions, but we also saw that they were grateful.

Their gratefulness was the sort that went beyond gushing thanksgiving. It was gratitude that showed up as a willingness to ask questions and listen to the answers, as well as in being excited to get to work even when it was difficult and uncertain—as joy.

The students were not blind to the world’s challenges. They could see that many problems could not be solved by science, let alone by disseminating more information about it. They could see that their problems were outgrowths of a patriarchal culture that hated being corrected, of a prevailing notion of efficiency over doing a good job, of unethical practices unchallenged for so long that they had become normal.

Their fight, therefore, was against a lack of critical thinking, a reliance on outward appearances, corruption—things they had been taught were the enemy, but things often foisted upon them by the same institutions that they had been taught to trust.

And still, they were grateful, excited, joyful.

I remembered them on the Second Sunday of Advent, as Fr. Peter Pojol, SJ, spoke of the concept of metanoia, a word that is often associated with repentance, with making ready the way for Christmas.

Metanoia, however, is not simply saying sorry or promising not to repeat one’s mistakes. It is a change in one’s core, and it does not come from well-crafted words or unflagging self-belief. Metanoia is the acknowledgment of one’s powerlessness, which should lead to one acting with the certainty that God’s future is already present.

It is looking forward in trust and hope. It is knowing that one truly moves forward only with and in grace.

Those who have nothing to lose, therefore, are those who welcome Christmas the best because they accept that everything they have is grace: undeserved, unmerited, unnamed, unasked for.

This was best exemplified by a conversation I had with one of the scholars. He had come from a small elementary school and then entered a science high school as an outsider whom everyone regarded with skepticism. He knew that he was not a genius, but he vowed to simply do good work because he had been brought to every place in his life by the generosity, grace, and goodness of others.

It was a philosophy he carried throughout college. Now, months away from graduation, he feels the anxiety of wanting to serve the country with new odds stacked against him.

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“I am a product of grace,” he kept saying, as he narrated how even his college life had been full of undeserved rewards, “People have put their trust in me, and the least I can do is to try my best.”

I remembered him, and the scholars, on a Sunday of metanoia—because that was perhaps the nature of the joy I witnessed. It was a joy that came from recognizing that not everything in life is within one’s control, that we owe so much to the kindness of those who have gone before us and to powers outside our very limited own.

That we must listen to each other. That we can only do our best to change systems, but that we must also be open to surprises.

Perhaps that’s something we can add to our metanoia, as we journey through our own advent while wading through flood control scandals, overactive troll farms, and overambitious politicians. Real change in the country can’t happen with mere resignations or apologies.

We must change who we are at our very core: how we define who deserves respect without falling back on assumptions of age or wealth, how we work with integrity without expecting public recognition, how we recognize that those who crave power must never be given it.

That no single human deserves anything—not obedience, not deference, never worship—when we are all products of grace.

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iponcedeleon@ateneo.edu