Biography
Sr. Carol Perry is a member of the Roman Catholic Sisters of St. Ursula, an order whose ministry focuses on education, social justice, spirituality and pastoral care. For more than 25 years she has taught an adult Bible class at one of America’s oldest Protestant churches, the historic Marble Collegiate Church in New York City, and for the last nine years she has been the resident Bible Scholar. Sr. Carol leads bible studies at Marble Church and in business locations throughout Manhattan as part of Marble’s “Spirituality in the Work Place” outreach.  [Biographical information is correct as of the broadcast date noted above.]

"Slow Grace" 
We recognize some forms of grace even as we are unable to define them. The wind through the branches of a willow tree, the fluid movements of a ballerina—these are visible. But, in the realm of the spirit, grace remains one of the more difficult concepts on our spiritual journey. Its action is so rarely a blazing moment on the road to Damascus, as it was for Paul.

In our world where things are better if they are faster, it is good to recall the patience of God in offering grace. We find a wonderful example of this in the Gospel of John.

There we first meet Nicodemus in a scene familiar to most of us. He is one of the members of Jerusalem's ruling religious body, the Great Sanhedrin, and he comes to Jesus at night, stepping symbolically out of the darkness in chapter 3 of John. He comes with his questions both about who Jesus is and what that might mean for him. But what we tend to forget is that at the end of that exchange of ideas Nicodemus goes back into the night. There is no instant response to the appeal of the Teacher to be born anew. Nicodemus resists, and, humanly speaking, we can understand why.

He represents authority in first century Judaism. He and his fellow Pharisees interpret the Law for the rest of their countrymen. So how can this rabbi from Galilee who has studied under none of their authorities possibly speak truth? But Nicodemus does not reject Jesus. He ponders and we discover that he cannot forget that encounter at night. This is the persistence of God's grace.

When next we meet him, in chapter 7 of John, it is festival time in Jerusalem, the joyous feast of Booths. Nicodemus, in the Temple, is seated with the group of rulers who are awaiting the return of the Temple police who have been sent to the courtyard to arrest Jesus. When those guards return empty-handed, the authorities are not pleased. In fact, they are more than that, they are dismayed to hear the police say: "Never has anyone spoken like this."

In the ensuing condemnation, Nicodemus dares to speak up. Grace is working in him as he challenges the interpreters of the Law with their own respect for that Law. He says: "Our law does not judge people without first giving them a hearing to find out what they are doing, does it?" He is still clinging to the one thing that is certain in his life, the Law.

But his small voice for justice is swept away by the scorn of those who share power with him. These Pharisees draw on their ultimate prejudice against Jesus when they say: "Search and you will see that no prophet is to arise from Galilee." And so Nicodemus seems to once again drop back into the darkness.

But God's grace goes on working. We will never know how this man wrestles with it, how many times he faces the fact that admitting Jesus into his life will cause him to lose everything that he holds dear: position, power, human respect. But not admitting Jesus will place him beyond peace and joy. So the human and the divine struggle, and we see the ultimate resolution only in chapter 19 of John.

Death has already claimed Jesus, and as night falls quickly on Calvary's hilltop, two new disciples step forward. One is Joseph of Arimathea, boldly asking Pilate for the body of Jesus and offering his own tomb for the burial. And joining him in the task of ministering to the one who died as a common criminal is our Nicodemus. The triumph of grace is so visible. It is he who brings the spices to anoint the body, coming to do what was traditionally a woman's task. But that does not matter now. He comes to claim the dead body of the teacher he was unable to publicly acknowledge in life. He comes to perform an action that belongs to the family of the deceased.

And so in every way, Nicodemus has rejected his past life and has chosen a new one. Grace has claimed him. Career, human respect, power, none of these matters any longer. With how much love does he bury the Teacher whose words haunted him until he could accept them. As the sun sets on that fateful Good Friday, something wonderful is born in the soul of Nicodemus.

In his story we indeed see amazing grace working its transforming action. This love and patience on God's part are constantly active in our world. Grace is sometimes almost visible when those we meet offer that helpful assistance, that encouraging word, that shared insight which changes the shape of our day. At other times, grace is the inner urge which we cannot resist and which moves us to the good.

But above all, grace is God patiently working in our lives, prodding, suggesting, waiting with the enduring reassurance: "And behold I am with you always, even to the end of the age." May that reminder give strength and purpose to our days.

Interview with Carol Perry

Daniel Pawlus: Sr. Carol, thank you so much for your inspiring message. The first thing I’d like to ask you—I know we’re going to talk about grace—is how is it that you are a Catholic nun working at a Protestant church in New York City? Tell us that story a little bit.

Carol Perry: It was by invitation. Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, who more that twenty-fives years ago, invited me to be his adult Bible teacher. I think one of the gifts that Marble Church offers to the community is the fact that it fully understands we are all Christian. And as I often jokingly say to my classes, when we get to heaven there is not going to be one gate for certain denominations and one gate for others. There is one very large gate, we’re all going to go in together and let’s practice here on Earth.

Delle Chatman: Thank goodness for that! I want to pursue your approach to Bible study that zooms in on stories that somehow really want to dig into, as I say, these characters, these real people who wrestled with God in a variety of ways and went through a number of experiences. How do you approach that in your classroom?

Perry: I think it was an inspiration that came to me a number of years ago that the Bible is about people and people are just like us. They have our hopes, they have our desires, they have our sufferings, they have our challenges. And I think if we teach the Bible from the point of view of the people who are on the way to God, then our own journey can identify with that. We are a part of this same movement. I think we can sometimes be so caught up in the fact that it is God’s word that we forget the other part of that. It’s God’s word to people.

Chatman: And the way you brought that to Nicodemus, tracking him through the Gospel and seeing how he changed and how he related to Jesus, that really brought it home because you’ve followed the character arc, as the writer in me would say, to see exactly where he began and what changed him and where did he end. At least as far as we are concerned: how was he transformed by the Lord.

Perry: He was a wonderful character to do this with because he was a rare character in the sense that we can find him at three different moments of his journey. So often people will come to Jesus and they have an interaction, though I often said to my high school students, and then what happened next? Which, by the way, is a wonderful thing to do in your own prayer life. Choose a passage where the person interacts with Jesus and say to yourself: what would happen next? Where would we go from here? With the Nicodemus story, John takes us from point to point and it’s almost visible what happens.

Pawlus: I’m curious. How do you apply this in your Spirituality in the Workplace outreach? This must be directly related to that.

Perry: Absolutely, because people working are Christian people who have come to work. The work is a part of their faith journey. It isn’t that they go to church on Sunday and they go to work on Monday and there is this great divide between them. So what we do in those little groups is wrestle with a Bible text, but we ask ourselves: what does this mean for us today as working people? In our instance, in New York City. How can this help our journey? For example, we had a wonderful time last year wrestling with David as a model CEO.

Chatman: Oh my goodness! And was he a model CEO? My goodness, plotting to send one of his underlings into warfare in order to make up with the wife!

Perry: That’s what we see happening with different social contexts. But if we can make the Bible people real enough for us, then we can understand both their motivation, we can understand their failures. God knows, David had them. And we can also understand their successes and then this becomes a part of our journey. It’s not something that happened a long time ago.

Chatman: It’s something that is happening now. And David—sticking with David for half a second— and the fact that he had trouble with his kids.

Perry: Is this still a human problem?

Chatman: This is still a human problem!

Pawlus: So you’re in the office place talking with people about these vary specific issues and how they relate to their lives now and not just in the historical context, but the direct connection.

Perry: It has to be now, otherwise Bible study is a “head” thing.

Pawlus: Intellectual.

Perry: Intellectual. And it has to be a “heart” thing because to me the primary reason for studying the Bible is to find out what it means for us. As I said to someone, we have to keep re-translating it into our situation, into our life circumstances so that it is the Living Word.

Chatman: There are those who believe that as we listen to the Gospel being read on a Sunday, we should put ourselves in the midst of it in order to say, ok, I’m either one of the people listening or I can identity with this woman who is trying to get her hand on the hem of that gown, you know. And you’re right. It does make it more immediate, more for me, as if the Lord is living and working through me—though what happened to him was, yes, two thousand years ago—but right now.

Perry: Absolutely.

Pawlus: I think there is a consistent part of your message, too, that God’s grace is always working in our lives and it’s always transforming us in different ways. Maybe you could share with us some examples of how you’ve seen grace transform people’s lives in big or small ways.

Perry: Big or small. I think, you know, sometimes we get caught up in the fact, as I mentioned, that Paul had this dazzling moment and therefore that’s what grace has to be. And I think sometimes grace is as simple as the unkind word we don’t say. It’s the encouragement we offer when we see somebody who is discouraged. In some of my workplace groups when we share around a table as to what this means to me here in this particular place and somebody says, “But I’m in the same circumstance. My boss does that, too.” Well, this is shared grace and it’s working, transforming us so that we never forget who we are on this journey.

Chatman: I’ve been thinking about your title, “Slow Grace,” and I wonder if grace alludes us because we aren’t moving slow enough to take notice of it’s motion.

Pawlus: That’s an excellent point.

Chatman: That we rush so much, that we rush by those moments where God is really trying to say, “But, but, but...but Delle, but Delle...”

Perry: I think that’s our challenge. We live in this world of instant mashed potatoes, instant messaging. And if it isn’t instant, it isn’t good. I think it is very hard sometimes to stop from our instant world and say, “But God doesn’t have a stop watch. God is not timing my spiritual journey, but God’s grace is there.”

Pawlus: It’s this constant process. It’s growth that evolves and shows us grace in the process of our lives.

Perry: That’s right. And we don’t always sense this because I prayed to God and I didn’t get an answer in the next ten seconds, therefore... . I really think the pace of our lives and the pace of God’s grace are almost in opposition unless we take the time to stop and breath and invite God into a slower spiritual journey.

Chatman: But we have to be willing to surrender our immediacy, our “I want it now,” and our agenda and say, “God, you take the reins.”

Perry: That’s right. Sometimes our prayers are like dictations to God rather than stopping and saying, “And God, what would you have me do?” Which is what Nicodemus had to wrestle with. What did God want him to do? Did God want him to give up that power and become a disciple of the scorned carpenter from Galilee? The wrestling must have been enormous. John only hints at it.

Chatman: Well, I’m thinking that you’re giving us the strength to slow down and take some risks and pick up the grace. Sister, thank you so much for your message and for talking with us about grace.