Uncommon Grace

I listen quite regularly to Desert Island Discs. It’s one of those old radio programmes that has continued to be broadcast by BBC Radio 4 since time immemorial. The formula consists of an interview with a well-known personality linked with their favourite pieces of music and what those pieces have meant to them at certain times in their lives. It’s a simple formula that has stood the test of time, and hardly changed since the fifties. 

I was very impressed with the interview Aung San Suu Kyi, the Burmese opposition leader, gave on the programme last month. There are certain people in this life, and in history who cut across the neat Christian theological distinctions of common and special grace. (That distinction is, that, whereas all of humanity enjoys a common sense of the grace of God, special grace belongs to those who, through faith and repentance, have trusted in the redeeming  power of the  blood of Christ, and as such, confess Jesus as their Lord and Saviour). 

Aung San Suu Kyi is not a Christian. Her Buddhist faith is very important to her. And yet she displays in her bearing, in her statesmanship, in her conversation, an uncommon grace, and it’s impossible not to be aware of the image of God in her. At the end of the interview, when it is standard for the interviewer to offer any choice of a book, besides the Bible and the works of Shakespeare, to take with them to the desert island, Aung San replied that she would treasure the Bible, seeing that she often used to read it aloud to her maternal grandfather when his eyesight was failing, as he had previously converted to Christianity.

But I was struck by something she said about the nature of sacrifice. She was asked about the price she had paid for her political principles in terms of an almost lifelong separation from her husband and family. 
“When you have chosen a certain path in life” she said,  “you should walk it with satisfaction and with determination and not try to make it appear as a tremendous sacrifice. That can be like looking for something back in return for the sacrifice.Whatever you do out of your own free will that, in itself, should be the gift you give to the cause and to those you love." 

Whether it’s out of political motives, or from a religious or missionary calling, that’s a good principle to reflect on when you’re tempted to think that God, or the world, sort of owes you something for all that you’ve done and given up.