AtD: Lew's experience of grace

[Robin Landseadel]

Something that Pynchon emphasizes in AtD is that for Grace to blossom  
one must not expect rewards for one's good acts. It appears to be a  
compromise setting between RC's confession/pennance/payment and  
Luther's "Free Gift" modulated by TRP's concepts of "Karma" and  
Natural Law/Taoism. There's a bit of a Koan in "It doesn't work unless  
you're not really expecting it to work." It's reminiscent of Doc  
Sportello's "What , I should only trust good people? man, good people  
get bought and sold every day. Might as well trust somebody evil once  
in a while. I mean, I wouldn't give odds either way."
On Dec 1, 2010, at 9:03 AM, David Morris wrote:

> The Christian (Martin Luther) concept of grace would be essentially a
> "free gift," something not earned and not owed, indeed ultimately
> something that was given "in spite of" what one deserved.  This
> concept was so at odds with Roman Catholicism's earned grace (by way
> of confession/pennance/payment) that it is not at all surprising that
> he and his followers were so despsed/persecuted by the RC Church.
>
> On Wed, Dec 1, 2010 at 10:33 AM, Robin Landseadel
> <robinlandseadel at comcast.net> wrote:
>> On Dec 1, 2010, at 4:40 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen wrote:
>>
>>> "One mild and ordinary work-morning in Chicago, Lew happened to  
>>> find himself on a public conveyance, head and eyes inclined  
>>> nowhere in particular ["soft eyes", as they call it in The  
>>> Wire.kfl], when he entered, all too briefly, a condition he had no  
>>> memory of having sought
>>> [As A.C. has it: "Don't lust after results!".kfl],
>>
>> I'd say "very," as there is a definite sense that "Doing the Right  
>> thing" is correlative to "Grace" in this novel.