Saying Grace

Recently I felt like getting retro with it, and writing on my old blog again. I imported a bunch of old posts to a new layout and seemed to lose most of the comments. Oh well. Thanks for those comments, guys. Everything is impermanent.

When I was thinking about writing, I immediately thought about a theme that keeps creeping up in my life lately. Grace.



I'm not exactly sure what grace is but I like this definition that I've come across:

Grace is experiencing the joy of being alive in the here and now.

Last fall my friend Suzanne gave a sermon about grace at church. It really had me thinking. She said how when people say how God knows the count of every hair on your head she thought that was a load of BS. But one time she was reading about the science behind how bears hibernate and she was so blown away that she thought there must be a God and if he can manage this thing with the bears and all the other bajillion organisms and the entire solar system, what's knowing how many hairs are on our heads. I thought that was a fascinating way to think about it.

There's so much that I don't know but the answers are out there. Whether God is an old wise gentleman or a hippy lady wearing sensible shoes or a Great Spirit or if there is no God...there is an answer to how many hairs are on my head and how many organisms are in the solar system. I don't know those answers. There's an answer to what will happen to me tomorrow, but right now I have no idea. That could be stressful, but it could also be beautiful because I can make the choice to concentrate on today and accept that tomorrow, no matter how I try to control it in my mind right now, is a giant mystery.

I sat in silence in lovely little Holy Covenant church and thought about these things until my head nearly popped off.

That night I left church, walked to the train station, sat down on the wooden bench while I waited for the brown line and cracked open "Travels with Charley" to the page where I left off. The first line I read:

"My grandfather knew the number of whiskers in the Almighty's hair. I don't even know what happened yesterday, let alone tomorrow."

I got the chills. Coincidence? Maybe. But also grace.

Grace is experiencing the joy of being alive in the here and now.

A couple days later I was cleaning out boxes and came across a paper I wrote for the class "Religious Visions in Modern Fiction" about discovering redemption and grace on my trip to Appalachia. I somehow tied Kurt Vonnegut's "Cat's Cradle" in there because that's what you do with college papers. My professor had written a page full of nice comments that read more like a letter, and it ended with, "One may consider it grace that you took this trip and this class at the same time. Keep this paper always." Oh grace...you sassy little concept...always creeping up on me.

When I went back to this old blog, the name "Saying Grace" came to me. I like it in terms of saying grace before meals because food is central to pretty much everyone and everything I love- family and friends and traveling and training for a marathon. And because saying grace before and after meals is a practice my parents instilled in me that we still do today and it makes me think of tradition and family and how I was raised. And because finding grace in small moments is what motivates my choices in friends and career and travel and music and family and everything. Maybe the key is to just say it's grace and not take this crazy shit for granted.

The perfectly ripe pear from the HarvesTime that somehow made it's way into my morning snack. Grace. The first time I laughed hard, from a real place, with a brand new friend. Grace. The familiarity and comfort and nostalgia I experience at 18 Holly Drive. Grace. Reading the final paragraph of a book I love. Grace. Sharing a homemade meal with friends. Grace. Making music. Grace. Setting up my tent in a new nook in the woods. Grace. Standing on the shores of an island off the coast of Belize, saying goodbye to my Italian fling, and having his parting words be: "Call me if you wanna make a baby." Grace.

Each day is full of moments that fill me with grace. They're the moments that make me smile or make me feel connected to someone or just make me think about someone or something other than myself. Just the other day a woman on the Red Line stood up and started singing gospel at the top of her lungs. I was prepared to be irritated with her because it was early and I was tired, but I was too busy being amazed at how lovely her voice was. Grace.

The plan is to use this blog to write about these moments. Current ones and old ones. Next up: the story about that Italian.