photo by Collyn Ware

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms… ― Henry David Thoreau

Recently, I was talking with a friend, a realtor who specializes in farm land and acreages. When I asked if he’d been busy (thinking he probably hadn’t been since it’s the dead of winter in Iowa), he answered with a resounding yes. Really, I said. At this time of year? He reported that people were buying up land all over southeast Iowa. Even people from out of state, from the coasts, he said. We both speculated on this phenomenon and decided that our Covid year had prompted some to seriously rethink where and how they lived. You’re not going to bump into any stars on any boulevard around here, but you might bump into a white-tail doe and her twins. Literally, if you don’t drive defensively!

I’ve thought about this conversation a lot in the past week. I have a smorgasbord of delights outside my windows: song birds of all sorts and sizes, deer who visit nightly, unblemished snow that blankets the back yard until it winds its way into the timber, sunrises and sunsets to make you weep. For the twenty years I’ve lived on this acreage, I’ve had all these sights and sounds to enjoy, and yet, I’d be lying if I said that I’ve always enjoyed them as I have this past year. I’d be fibbing if I said that I lived deeply and sucked all the marrow out of life, that I lived deliberately, fronting only the essential facts of life. Of course, I haven’t. For too long, I’ve been too busy living–or so I thought–to live.

If Thoreau were my mentor, not my literary but my life mentor, I have no doubts that he’d call me into his office. Do you want to know how many times you looked outside today, how many times you looked up from your book or computer screen? I can count them on one hand. Actually, I can count them on one finger. You’re on probation–indefinitely–until you can improve your life. And this would be fair and kind enough. Averaging my pathetic performance over the past two decades, I would’ve scored low enough to be legitimately expelled. I may have had a smorgasbord of delights all around me, but often I took them for granted just as I took too many other things for granted. Holding a red marking pen and balancing a stack of student papers on my lap, I resigned myself to a life-on-hold.

With far fewer distractions, many of us have come to live more deliberately, driving our lives into corners and reducing them to much lower terms. I can still recall the bliss (and this word doesn’t do it justice) of floating in my above ground pool, orioles, finches, and grosbeaks flying in and out of the oak trees, a cloudless, cobalt sky above me, and sun enough to warm my bones. I remember thinking how blessed I was to have all of this just outside my door. I remember thinking how life didn’t get much better than this.

Throughout history, there have been writers and leaders who celebrated living dearly. They admonished us, cajoled us, shamed and loved us into cultivating better lives. This is nothing new. It may be sadly new for many of us, though, for we’ve lived our lives in the land of conveniences, on the treadmills of production and on the ladders of success. Having learned them in school, we’ve been educated enough to recite Thoreau’s aphorisms. We’ve put them on posters that hung in our classrooms and offices. We’ve used them to introduce speeches and essays. They’ve been our friends:

• I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately . . .
• I learned this, at least, by my experiement: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.
• If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music he hears, however measured or far away.

But calling them our friends is clearly not enough. I just finished Charlotte McConaghey’s new novel, Migrations. Her protagonist, Franny Stone, is on a mission to find the world’s last flock of arctic terns on their migration from pole to pole. Some reviewers have called this novel an ode to a threatened world, for readers begin to realize that it’s not only the arctic terns that are endangered. The great schools of fish are gone, leaving the ocean barren. There is no bird song, the birds native to different parts of the world now extinct. Franny drives her life into a precious corner and reduces it to a solitary goal: seek and love the arctic terns. She wants nothing more than to come to the end of her life knowing that she lived deliberately, and thus lived well.

We all have those corners into which we might drive what is most precious to us. And once there, we might come to see that, in doing so, we’ve reduced the clutter of our lives to the lowest and most valuable terms. We don’t need a pandemic to live more deliberately, but for many of us, months of living quite differently than we’ve ever lived before have jump-started this. I don’t want to be out-deliberated by some Californian who jubilantly buys ten acres of Iowa hardwoods, birds, and solitude. I want to see the wealth of my rural world. And not because someone else values it, but because I want to come to the end of my life and say I have lived, that I tasted deeply and sucked all the marrow from my 3.6 acres, my decades of living and loving.

I want my mentor, Henry David Thoreau, to pronounce my probation period over. And I want to hear his parting words: Live deeply, dearly, deliberately, my friend.

 
  
 End Roll
 for my mother on her birthday
  
 It’s a gift from the newspaper office, you say—
 an end roll of newsprint on a spool
 that stands 3 feet tall on its cardboard spine—
 free for the taking. 
  
 All yours, you say,
 and I watch as the center cannot hold,
 as paper begins to unspool itself
 like yarn from a wild skein.
  
 At first, I can’t bring myself to put pencil to paper.
 The white field before me is too dear.
  
 But even at twelve, 
 I understand the invitation before me.
 The furrows of my palms loosen,
 and then I begin to draw what I’ve only imagined—
 tentative at first, but then surer—
  
 until I’ve given form to an acre of possibilities
 until I’ve drawn right up to the cardboard core.
  
 I’m still the one who trembles before paper,
 the one who finds the world on the back of an envelope,
 whose hours are lost and gained 
 when my pen finds its way. 
  
 I was born a fallow field
 where shapeless, wordless things would incubate,
 the loam of my lifetime deeper and richer because
 even before I knew this,
  
 you knew. 

We should remember that there are few pleasures greater than promoting your moral enthusiasms at other people’s expense.
― Theodore Dalrymple, Spoilt Rotten: the Toxic Cult of Sentimentality

English cultural critic, prison physician and psychiatrist, Anthony Malcolm Daniels, also known by the pen name Theodore Dalrymple, understands too well the slippery slope of moral enthusiasm. There’s often nothing more exhilerating than to ride the tide of moral enthusiasm. This is the stuff that cultural–and personal–dreams are made of. Righteous indignation blossoms into full-fledged moral enthusiasm, and the world lies at our feet. Sometimes trembling in anticipation or sometimes in fear, sometimes sleeping, blissfully unware of what’s to come, the world is our playground–or perhaps more aptly, our stomping ground. For when moral enthuiasm comes at other people’s expense, our speech and actions may leave a path of destruction in their wake.

Memes commemorating 2020 will undoubtedly continue into the new year. Most of us were all too eager to ring out the year-from-hell. We joked about the “new normal,” and yet, truthfully we weren’t laughing. Quarantined in our homes, our interactions with the outside world came largely through the internet and television. And what we saw there was anything but normal. Hospitals struggled with the influx of Covid patients, death rates climbed, dire predictions abounded, and authorities debated the best courses of action. And then as the world grappled with the horrors of a pandemic–the likes of which it hadn’t experienced for a century–we took to the airwaves. First in relative solidarity and then increasingly in conflict, we plastered social media with proclamations of what to do, how to think and live in this new age of pandemic.

On the heels of pandemic came nationwide racial, social, and political conflict, the intensity of which harkened back to the 1960s. Again, some of us took to the airwaves, first to comment and then increasingly to shame. Some lived through social media, eager to agree with those who espoused like ideas and equally eager to refute those who didn’t. Moral enthusiasm was the name of the game, and it was the only real game in town.

Clearly, moral enthusiasm isn’t, by nature, a bad thing. We depend upon those who think and act with moral enthusiasm which makes–and has made–our world a better place. We can’t imagine our lives without the thinkers and doers who are so excited by cell biology or artificial intelligence or genomics. Too often, we take for granted those whose moral enthusiasm has led to social, economic, environmental, medical, and political innovations that have changed our world. True, many will argue that these changes haven’t always been good or that their consequences have been dangerous. In the past year as the world’s scientists worked feverishly to develop safe Covid vaccines, many of us questioned the safety and efficacy of their work. But just as many of us applauded the benefits of such work and respected the moral enthusiasm that fueled the countless hours spent in laboratories.

In 2020, I watched as we wielded our moral enthusiasm like machetes. With edges sharpened on the stone of good intent, our words often macerated anything in their ideological paths. We unfriended others on Facebook. Some of us even posted terse announcements that we were taking a break from social media altogether. And some of us held such aggregious views that others canceled us (or we canceled them). Paradoxically, people across political, social, and educational spectrums were equally enthusiastic, equally confident of their moral compulsions: police or no police, face masks or no face masks, vaccine or no vaccine, in-person schooling or no in-person schooling, incumbent president or no incumbent president. We ruminated within the four walls of our homes. Sometimes, our ruminations morphed into alien beings with lives of their own, and like mad scientists, we took pleasure in our creations.

But as we leave 2020 and look forward to 2021, we face a real dilemma: how do we promote and nuture moral enthusiasm that has the power to positively change systems, cultures, and even nations without destroying individuals? It would be foolish to suggest that there is an easy solution to this dilemma. History is a mausoleum of moral enthusiasts and those who suffered under their reigns. Yet, it’s also a memorial of moral enthusiasts and those who prospered under their reigns. What to do, what to do. . .

Dalrymple may not have the solution to our dilemma (who could?), but he offers sage words that seem particularly apt for our future:

The bravest and most noble are not those who take up arms, but those who are decent despite everything; who improve what it is in their power to improve, but do not imagine themselves to be saviors. In their humble struggle is true heroism.

This is a New Year’s resolution worth adopting, I think. To be decent despite everything, to improve what is in my power to improve, to refuse to see myself as a savior, to live humbly in my enthusiasm. For me, it will be a daily (hourly?) struggle, but the fruits of this labor may be the bravest, noblest struggle of all.

the scandal of particularity (theology): the difficulty of regarding a single individual human (Jesus) as being the savior for all humans

Months after we adopted Quinn, I transitioned from full to part-time teaching. Initially, the transition was more brutal than it should’ve been. Whereas I’d once taught a classroom of 75 students in my introduction to literature course, I now faced a classroom (dare I say classroom?) of five students in my night class. I stood transfixed before these five students who sat so close to me that I could literally read the notes they were scribbling in their notebooks and smell the familiar scent of Axe that wafted off of one young man whose eyes grew larger as he thumbed through our 600+ page American Lit anthology. Until then, I realized that the sum total of my teaching experience had been with larger groups. In these classrooms, my eyes would invariably scan a sea of faces, and often enough, I began to regard them as a mass, an abstract whole, a generality. But this? This wasn’t a whole; these were the individual parts, up close and in person. And it was impossible to see these parts as anything but unique and particular.

Today, I teach an audience of two. Working one-on-one with each of my grandchildren has made me acutely aware of how much you can see and understand when your sole focus in on an individual and his or her learning style. No more teaching to the middle. Every lesson, every day is tailored to Gracyn or Griffin’s particular needs and learning styles. As we lean into each other, our heads bent over the same work, this is about as real as it gets.

There’s something truly scandalous about particularity. It narrows our field of vision and closes the gap. It begs to be known more intimately and invades our personal space. If we blink hard, trying to blur the edges and transform it into some shadowy abstraction, it resists. And if we try to cast it out into some nebulous agglomerate, it refuses to be consumed. It remains scandalously particular.

In Chapter 14 of Miracles, Christian author C. S. Lewis writes of such scandal:

To be quite frank, we do not at all like the idea of a “chosen people.” Democrats by birth and education, we should prefer to think that all nations and individuals start level in the search for God, or even that all religions are equally true. It must be admitted at once that Christianity makes no concessions to this point of view. It does not tell of a human search for God at all, but of something done by God for, to, and about Man. And the way in which it is done is selective, undemocratic, to the highest degree. After the knowledge of God had been universally lost or obscured, one man from the whole earth (Abraham) is picked out. He is separated (miserably enough, we may suppose) from his natural surroundings, sent into a strange country, and made the ancestor of a nation who are to carry the knowledge of the true God. Within this nation there is further selection: some die in the desert, some remain behind in Babylon. There is further selection still. The process grows narrower and narrower, sharpens at last into one small bright point like the head of a spear. It is a Jewish girl at her prayers. All humanity (so far as concerns its redemption) has narrowed to that.

Lewis understood how scandalous these words were, how many would chafe at what they would see as a painfully narrow view of redemption. Indeed, the whole idea of one Jewish girl and her bethrothed, of one baby–both divine and human–is scandalous. Out of centuries of possibilities, countless people and places, God chose this time, this woman, this man, and this humble place for the birth of his son. The degree of this particularity is outrageous. This is what Hebrew scholar Walter Brueggemann would call the scandal of particularity. [The Message of the Psalms: A Theological Commentary, 1984]

As a rule, we don’t do particular very well. My students, like most politicians, preferred to speak and write in sweeping generalizations and abstractions. We’re big scale, grand scheme kind of folk. The world of abstractions can be a world of rainbows and kittens, all irridescence and spun sugar. Too often, we prefer to maintain our distance and look on from afar, for this allows us to turn away if we see something–or someone–that confuses or grieves us. For better, and often for worse, we hide behind our cloaks of generality, so we don’t become overwhelmed.

As tragic and troubling as 2020 has been, it has brought the particular directly into our households. And this isn’t altogether a bad thing. In many ways, it’s a very good thing. The scope of our lives and world seemed to shrink within our own four walls. Though we had access to the world at large through television and media, our immediate worlds were small and relational. The people within our households became our particular worlds. And this was genuinely scandalous in the sense that there were fewer outside distractions, fewer opportunities to generalize, fewer instances in which we could distance ourselves from others in our homes. At times, it was undoubtedly uncomfortable, perhaps even painful. Yet, at other times, it was wondrous and intimate, for we realized that these particulars–those people and shared moments in our own homes–were the very things that mattered most.

Certainly, I can’t speak for God, but I think he revels in this kind of particularity. After all, he gave his son to a particular mother and father, to the very human experience of living and loving and leaving. Lest we generalize and lest we make his love an abstraction, he gave us a baby. What a scandalous particularity.

photo by Collyn Ware

Never be afraid to trust an unknown future to a known God.
― Corrie ten Boom

In the past year, I’ve had several conversations with individuals whose trust in a better world and brighter future was tenuous at best. One admitted that she didn’t feel as though she could bring children into a world like this. Another lamented the status of our political and physical environments, claiming both were woefully inadequate to sustain any promise for the future. As I listened, I imagined the doomsday clock ticking loudly, both the hour and minute hands circling wildly and with great speed. I imagined the end coming like a thief in the night, quick and sure.

As I reflected upon these conversations, I was truly saddened. Even in my darkest moments, I’ve never felt as though things were so bad that I didn’t want to have children or plan my future. Even as wars continued, politicians wrangled for power, and news of environmental disasters grieved the world, I found myself looking forward to better times.

If anyone may have conceded that the doomsday clock was, indeed, ticking, consider Corrie ten Boom, the Dutch resistance worker and concentration camp prisoner. Corrie and her family, members of the Dutch Reformed Church, worked with the Dutch resistance to resist Nazi occupation of the Netherlands and to hide Dutch Jews. For this work, she was arrested by the Gestapo, imprisoned in her own country, and later transferred to Ravensbruck, a female concentration camp in Germany. Clearly, she had cause to regard the future–hers and the world’s–with despair. And yet, she didn’t. When her future was unclear, she clung to the assurance that God was with her. She trusted that the world’s dark night of the soul wouldn’t last forever. After she was released from Ravensbruck in 1944 and reunited with surviving members of her family, she dedicated her life to reconciliation, helping Holocaust victims heal emotionally and spiritually. In spite of the pain she witnessed all around her, she hung on to the promise that God would never forsake his people, and she let go of her pain and fear. She may not have known exactly what the future held, but she did know the God to whom she entrusted it.

In the nativity story, Joseph is often portrayed as a secondary figure: the guy who got Mary into Bethlehem, who found shelter just in time, and who stood around helplessly during the birth. Imagine discovering that your betrothed is pregnant–and not with your child. If anyone had a right to doubt a hopeful future, it might have been Joseph. Faced with what appeared to be no good options, Joseph could’ve cut his losses and slunk away in shame. But in truth, he stepped up to play a leading role when he took Mary as his wife. In Matthew 1: 20-21 and 24, we read:

But after he had considered this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, “Joseph son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife, because what is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. she will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins . . . When Joseph woke up, he did what the angel of the Lord had commanded him and took Mary home as his wife.

To assume the role of earthly father to God’s son is, perhaps, one of the biggest leading roles of all. When Joseph could only see the future through the glass darkly, God reached out to him in a dream. Joseph grabbed this promise and held on. And then he let go. He released his shame and fear, his uncertainty and pride and stepped up as both husband and father.

Every Christmas, I remember our own trip to Bethlehem in 1992. In the middle of the night, Paul and I loaded our sleeping girls into the van and made our way to the Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis, Minnesota. There in a few short hours, we would meet our infant son who was being flown in from Georgia. Not flesh of our flesh, nor bone of our bone, but the son we’d already come to love and would soon adopt. Paul would never have a biological son, but he stepped in with both feet to father this baby boy whom we only knew through photos. For in truth, we had a family of five already, and adopting a fourth child came at my urging. He could’ve said no, but he didn’t. Instead, he hung on to the future that I’d imagined–a future we trusted that God would bless–and let go of any uncertainties he’d previously held.

Unquestionably, most of of us have had moments when we looked ahead and could see no light at the end of our tunnels. We may not have been able to even see our hands in front of our faces. To move forward, to embrace the future with courage and hope? Sure, we’ll just step into a tiger’s cage, ride a barrel over Niagra Falls, rappell off a skyscraper and free climb El Capitan. No problem.

None of us knows exactly what our futures hold. We can make predictions, and we can dream. But ultimately, it’s all about what we hang onto and what we let go of. We can hang onto our doubts and fears, as we let go of any hope in a better tomorrow. Or we can reach forward and hang onto God’s promises, as we let go of the pessimism that that threatens to imprison us. Holocaust survivor Corrie ten Boom hung on. Fathers Joseph and Paul hung on. And in doing so, all stepped assuredly into the future.

And then there’s my grandson Griffin, standing atop a sledding hill for the first time in the season. The snow was wet enough to be slick, and at the bottom of the hill stood a forbidding thicket of scrub brush. He hesitated. Then, he hung onto his grandpa as they pushed off and let go with a whoop that sailed through the frosty air.

This is the paradox and challenge of Advent: to hang on and let go. But just ask Griffin, it’s well worth the ride.

for Griffin

I stand at the door, eyes locked
on the ceiling, eyes of a stranger,
and then she cries...
Oh my God, help me!
Where a child would have cried Mama!
Where a child would have believed Mama!
she bit the towel and called on God
and I saw her life stretch out...
I saw her torn in childbirth,
and I saw her, at that moment,
in her own death and I knew that she knew.
--Anne Sexton, "Pain for a Daughter"

In Sexton’s poem, she writes about her daughter who has lost her pony to distemper and, in her loss, consoles herself by visiting the neighbors’ thoroughbred. He inadvertently stands on her foot, and she limps home having lost three toenails, her riding boot filling with blood. She sits on the toilet as her father attempts to clean and disinfect her wounds. At the end of the poem, Sexton, the mother, stands helplessly in the doorway watching the entire ordeal. Clearly, she witnesses genuine pain as her daughter cries out to God for help. But the real pain, she knows, will come later as her child-daughter becomes an adult who will bear a child and ultimately face death. The fact that she sees this very adult awareness in her daughter’s eyes is, perhaps, the most painful moment of all.

The first time I taught this poem in an introductory literature course, I could barely read the final lines aloud. Sexton’s words had literally sucked the life from me. As the young mother of an infant daughter, I hadn’t yet imagined her as a mother and woman who would experience the pain and loss of life. And truthfully, I didn’t want to. Better to think of her swaddled in the pink blanket her grandmother had given her, safe in her crib. Better to believe that, armed with a regulation carseat and up-to-date immunization records, I could protect her from the world at large. Better to believe that I could take her adult pain away as efficiently as I could apply Bandaids and administer teaspoons of Tylenol.

In the season of Advent, I often find myself thinking about what Mary really knew about the life and death of the child she would bear. She may not have known that her son would be scourged and crucified, but she did know that he would be both fully human and fully divine, both her son and God’s. She had to know that the world’s eyes would eventually be on him and that his heavenly father would ask great things of him. This awareness alone is daunting. And as she watched Jesus grow into a full understanding of who he was and what he was destined to do, she must have had moments–like any mother–during which she cried out, “If only I spare him this pain!”

Last week, Griffin and I were working on his daily math lesson. It was a new concept and a challenging one, at that. Finally in desperation, he dropped his pencil and said, “This is too hard! And I know 3rd grade math will be even harder!” Tears had formed in the corners of his eyes, and he blinked hard. So did I. Because in that moment, I knew that he knew. I could see his life stretch out before him, the boy-child becoming a man, the days when all things seemed possible–the world at his fingertips–growing increasingly more tarnished by the realities of the adulthood. I could see that the boy who dressed and talked like a rodeo circuit bull-rider would soon see that this was just a childhood fantasy, the death of which would leave a real and painful scar. It was a small thing, this tough math problem. Still, it took on larger, more significant proportions as we both considered it.

Generally speaking, we look forward to the future, to better days ahead. 2021 has got to be better than 2020, we think. Certainly, we’ll leave the coronavirus behind eventually, and life will return to some kind of normal. And in those moments when we see that pandemic-free future, we rest assured that better days glow brightly along the horizon. Still, as adults, we know what the world knows: that we’ll ultimately immunize the world, open up restaurants, schools, and workplaces, and live maskless days–until the next virus or war or environmental disaster. We know that we know.

This awareness could bury us, or it could be yet another reminder of how broken our world is and how desperately we need a a savior. Sexton hears her daughter cry out to God, when, in the past, she would’ve cried out to her. As Griffin struggled with two-digit subtraction, I could imagine the times when he, too, will cry out to God, for his pain will be greater than that which his mom or grandma can remedy. Today, we cry out to scientists and politicians, to policy makers and academics. We raise our collective voices to the world and hope for better days ahead.

But we would do well to cry out to God. First and foremost, we would do well to remember that we’ll only have days of earthly respite. We need a savior whose comfort and peace offer so much more than this. In this season of Advent, we can see the light of Christ emerging from the darkness. And yet, we know that this light will ultimately be extinguished. We can see Christ’s life and death stretch out before him.

The promise of Advent, however, is the promise of return: the light that reemerges, the resurrection of hope. We know that we know. And this makes all the difference.

For my granddaughter, Gracyn

It is useless to try to make peace with ourselves by being pleased with everything we have done. In order to settle down in the quiet of our own being we must learn to be detached from the results of our own activity. We must withdraw ourselves, to some extent, from the effects that are beyond our control and be content with the good will and the work that are the quiet expression of our inner life. We must be content to live without watching ourselves live, to work without expecting any immediate reward, to love without an instantaneous satisfaction, and to exist without any special recognition.
― Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island

I would be lying if I said that I’ve lived Merton’s words. I wish that I could say that I’ve been much more interested in being than doing, that I’ve rested in the quiet of my own being more than in the things I’ve done. If I were to score my level of being throughout my adult life, well let’s just say that my average score would be painfully low. And don’t get me started about the Christmas season. It’s a miracle, indeed, that I haven’t self-combusted as I’ve shopped, shipped, baked, wrapped, and decorated. Seriously, a D- for the season would be generous.

God asked–and continues to ask–many of his most unlikely servants to do things they weren’t especially prepared for, things that required talent and aptitude they didn’t have. And we read story after story of these folk who accomplished great things for God’s kingdom. But with Mary, God asks her to be, to become the holy receptacle into which he plants his most precious seed and knits his most wonderful work: Christ. In Luke 1: 38, we read:

And Mary said, “Behold, the bondslave of the Lord; may it be done to me according to your word.”

May it be done to me–not let me do. Each Advent season, I marvel at Mary’s quick consent to settle down in the quiet of her own being, to be God’s handmaiden. She is the woman I’d like to be when I grow up.

This fall, I’ve been homeschooling my two grandchildren. It goes without saying that most days are filled with doing: 2nd grade math, reading, science, social studies, penmanship and spelling AND 6th grade math, reading and writing, science, social studies, spelling and beginning Spanish. Even at my most experienced point in teaching, I never had this many preps. Each day, I hope I haven’t forgotten something. And as a veteran doer, I have folders and charts–all the teacher things that are standard tools of the trade.

A few days ago, I’d finished with Griffin who had gone to the garage to work with Grandpa. Gracyn and I worked to complete the subjects she hadn’t yet started. When we’d finished, I gathered up papers to put in her folders and cleaned up our work area. It was then that I noticed she’d moved to the kitchen bar where she planted herself on a stool. It became clear that she just wanted to talk and pass the time with me. I was struck with the fact that I had to DO nothing. I just had to let it be done to me: the sweet conversation, the time alone with an 11-year-old who—for 30 precious minutes—made me feel more like a friend and confidante than a grandma. As I sat there, I let it be done to me. I became a willing receptacle for all she wanted to give me, for I was acutely aware that this was what I was called to be.

In Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, Thomas Merton explains that when he prays, he seeks a point vierge or virgin point at the center of his being. He describes this as a point untouched [by sin and] by illusion, a point of pure truth . . . which belongs entirely to God. . . . As I sat and let Gracyn’s presence wash over and through me, I realized that I’d reached a point vierge. This time belonged entirely to God who had blessed me with an experience untouched by sin and illusion, a point of pure truth. Like Mary, I found that I could only utter, How can this be?

As the days before Christmas crowd in upon me, one day crashing into the next, the hours filled with final shopping, wrapping, and mailing Christmas cards, no doubt I’ll find myself a doer more times than I’d care to admit. But this Advent season, I vow to simply be. I will be ever mindful of those point vierges which come only when I can stop doing.

And when, in the middle of a lesson on telling time to the half hour, my grandson gasps as he reports that there are three squirrels on a one branch in the ash tree outside, I’ll let his wonder be done to me. I’ll stifle the teacher-in-me and channel Mary. For I’ll understand the futility of measuring my worth by everything I’ve done. I’ll really try to settle down in the quiet of my own being.

photo by Collyn Ware

The Way of Things
 
As the sun slips below the ridge,
the day dissolves into the tree line,
a smudge pot of coral
then the palest yellow and near-blue.
 
In the cabin, I look out at the timber.
I can barely see the white tips of his antlers
pierce the dusk.
When he moves, he parts the nettles.
He makes a way, this young buck,
his dun-slicked back like the hull of a cargo ship
pushing the night forward.
 
It’s the way of things:
this pushing the next thing forward,
the inevitable, first as a suggestion
and then as a thing of its own.
 
It’s the way of things:
the darkness on a steady course,
time its lodestar.
 
For in the blink of an eye,
the day who spent the hours with abandon—
light and color painting the world with such a broad and lovely brush—
succumbs.
 
Then the buck beds down in the cedar thicket,
and the hills tremble with coyotes.
Cold so clear it shines
crowns the world.
 
But in the blink of an eye,
the thickets stir again.
The hills simmer all golden and garnet,
and every stone is jeweled with frost.
 
It’s the way of things:
the day refusing to die,
germinating in the ash heap,
and promising—like a sleeping seed—
its return.

Photo by Collyn Ware

I’m writing this in part to tell you that if you ever wonder what you’ve done in your life, and everyone does wonder sooner or later, you have been God’s grace to me, a miracle, something more than a miracle. You may not remember me very well at all, and it may seem to you to be no great thing to have been the good child of an old man in a shabby little town you will no doubt leave behind. If only I had the words to tell you.
― Marilynne Robinson, Gilead 

These are the heartwrenching words of Reverend Robert Boughton to his son, Jack. Jack’s petty thefts and adolescent discretions have given him a certain notoriety in his small town. He’s the proverbial preacher’s kid gone wrong, the son hell-bent on sowing his wild oats right in the face of his community and his father’s church. But these crimes are small change. The big-dollar sin occurs when he impregnates a young, poor girl and leaves her with neither husband nor financial means. An unemployed college student, Jack leaves school and skips town. Horrified, his family attempts to offer both financial and emotional support to the young mother. At one desperate point, they offer to raise the child in their home, for the squalor she and her mother were living in was more than the Boughtons could stand. And later when the four-year-old child dies from an ordinary infection gone unattended, they are beside themselves with grief and remorse. Meanwhile, Jack is living hand to mouth in St. Louis. He doesn’t return for either his daughter’s or his mother’s funeral.

And yet, his father passionately and persistently reaches out with grace. He sends money and writes letters. He sends his older brother to look for him. And he prays, how he prays! There is literally nothing Jack can do–or not do–that will make his father love him more or love him less. In one particularly moving passage, he reveals that in spite of what his son may think of himself, he has been God’s grace, a miracle, something more than a miracle for him, the good child of an old man.

Good? What of Jack’s sins and seemingly unrepentent nature? Undoubtedly, he feels shame and guilt. And repeatedly, he vows to be a better man, to stop drinking and carousing, to clean up and secure a real job, to be able to walk down the street and return to his family home with some dignity. In his book, The Cost of Discipleship, German pastor, theologian and anti-Nazi dissident Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes:

Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession, absolution without personal confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.

Bonhoeffer claims that grace is cheap without repentance and, above all, without the cross. Over the years, Jack struggles with what he can and can’t believe. Ultimately, he can’t believe in the God to whom his father has devoted his life. He knows about God. He intellectually understands the cross as God’s great gift, but he can’t find his way beyond head knowledge. Again and again, he turns inward, convincing himself that he must press on alone. In the end, he passes on the true grace that God offers and can only accept the heartfelt love that his earthly father gives. If one considers his father’s unconditional, unmerited love as a form of grace, Bonhoeffer would contend that it is cheap grace at best.

For Jack remains lost, wandering alone in the desert of his own effort and skepticism. American philosopher and writer, Dallas Willard, would have some words for those who are bent on working their way out of the wilderness. Willard writes that [g]race is not opposed to effort; it’s opposed to earning. I can imagine that he’d like to sit down with Jack over a cup of coffee and help him understand the difference between effort and earning. He’d have much to say about the fact that none of us–no, not one–can ever earn God’s grace. Still, our good works in response to the gift of grace are pleasing to our fellow humans and to God.

Along with Willard, Christian author, Philip Yancey, has written much about grace. He writes:

Grace is shockingly personal. As Henri Nouwen points out, ‘God rejoices. Not because the problems of the world have been solved, not because all human pain and suffering have come to an end, nor because thousands of people have been converted and are now praising him for his goodness. No, God rejoices because one of his children who was lost has been found. [What’s So Amazing About Grace?]

Perhaps it is just this shockingly personal nature of grace that frightens and confuses Jack. The Creator of the universe, the Savior of the world sets out on a rescue mission to bring one raggedy, wretched man into the fold? Really? The intensity of such relentless pursuit and personal attention is, indeed, shocking and ultimately beyond what Jack and many of God’s children can accept.

The grace of God means something like: Here is your life. You might never have been, but you are because the party wouldn’t have been complete without you. So writes author and theologian Frederick Buechner. Jack’s father desperately wants his son to know that the party hasn’t been, and won’t be, complete without him. He longs for Jack to show up in the only way it really matters–before God. Only here can he lay his burdens down. In the end, perhaps grace comes down to just this: showing up before God who meets you in prayer, who stands with you in all of life’s trials and joys, and who says:

You have been a miracle, something more than a miracle. . . If I only had the words to tell you.

Love is holy because it is like grace–the worthiness of its object is never really what matters.
― Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

The last two books I’ve read, Jack and Home, are novels written by American author, Marilynne Robinson. Both novels explore the role of grace, that life-giving presence that moves with and through us, in and out of the most sublime and the most terrible circumstances. And though the word “grace” may sound like such an elusive and ephemeral thing, a lovely wisp that is subject to whatever winds may carry it, Robinson reveals it to be more like a bulldog whose tenacious nose tracks down subjects whose worthiness is never really what matters.

In both novels, Robinson’s character, Jack Boughton, is a man in desperate and perpetual need of grace. He begins his life in Gilead, Iowa as a rebellious teen, then impregnates and abandons a young woman with their child who dies tragically as a toddler, and finally survives prison and the streets of St. Louis. Sometimes through a haze of alcohol and other times through the stark loneliness of sobriety, this is a man who ultimately meets and falls in love with a black English teacher in an age when interracial marriages are impossible. Della, the daughter of a Memphis preacher, sees through Jack’s self-deprecating humor, cynicism, and alcoholic lapses into his tender, searching soul. She is grace personified, God’s indiscriminate love and unwavering assurance in female form. But much as he’d like to—and certainly as much as he needs to—Jack can find no way to cross the chasm into the open hearts of those who reach out to him across the widening expanse of his shame. Nor can he find his way to God. For Jack, there is no balm in Gilead—or anywhere else for that matter.

The more I read, the more I became smitten with Jack, both as a complex character and as a fellow sinner. Is it really wise to say that you’re smitten with a sinner? I think so. At least In the sense that you find in this sinner a kindred soul, one whom you truly understand and with whom you empathize.  Long after I’d closed the book, I found myself planning the conversations I’d have with him and pondering how I might save him from himself when everyone else had failed. That should have been my first clue that I really understood little about grace. Oh, I had the prerequisite Christian head knowledge that allows me to talk the talk. But truly, the more I read and thought about Jack, the more I became convinced that I would be the last person who could ever save him. It would be like the blind leading the blind.

In her collected essays, The Givenness of Things, Marilynne Robinson devotes an entire essay to grace. In it, she suggests that prayer “opens on something purer and grander than mercy” and that the “residue of judgment makes mercy a lesser thing than grace.” Generally speaking, when we think of mercy, we often think of a pardon or a reprieve that comes after a judgment. Mercy operates in the realm of justice where transgressions and their consequences are the natural order of things. In this realm, you get what you deserve. Unless, of course, mercy blessedly interjects itself into the process.

Grace, however, has little to do with justice and everything to do with love. If there was a hierarchy of unmerited acts of generosity, grace would most certainly be at the top. It supercedes any consideration of the law, any causal relationships, any human explanation or expectation. Robinson writes that “[t]here is no justice in love . . . it is only the glimpse or parable of an incomprehensible reality . . . the eternal breaking in on the temporal.” Jack and I struggle with the notion of grace precisely because it is incomprehensible and divine. Though we both have lived much of our lives in the world of abstractions—words and ideas—we often lose ourselves in the mire of tangible, temporal earthly reality. We think in terms of faults. We labor over I-should-have-known-betters. We lay awake at night and count our sins, lining them up like canned goods on the shelves of our dirty souls. We play judge and jury as we try our many transgressions, and the verdict is always guilty. We are on a first-name basis with shame, who is our constant companion.

Perhaps most foolishly and tragically of all, we cling to the notion that it is our humility that prevents us from accepting the grace we don’t deserve. With such a keen awareness of our flawed natures, we humbly insist that we move aside while others deservedly step up to receive their grace.

      If Jack were a real person, I believe that he’d have a particular fondness for a scene in an older feature film, The Mission, starring Robert DeNiro and Jeremy Irons. Prior to this scene, Robert DeNiro’s character, a Portuguese slave trader has killed his brother whom he’s discovered with his lady love. Stricken with grief, he languishes in prison for months until Jeremy Irons, a Jesuit priest, visits and challenges him to accompany the priests to the mission that serves the very natives he’d previously sold into slavery. He agrees but only if he’s allowed to choose his own penance: to literally drag his former weapons and armor behind him for the entire trip. In one scene—the scene Jack would undoubtedly rewind and watch again–DeNiro loses his bundle of weapons and armor, and they slide down the mountain in the mud. He reattaches them and tries several times to climb the slippery slope, dragging the bundle behind him. Each time, he fails. Finally, a native pulls out a knife and cuts the rope attaching the bundle to DeNiro. His penance clatters down the mountain and disappears over the falls.

Jack would understand and empathize with DeNiro’s penance, for he, too, bundled his faults and dragged them over decades and miles. But he would marvel at DeNiro’s quick acceptance of the grace that freed him from a prior life of violence and greed. He would marvel but fail to see that it is just this simple acceptance that separates those who lug their penance around and those who have been freed.  

Grace works in a world where those in need seem to have Teflon souls which repel any act of unmerited love, protecting the emptiness inside them. In her book Gravity and Grace, French philosopher and writer Simone Weil writes:

All the natural movements of the soul are controlled by laws analogous to those of physical gravity. Grace is the only exception. Grace fills empty spaces, but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void. The imagination is continually at work filling up all the fissures through which grace might pass.

Those resisters-of-grace often have active imaginations which work diligently to fill up all the fissures through which grace might pass. The grace-shaped voids in their souls stay empty. They refuse to let grace be an exceptional act; they refuse to let it in. Instead, they set about the task of mixing more mortar for fissure repairs.

     As I learned more about Jack, I discovered how well-read he was, how articulate and charming. And polite, a man of impeccable manners. He was keenly aware of how far these attributes could take him—and where they could not. Like many of us, he grew to regard living as solitary, human work. Keep your nose clean, put it to the grindstone, sniff out temptation, and breathe as deeply as your circumstances will allow. In her book, Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith, author Anne Lamott writes about grace:

It is unearned love–the love that goes before, that greets us on the way. It’s the help you receive when you have no bright ideas left, when you are empty and desperate and have discovered that your best thinking and most charming charm have failed you. Grace is the light or electricity or juice or breeze that takes you from that isolated place and puts you with others who are as startled and embarrassed and eventually grateful as you are to be there.

Grace sweeps us out of our isolation into a communion of others who are just as startled and embarrassed and eventually grateful as we are to find a way out of the darkness and into the light.

Grace can only sweep us into the light, however, if we know the source of it. Sadly, in spite of having grown up in a God-centered home with a minister as father, Jack can’t honestly acknowledge God as the source of this light. He can quote scripture and theology, as well as play beautiful hymns on the piano, but he can’t find his way to faith.  There are moments where he stands just at the edge of the light. And then he retreats into the shadows of skepticism and shame.

     In the end, all this lugging around penance, tallying faults, armoring up, and hiding in the darkness is human folly, not God’s work. And God, Robinson argues, is so much bigger than all of this:

To think that only faultless people are worthwhile seems like an incredible exclusion of almost everything of deep value in the human saga. Sometimes I can’t believe the narrowness that has been attributed to God in terms of what he would approve and disapprove.

I confess that I’ve often attributed this kind of narrowness to God. I know better. Still, I find myself deciding what God would approve and disapprove of, forgive and not forgive in regards to my own soul. For others, I see God’s extravagant, unlimited grace. Even as I write this, I understand how utterly foolish this sounds. Foolish and arrogant. For if I believe that God wouldn’t offer grace to me, doesn’t this suggest that I see myself as somehow exceptional, set a part from my fellow mortals? Clearly, I’m not. Clearly, I’m a mere mortal, a sinner in need of grace.

The more Jack struggled with his past, with his unbelief, with his sin and pain, the more I wanted to reach into the novels and pull him out of all of it. Just take my hand, I’d say. But then, Jack would first have to acknowledge that there was a hand extended to him and then accept it. He would have to see that his worthiness doesn’t matter. He has no eyes to see this, though.

We live in a world that is increasingly marked by blame and shame, by accusations and quick judgment. I think it’s safe to say that, as a whole, we’re not very good at either offering or accepting grace. We’re too consumed by the worthiness (or unworthiness) of ourselves and our fellow humans. Too often, we regard the whole lot of humanity as just one big gene pool of faults, flaws, and failures. Our capacity for grace-giving and receiving is narrow, and so we assume that God’s, whose scrutiny is infinitely sharper than ours, is even narrower. Like Jack, we have no eyes to see the true nature and source of grace.   

All of us have failed. One wishes to be punished. One is willing to assume all kinds of penance, but do you know, my daughter, that in love — I scarcely dare say it — but in love our very mistakes don’t seem to be able to last long?
― Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey