I didn’t write this, but I wish I had.
All up and down my street I can smell stuffing and spices. It’s quiet outside, and very still. There’s little traffic today. The air is warm but autumnal. This little warmth is a grace note between one measure and the next. Winter hasn’t come yet, but it’s on its way. This is the last of the harvest time. A time to let ourselves be filled and renewed.
Grace.
What an odd thing.
We speak of “saying grace,” of being “full of grace.” Dancers have it, poor losers don’t. It can be both mercy and charm. To be full of grace can mean to have the indulgence of God, to be sanctified and elevated through some mysterious and luminous inner quality. It can also mean simple thoughtfulness. It is the wedding of mercy and wisdom. It is care. We practice it when we are charitable to others. We experience it in our lives in moments of clarity and understanding; when a kindness is done to us undeservingly, or when, after an undeserved ill turn, we find acceptance after all. Forgiveness? Surely that.
All I have sought this year is grace. The grace to accept change and responsibility. The grace to let things pass from me that need to pass, let things die when it is time for them to die. Where I have done wrong, and I have done it, I have prayed for the grace to make amends, but I am not graceful. I have prayed for the deeper grace of understanding, and been answered with more questions than I know how to ask. I have harrowed the dead soil of my heart with only the good graces of others to sustain me.
In the end, it is not something I can hold, but only something that comes to me, passes through me, a state of existence. I have dug deeply into myself, given of myself, hoping to find it, and found that it isn’t something I can keep by holding it. Only by giving it away.
If we reap what we sow, I have sowed better seed than I believed I possessed, for I’ve reaped the rewards of better friendship than I deserve. My friends, my family, they are whatever grace I possess, and I am sorry I don’t often have the words to say it with all the grace it deserves.
But I am grateful for it.
For all of you, I wish comfort. To those returning to family, and to those separated from it. To those who will be gathering in, and to those who have nowhere to gather.
For everyone nursing new lives, new projects, new loves through the shadowy part of the year, I wish banked hearth-fires and tight bonds. Cherishing what we have doesn’t make it last one whit longer, but awareness of it is a rare gift. That’s grace, too. Allow it.
For those mourning loss, separation, or absence, I wish you comfort and peace. That which dies feeds new life. We cannot pass through such holocausts unchanged, but we can trust that the raw and burnt bones of our inner landscape will, someday, be clothed once again in new green. One of the mysteries of grace is that it is true regeneration.
A few of you have, over the past year or two, become more dear to me than my own hands, or the work of my hands, and when it comes to saying it I’m as dumb as any beast in the field. But I’m saying it now. Thank you. I have so little to give back, so little to weigh against so much gratitude and hope. So little to give back in return for what you give me.
Even to those of you I don’t know: you are the reason I speak into the dark. This is the only way I will ever meet so many of you, but I am glad to have found you here.
When I think about it, it’s profound. This is all the time you will ever have, and yet you choose to spend a little of it with me.
A well-known fact of grace is that at times it comes even to the undeserving. Thank you for that.
