Grace Note

Hi! I haven't haunted this blog in a while. To say I've been buried is an understatement. I need to finish my dissertation by May 20, so all my time goes to that or teaching or the job search. Oh, and growing that baby..who is doing well, but more on that later. But I'm getting to the point where I'm dying for a creative outlet, so I'm still going to to try to post a few things here and there in the next week or so.

Throughout Lent, my church, which regularly holds Wednesday night service during the season, is doing a series called Grace Notes, in which members share portions of their faith stories. Since I'm on the committment that came up with this idea, I talked myself into being one of the people who shares their stories. Although I had little time, I am ultimately glad I did it and was happy with the result. I'm posting it below since many of your followed me on this journey. There still might be errors in it, so I apologize. I'm not a good proofreader when I'm get worn thin.

I come from a tradition in which you give up things for Lent. And despite instructions from the pulpit that perhaps we might consider doing something instead of giving up something, it did not stop the phrase you would hear over and over on the parochial school playground around Ash Wednesday – “What are you giving up?” And the thing about playgrounds is that you better have an answer to such questions. So I would spit out typical Lenten sacrifices like giving up chocolate or soda or other sugary snacks just to make sure that I met the approval of my classmates. After about 18 years of such split second decisions, I started giving up giving up things for Lent. I was tired of it, I usually failed, and it was no longer a meaningful spiritual practice for me.


Yet this didn’t stop me from thinking about Lenten promises every spring. Usually I thought of the “perfect Lenten promise” around week three of Lent - the kind of promise that would be challenging but meaningful and one that might have lasting effects. But then I would think, “Eh, Lent’s almost over. Why bother?”

True to form, I thought of another one of these perfect resolutions on a walk last spring. What if I made myself notice one beautiful thing every day? More specifically, what if I sought out a moment of beauty in a place where I might least expect to find it? I was (and still am) in the midst of writing my dissertation. My project looks at the ways Shakespeare is being used to address issues of social justice and build new communities. I was spending my time researching prisons, post-Apartheid South Africa, and issues of gender and class inequality. I was thinking a lot about how literature and the arts might give us a different perspective on the things that are "broken" or "ugly" in the world. I wanted to seek out beauty in those stories we might consider tragic, unjust, or even mundane, and by doing so, change the narrative. And if I was doing this in my work, why wasn’t I doing it in my day-to-day life? On that spring walk, I realized that I wasn’t acknowledging the beauty in my own life. I've always been a worrier, and a lifetime of fretting has made me more skeptical than appreciative of most things. So what if I started looking for beauty each day? Could I start training my brain to look for incredible gifts that surround us daily? Could I make a habit of noticing the good things? And for once, I didn’t say, “Eh, Lent is almost over.” I said, “I am going to do this,” and I believe the Holy Spirit was at work in that decision And moreover, I decided to blog about this little project, noting the unexpected beauty I found each day, for 30 days.

Locating unexpected beauty in my daily life turned out to be easier than I thought. Scrolling through my blog entries from last spring, it is lovely to remember all the blessings I discovered: an hour unexpectedly spent at the public library, a recommendation letter a former student wrote for me, finding a scarf I had given up for lost, a random act of kindness by janitor in the English-Philosophy Building, and stolen moments with my husband and dog. At the end of those 30 days, I was changed. My eyes were opened to the beauty that surrounded me. I didn’t want it to stop, so I continued to write about unexpected beauty regularly on my blog. Yes, noticing beauty can become a habit. In fact, noticing unexpected beauty became an integral part of who I am.

Yet I stopped writing about unexpected beauty in the fall. I had a rough fall. Here’s the Cliff’s Notes version – I applied for over 40 jobs across the country without any results, my academic advisor suddenly lost a very long battle with cancer, and - and this is a big “and” - I lost two pregnancies in three months. I knew miscarriage was hard, but it is difficult to understand the isolation, grief, and confusion that comes with losing two people you loved so deeply but whom you never met. At times, it all felt like too much, and I didn’t know how I was going to keep going. I thought of Job a lot. I thought of Dante’s progression through Hell a lot. I cried a lot. I got angry from time to time. I told my counselor that I wanted to check myself into a hospital, but not because I was at risk of harming myself. I just wanted to go someplace where I could sit and be sad for a while and not have to keep moving through this broken, miserable reality that was apparently my new normal.

I never checked myself into any sort of hospital. I kept moving through my life. I kept writing my dissertation. I kept applying for jobs. I kept all my doctors’ appointments. I spent time with friends and my husband. And I kept noticing beauty, even in this, the most unexpected of places. My blog entries about beauty came to a screeching halt on August 29th, yes, but my ability to notice beauty in unexpected places did not. In the midst of one of the hardest seasons of my life, I found a lot of beautiful things. The friends who rallied around me and Ben with food, patient ears, prayers, and indescribable love, the tree our neighbor left in our driveway one weekend that we planted as a memorial to our children, and the way our marriage deepened and grew as we addressed those challenges that threaten to tear us apart. I truly believed that my impromptu Lenten promise has saved me, time and time again, over the past seven months. My brain was used to seeking out the beautiful, and it refuse to stop simply because my life was not going according to plan. My heart refused to stop being grateful, even when it seemed all hope seemed lost.

And this, to me, is grace. In her Vocabulary of Faith, Kathleen Norris looks to the story of Jacob’s dream of angels on the stairway to heaven as she tries to define grace. Jacob has just deceived his father and cheated his brother, yet he God grants him this blessing. He awakes from the dream, exclaiming, “Surely the Lord is in this place – and I did not know it!” Norris writes, “Even when we try to run away from our troubles, as Jacob did, God will find us, and blesses us, even when we feel most alone, unsure if we will survive the night. God will find a way to let us know that he is with us in this place, wherever we are, however far we think we’ve run.” So even in our darkest hour, God will find us. And my plan to lock myself up in a hospital so as to shut away life when it seemed awash in troubles? It would have never worked. As the Psalmist writes in Psalm 139:

Where can I go from your Spirit?
Where can I flee from your presence?
If I go up to the heavens, you are there;
if I make my bed in the depths, you are there.
If I rise on the wings of the dawn,
if I settle on the far side of the sea,
even there your hand will guide me,
your right hand will hold me fast.
If I say, “Surely the darkness will hide me
and the light become night around me,”
even the darkness will not be dark to you;
the night will shine like the day,
for darkness is as light to you.

God’s light is everywhere - in prisons, in countries torn apart, in cities and villages ravaged by natural disaster, in the injustices of our society, in the struggles of our marriages and families, in illness, in a recessed economy, in grief. Everywhere. But it is our job to see His light, to recognize it for the gift it is, and to celebrate it. Songwriter Sara Groves says that grace is “an invitation to be beautiful.” I love the activeness of this definition. We are given God’s gifts, but they are merely an invitation. It is up to us to honor those gifts, and it is within our capability to add to beauty that He surrounds us with. But the starting point is recognizing it all, and I am grateful for the Lenten promise that taught me this lesson.

At the start of this Lenten season, we had one of those really, lovely 60 degree spring days. So I went outside in order to complete the very unlovely task of cleaning up after our dog. But as I wandered around the yard, I saw that the blubs I had planted last fall were starting to push shoots of green leaves through the dirt. I noticed miniscule buds forming on our babies’ Red Maple. I reflected on our newest baby’s strong, steady, reassuring heartbeat that I had just heard at my 16 week check up. I marveled at all this new life. What a miracle that all this life that had been stirring around us when we were still entrenched in grief and anxiety during the winter months. Surely, God had been in this place, too, even if we had not known it.