Goodbye Graces

I've finally done it. I've accomplished a feat I thought would never happen: I finally finished One Thousand Gifts by Ann Voskamp.

Wait, what? you ask. You've been talking up this book for months now and you haven't even read it all the way through?

Guilty as charged. 

When I find a book I love, that speaks my soul language, I can't rush it. Ann's the kind of writer that keeps me occupied with one paragraph, one line even, for days, weeks. 

Her obsession with eucharisteo, with giving thanks, for choosing to see life as gift, will--I hope--keep me occupied for a lifetime. 

Ann writes, "the only thing to rip out the tape echoing of self-rejection is the song of His serenade. One thousand gifts tuned me to the beat."

I've felt it too. One Thousand Gifts has tuned me to the beat. The rhythm of love. The heartbeat of joy. The grace of gratitude. 

It's the antidote to my burnout at work, my dissatisfaction with my body, my stress and busyness and discontent. Even the act of giving thanks is a gift. 

I ended the book, tummy down on a picnic blanket overlooking a duck pond on a reading lunch date I pulled from my "Bucket bucket" which was inspired by Ann's commitment to counting gifts. 

These last two months before I move to Guatemala, leave my job, I am choosing to be present. Out of a bucket of uncertain tasks, I daily embark on challenges that promise certain joy. 

Here's my week of joy in pictures: 

Take a reading lunch break with Becky to the pond-- where I finished One Thousand Gifts.

Write notes to everyone (in the office that is).

Have a picnic on the grass.

Dress like a coworker day.

I found joy in quiet moments, in spending time with ducks--who doesn't love ducks?--, in slack lining and bocce ball tossing with coworkers, in Bananagrams and note writing. I end this week filled. And for that I am thankful. 

Where did you find joy this week?

T.S. Wednesday: The Meaning of Life

“Time past and time future

What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.”   T.S. Eliot, Burnt Norton, Four Quartets

Transitions are tough for me; I think they’re tough for everyone. I’ve spent the last months, nay year, deciding whether I should stay at my job, stay in the country. I’ve oscillated between living in the future, what could be, and the past, what has been and what could have been. Both the memories and the dreams sear vividly across my eyelids as I sleep to the world in front of me, the day before me, the moment that flits by.

My bathroom wall used to don a Lululemon poster that contained—along with myriad other inspirational quotes and phrases—the saying, “Living in the moment could be the meaning of life.”

Before I read Ann Voskamp’s One Thousand Gifts and before I immersed myself in Eliot, I would have chalked the phrase up to pop psychology and over-priced yoga pants propaganda. Not now.

As I contemplate Ann’s excursions into eucharisteo, or thankfulness, in every aspect of her life, I can see her journey to joy, to God, to meaning, is a pilgrimage to living in the moment. To naming the graces. Counting the gifts. Stacking the joy.

The journey to God is the quest to unlearn our clinging to the past. The challenge to relinquish a life lived solely in the future.

Naming gifts brings meaning as the moment is acknowledged, fully lived.

Eliot writes in his poem Burnt Norton,

“What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.”

I am tired of straining to hear the regretted footfalls thump-thumping against untaken paths. I grow weary of a world of speculation.

And so I will keep at this naming of gifts, this stacking of joy. I will scrawl in my notebook the thanks of the moment:

     * A time of extended merriment with friends old and new.

     *Soft mist blanketing, softening the valley as the miles dart by on quiet freeways.

     *The sharing of stories and journeys and pig cheeks' carbonara.

Another way I will orient myself to the present is by implementing a Bucket List for my last two months at my current job. Instead of withdrawing, disconnecting, and playing the Lame Duck Grant Writer, I will engage. I will create new challenges. I will try new lunch spots with my coworkers. I will write new blog posts. I will dance my butt off at our newly scheduled weekly Wii dance parties.

I will celebrate the past and I will dream for the future, all the while pointing to the present. 

***

Questions: Are you more apt to relive the past or spend your time dreaming and scheming for the future? What helps you live in the present, in the moment? Any suggestions for my work Bucket List?

What about evil?

In my pilgrimage from cynicism to faith, gratitude is my final frontier.

In case you’re new to this blog, I have one exhortation: read Ann Voskamp’s One Thousand Gifts.  This book is “a celebration of grace and a recognition of the power of gratitude”—in the most powerful and compelling language I have ever read. It is my current obsession (besides Hunger Games) and progression in my spiritual journey.

Photo credit: Ann Voskamp

Ann’s words have challenged my heart, but they’ve also challenged my mind. She’s addressed gratitude in the face of injustice, gratitude in the face of the mundane, and gratitude in the face of pain.

But today I ask, what about evil?

Ann writes that ALL IS GOOD. All is grace.

She says, “All God makes is good. Can it be that that which seems to oppose the will of God is actually used of Him to accomplish the will of God? That which seems evil only seems so because of perspective, the way the eyes see the shadows. Above the clouds, the light never stops shining.”

That doesn’t sit well with me.

She asks could it be, “that which feels like trouble, gravel in the mouth, is only that—feeling? What if faith says all is good…I think it. But do I really mean it?”

In my world, there are some things that don’t just feel evil; they are evil.

Death and war and rape and genocide and a million other forms of selfishness and injustice that pepper our world with pain. How are those moments grace, gifts?

I relate to Elie Wiesel, Jewish survivor of the Holocaust and Nobel Peace Prize winner, when he says,

“I feel like screaming, howling like a madman so that the world, the world of the murderers, might know it will never be forgiven.”

Sometimes I hear awful stories and I think I could scream for eternity and it wouldn’t be okay.

I think of catching and stopping warlord Joseph Kony. I think of the incredible victory that will be. But the tens of thousands of children who have been abducted and forced to murder, scream out to me that it will still not be okay. 

That it will never be okay.

But God is reconciling ALL THINGS?

I can’t mean it. I can’t.

Not yet. Or maybe not ever.

Photo credit: The Christian Science Monitor

I can see good and hope and love. I see things being made new everyday. As Gungor says, I know God makes beautiful things out of dust and out of us. But I can’t call it all beautiful—not in my macro-theology.

In my personal micro-theology I can believe it. I can name my own gifts, my graces. I can name my hurt and pain and walk the path to wholeness, to redemption, to beauty.

I can consent to each of us, on our own micro-level, acknowledging the gifts.

But I refuse to gift-wrap the world’s pain in glib statements of gratitude without the victims’ approval.  Like my bloggy friend Adrian Waller commented the other day, I refuse to say, “God causes bad things that are "really" for good.”

I refuse to say that it is okay that this world is so messed up.

I used to think that meant I couldn’t believe in God. Or that I didn’t believe in God.

I used to think I couldn’t be angry and grateful at the same time. That I couldn’t be angry and faithful.

But the other thing I learned from Elie Weisel is that you can.

In fact, I can be angry with God precisely because of my faith in Him.

Elie writes, “I have never renounced my faith in God. I have risen against His justice, protested His silence and sometimes His absence, but my anger rises up within faith and not outside it.”

And so today—from within faith—I wrestle. I protest a world with warlords like Joseph Kony and hot topic issues such as sex trafficking and child soldiers.  I protest the poverty I have seen in the city dumps of Nicaragua and Guatemala and in my own neighborhood in San Diego. I protest the less sexy atrocities of lack of access to land and food and crops that I encounter every day at my work. For a few minutes, I let my growing fears that I’m a Capitol dweller in the circus of the 21^st century Hunger Games consume me, and I—in the same breath—I ask,

“Where are you, God?”and “Please rain down your GRACE.”  

Amen. 

***


Can you relate to this tension between anger and gratitude?  Do you think it's possible to be angry at God and remain faithful? I'd love to hear your thoughts!