Jordan, it seems, is always thinking of me and ways to make me smile.  I have been perusing books of Wendell Berry's poems from time to time, but haven't yet bought one despite my love of his work.  This week, when I stopped by to pick Jordan up from the coffee shop and shuttle him directly to the Boys and Girls Club, he handed me Berry's collection of poems entitled Given.

Here is an excerpt of Part III: Sabbaths VI

By expenditure of hope,
Intelligence, and work,
You think you have it fixed.
It is unfixed by rule.
Within the darkness, all
Is being changed, and you
Also will be changed.

...

But won't you be ashamed
To count the passing year
At its mear cost, your debt
Inevitably paid?

For every year is costly,
As you know well.  Nothing
Is given that is not
Taken, and nothing taken
That was not first a gift.

The gift is balanced by
Its total loss, and yet,
And yet the light breaks in,
Heaven seizing its moments
That are at once its own
And yours.  The day ends
And is unending where 
The summer tanager,
Warbler, and vireo
Sing as they move among
Illuminated leaves.

 It has only been in the last few years that I have begun to understand the cost of time, of a year.  As Berry says, "Nothing is given that is not taken, and nothing taken that was not first a gift."  The delight of receiving a gift of grace inevitably becomes the ache of loss.  I swing dramatically back and forth between a posture of indifference and terror as I engage with the things and the people I have been given.  Indifference because I forget their value and their finite nature; terror because, when I realize these things, I find myself desperately grasping for control.  Less frequently, I assume a posture of awe-struck gratitude.  Those are my best days.  Rather, my best moments.  I find that position to be difficult to maintain; it pinches and stretches parts of me that I would prefer to leave alone.

But today, in this year, I am inexplicably grateful.  (And, it should be said, rather uncomfortable.)  We celebrate a year since my mother's radical mastectomy, a surgery that frightened us all, but left her without cancer.  It was this day a year ago that I sat, waiting, wondering.  What was happening?  What would happen?  What would they find?  Why is the phone not ringing, it has been an hour longer than they told us to expect...  It was this day a year ago that my dad sat with me in the waiting room, only leaving long enough to make his way to the gift shop to buy my mom an anniversary gift, a stuffed animal to keep with her when we all had to go home that night.  Today, we also celebrate a 42nd year of married life for my parents.  Today is a precious, precious gift from a merciful and loving Creator. 

We cannot hold on to anything for long.  It is all passing, here one moment and gone the next.  We hold on to things and people, and they pass through our hands.  But this is where I disagree with Berry.  I do not believe that the gift is balanced by total loss.  I believe that the gift, although taken, continues to give strength and comfort.  Loss, I, perhaps naively, hope, is tipped by the gift on the scale.  

I am learning, although slowly, that I must practice a posture of awe-struck gratitude.  This, as with so much in life, is a discipline.  A difficult and sometimes painful discipline.  Yet, I believe that it is one that leads us to see more clearly "Heaven seizing its moments...at once its own and yours."

"...And yet the light breaks in...the day ends and is unending..."

In his memoir, Jesus, My Father, the CIA, and Me, Ian Morgan Cron describes a brief moment of grace following a terrifying and scaring encounter with a bully.  He is in the woods surrounding his neighborhood.  The bully and his accomplices have left him.  He is humiliated, shocked, and utterly alone.  Cron recalls,

...I felt vacant and half-alive.  

To my right I heard the sudden crack of a twig...It was a fawn.  He was a tan smudge, thirty feet away, unaware of me...I lay frozen, watching him, for so long that my right leg fell asleep.  Eventually the pain of it became unbearable.  Little by little, I shifted my weight to get my right ankle out from under my left thigh, but the crack of a dry twig snapping under my bony butt sounded the alarm.  The fawn's tail shot up, revealing its white underside.  He crouched down and froze; his legs trembled, poised to flee.  ...He didn't run.  He looked at me, and gradually the fear that passed back and forth in our gazes dissolved.  The fawn's legs soon relaxed and straightened, and I lay down on my side with my head propped up on my hand.  After a long while of looking at each other, our eyes registered agreement.  We belonged here and to each other.  

The fawn sneezed, its head jerking downward.  I blinked and he was gone.

How do we explain these fugitive graces?

This story, and this question, surfaced during a conversation Jordan and I had this week.  We were talking about life, the big picture, and God's intentions for our levels of happiness or misery.  I thought of a couple my mother-in-law knows who are living in a place that they might deem "miserable," but stay because they know that they are called to do so.  I thought of my father whose constant companion during the last thirty years has been Parkinson's disease.  I thought of the thousands, likely millions, of children taken captive each year and used for sex, hard labor, and other unimaginable things.  I thought of Ian Morgan Cron, who faced not only a bully on this day, but an alcoholic father every day.

I thought of the "fugitive graces" with which the suffering are showered.  Like drops of dew, they nourish and revive us for the day ahead.  I cannot explain our suffering;  I do not know why pain and loss and disappointment and despair swarm, seemingly unchecked, in the midst of humanity.  Yet, these fugitive graces flicker before us, like light dancing on the wall, a fleeting glimpse of a Beauty beyond, a Grace everlasting.  How can we explain them?

I am realizing that these graces are not few and far between as we might think, but are countless and constant.  A man arrives at a wedding in a wheelchair.  A friend pushes him from one place to the next.  Yet, when the music starts, he can't help but tap his feet.  The friend brings him a walker, and the man journeys to the dance floor where he dances and laughs and laughs.  I saw this only the other day.

A woman is eating in a restaurant.  She sees a young woman who reminds her of her daughter.  The girl is with a boy.  The woman watches them sharing dessert as they watch hockey.  When her server comes to her, she whispers that she would like to pay the young couple's tab.  She leaves.  Moments later, the boy and the girl ask for the check and are told that it has been taken care of by a woman who thought that they were "the cutest couple."  Little did the women know the beauty of her act.  I received this humble and unassuming hospitality last night.

The flower blooms.  The grass tickles.  The sun shines.  The rain pours.  The child laughs.

"How do we explain these fugitive graces?"

I do not know.  But I am ever so grateful.