Grace

“All-Surrounding Grace”

    Denise Levertov

As swimmers dare
to lie face to the sky
and water bears them,
as hawks rest upon air
and air sustains them,
so would I learn to attain
freefall, and float
into Creator Spirit’s deep embrace,
knowing no effort earns
that all-surrounding grace.

I get daily emails from way too many places. And I never remove myself from the lists, I’m not sure why. Instead I hit delete. Maybe I like all the email. Maybe I like to feel like I am that important? Who knows.  Maybe I’m just lazy. That is more likely the case.

I get emails from Chris Carmichael about cycling, from active about running, cycling and triathlon, from the Kabbalists with spiritual messages, from the astrologers telling me about what will happen to a hapless libra today, from monster, indeed, careerbuilder and others making sure I know about new jobs, from national geographic because i like the pictures and the list goes on. You now get a sense of just how many topics this blog could end up covering…. And why I need to organize it!  By April i should have it figured out.

The above poem came in an email from the Inward/Outward  project - a project of the Church of the Saviour in DC. Am I a Christian? Probably no more than I am a Kabbalist or a Buddhist or anything else. I seem to find messages in many faiths that speak to me in time of need. I think I’d like to be a Christian, I’d like to believe. It’s like the poster my good friend has hanging in her office; It’s black and which with space ships and reads “I want to believe.”

I went through a period in my life where I was searching (okay, fine maybe that never ended!) – I was at work one day when a coworker who would later become one of those friends who does not last because the interaction just never comes naturally- when the coworker told me she was okay with having been passed over for a position.

“Why?” I asked

“Because I’m Christian.” she said.

“I’m confused. How does that make it okay?”

“Because it’s God’s plan”

“So you believe everything is predetermined. That we are pawns of fate – or God?”

“No.”

And the conversation ended. There was a crisis at work and my answers remained out the darkened windows somewhere floating in the heavens so to speak.

So she invited me to church with her and when I went the sermon was about Grace. The message of Grace as I understood it that day spoke to me. It was about how all we had to do was this simple thing. Believe and have faith and we no longer had to try try try try try so hard to be good enough to be loved, to be forgiven. It started from the premise that we were all exactly as we were supposed to be but also flawed and that we had to be forgiven – but that there was nothing we could do to be good enough to be forgiven – we already were good enough, we just had to believe.

I’m not sure if that makes any sense, but to a girl who grew up alone much of the time trying to figure out how to be good enough to be loved or what she’d done wrong that her parents or others didn’t seem to – this message was a huge relief.

So i wanted to believe and I still do. I still like the message.

Ah faith. I admire the faithful.