Everyday Grace

I have a reading, a an excerpt of a poem to share with you first this morning, and so I invite you to settle in, maybe close your eyes and open your ears and imagination.

You Can’t Have it All by Barbara Ras

But you can have the fig tree and its fat leaves like clown hands gloved with green.

You can have the touch of a single eleven-year-old finger on your cheek, waking you at one a.m. to say the hamster is back.

You can have the purr of the cat and the soulful look of the black dog, the look that says, If I could I would bite every sorrow until it fled,

And when it is August, you can have it August and abundantly so.

You can have love, though often it will be mysterious, like the white foam that bubbles up at the top of the bean pot over the red kidneys…

You can speak a foreign language, sometimes, and it can mean something….

And you can be… [grateful for makeup, the way it kisses your face, half spice, half amnesia,] grateful for Mozart, his many notes racing one another towards joy,

For towels sucking up the drops on your clean skin, and for deeper thirsts, for passion fruit, for saliva. …

You can have your grandfather sitting on the side of your bed, at least for a while, and you can have clouds and letters, the leaping of distances, and Indian food with yellow sauce like sunrise.

You can’t count on grace to pick you out of a crowd but here is your friend to teach you how to high jump, how to throw yourself over the bar, backwards, until you learn about love, about sweet surrender….

And when adulthood fails you, you can still summon the memory of the black swan on the pond of your childhood, the rye bread with peanut butter and bananas your grandmother gave you while the rest of the family slept.

There is the voice you can still summon at will, like your mother’s, it will always whisper, you can’t have it all, but there is this.

Once a week I have a lesson in grace.  I walk a couple blocks down the street from my house to the public school in my neighborhood in Oakland.  I enter through the big red doors, say hello to the security guard and find the third grade boy I’ve been meeting with since last January.  We only spend about 90 minutes together, mostly doing homework, reading, and playing some too.  But since September we begin each time together in the same way:  we reflect on 3 good things in our life and write them down in a gratitude journal.  Now, at first I was a little hesitant to engage in this practice with him.  Here is a kid who doesn’t have a lot of material wealth, who doesn’t have what many would call an intact family, I hear snippets of economic and emotional hardships at home through his 9 year old eyes — and I’m going to make him tell me what he is grateful for every week?  Isn’t that a little presumptuous of me?

And indeed, at first, it was a little awkward.  It took him a little while to think of things, to get what we were doing.

But now that we’ve done it a few times, he completely gets it, and he comes ready!  He reminds me how we start, and we pull out our journals and we both write and then share with each other.  It’s like he’s been thinking all week—what will I write in my journal?  He’s been noticing the good things as he goes about his days.

Truth be told, it took me a while to get what we were doing, too.  How often do we sit down with each other and simply name what gifts there are in our life?

This is a child who certainly does not have it all.  In fact, in a more just world he would have much more than he does, and yet he has an incredible capacity to notice and be grateful for the gifts of life.  Like the poet Barbara Ras, he notices the everyday and mundane, alongside the spectacular and amazing.  He is grateful for things like having ice cream, getting to help his friend fix his bike, going to visit his mom and spending the night, dressing up like a vampire for Halloween,  He is still grateful for getting to go to Chuck E Cheese’s for his birthday last year.

Can a visit to Chuck E Cheese’s be a sign of grace?  Well, yes, for some people I think it might be.  UU minister Rev. Lynn Ungar calls grace “a promise of life and its fulfillment.”  For this particular young boy, a singular visit to Chuck E Cheese’s might just be that—a sign that perhaps life might be even more than he had imagined.

I wonder if noticing these moments and writing them down might change his life. Maybe, but  I do know that witnessing his gratitude and sharing my own has changed me.  It has been a weekly reminder to focus on and appreciate the simple gifts that arrive.

We live in a dominant culture of capitalism, consumerism, and competition that constantly tells us that we need more, we need to be different, we need the latest updated version, we need to be able to do it all.  It constantly tells us that who we are and what we have are not enough.

As a new parent I am now very much more aware of how often this message gets directed at parents and children.  Who knew there were so many absolutely essential items that I would need to take care of a being that weighed less than 10 pounds?  Who knew that I would need not one but several very detailed and conflicting reference books to teach me the right way to parent?   Who knew that a four-month-old would receive samples of special baby shampoo in the mail?

And we Unitarian Universalists are not immune to this American culture that pressures us to have-it-all.  In fact, there’s quite a strong streak of it in our Unitarian history.  It’s that 19^th century Unitarian cry that James Freeman Clark endorsed of “the progress of Mankind onward and upward forever.”  A sense that there is always something better out there, some way to improve yourself, some way to be or do more.

Now, to be fair, when confronted with a Calvinist theology that says all humans are depraved and sinful at the core, a belief in the ability of human progress sounds pretty good.  Those 19^th century Unitarians helped us to reaffirm that each one of us, each one of us has the potential for growth and transformation.

But the problem with more, more, more and onward & upward forever is that we sometimes forget that we are simply human beings living on this planet earth.  When we are compelled to always reach ahead, do better that we did before, to progress, we often miss what is already good and is right in front of us.   We miss the grace, the gift of the life we have right now. And when we miss it, when we don’t see it, it becomes diminished, we are much more likely to abuse it.

If grace is the promise of life and its fulfillment then it comes perhaps never so clear as through our children.  My daughter Johanna is now almost 5 months old.  On a daily basis I am awed by her presence in the world, let alone in my life.  That she is here is amazing.  That she is part of my family is grace.

When I am so consumed by having the right products and the correct parenting strategy, I miss what her breathing sounds like.  When I’m trying to do it all, to get to everything on my To-Do list, I miss the feel of her warm head on my chest.  UU ethicist Sharon Welch says “grace is all there is or need be of the divine.”

If I miss these things, I miss what there is of God.

As many of you already know Johanna came to us through adoption, after a fairly long wait.  And let me tell you many very well-meaning people said to us at times, “you both are great people, you are going to be such great parents, you’ll definitely have a child soon.”

As if adding to our family was something that we could ultimately control by whether or not we were good people.

As if the gift of life were something dependent on our behavior.

I am so very clear now that her creation and her coming to live with us was not dependent on anything that I did or did not do.

No, She came to us from somewhere else--- Isn’t that the way it is even for our biological children?  There is an element of mystery.  The life itself, we didn’t create the life.  It’s a gift given.  We simply are caretakers,  responders to this gift.

A Christian pastor friend of mine shared an image she holds for what Grace is…  she says it’s like a rain that is falling down all the time, on everyone. It doesn’t choose any of us out of the crowd.

This is a Universalist vision of a love that does not exclude anyone.  It’s there whether we know it or not.  It comes no matter what we do.

But then she says, we have a choice.  Our choice is in how we respond.  We each are a cup, a vessel, and we can either keep ourselves turned upside down, so the rain hits us and simply rolls right off, or we might open up, turn the cup over, and catch some of that rain, that love, that grace.

We can become grace catchers, conduits for love in the world.

Make Channels for the Streams of Love Where they may broadly run, and love has overflowing streams to fill them every one.

That hymn we just sang is based on a text from the Hebrew Bible, in 2 Kings (4:1-7).  It’s a story of a widow and the prophet Elisha. The widow is in debt, and a creditor has come to take away her two children as slaves for payment.  She has nothing at all in her house but a jar of oil. Elisha directs her to go borrow empty vessels from all her neighbors; to bring them back to her house with her children, and begin pouring her one small jar of oil into the empty vessels.  Her neighbors kept bringing more and more empty jars to her, and amazingly her one small jar of oil kept filling them all.    She was able to sell the jars of oil and pay off her debts, saving her children from slavery.

The woman did not create the oil, but in the context of a community that opened itself up, that offered itself up, providing vessels for love, the oil expanded and multiplied.

We don’t have to do anything to create grace.  But we are called to receive it and to carry it forward.  Making channels for the streams of love to flow ever wider.

Engaging in a gratitude practice with my third grade friend is helping me to turn my cup over and catch more of the streams of love raining down in my life.  Being able to literally hold a gift of new life in the form of my daughter helps too.  They are every day reminders of the love

I am not arguing that we each should just be happy and content with whatever we are dealt in life;  My third grade friend has less, I have more, but we each have things to be grateful for, and isn’t that nice?

I am not saying we should just look for the good things, in a kind of blind optimism, and ignore the fact that the world around us is full of the unfair, the outrageously  immoral, the sickening, and the sad.

It matters to notice and name the grace because it affirms that we humans are not ultimately in control, but part of a broader interdependent web of life. We can’t have it all, but everyday we have our life.  In fact, it is by noticing what an incredible gift life is, miraculous really, like the jars of oil ever filling… it is by noticing and receiving this gift that we can become carriers of life and love to others.  This love and gratitude can fuel our work for justice and equality, rooted in an affirmation of the goodness of life right here, right now.

In the midst of war and poverty and  greed, when we see leaders failing to protect the common good, placing profits over people, hurting our children, and diminishing our possible future--  in the midst of all of this, receiving and affirming life’s grace anyway helps us to stay rooted to this earth, connected to the bright eyes of children, opening ourselves to those in our community.

Grace calls us to work for a world where we all have enough, where children are safe, where life can flourish.   Responding to life’s grace in our everyday lives may help us to find the courage we need to stand up for love and justice, to stand on the side of love.

When you need a reminder of life’s grace, hold a child, go ask a third grader what they are grateful for, notice the strange beauty of a fig tree, find a friend to teach you how to high jump, to surrender and fall in love.  When you need a reminder, come into a community that opens itself to love, that stands on the side of love.

When you need a reminder, summon that voice that says, “You can’t have it all, but there is this.”

I invite you to do that right now.  Close your eyes if you want.  Can you say it with me?  I can’t have it all, but there is this.

A few moments of silence to reflect-- What is the grace you have received today?  How will you carry it?

We can’t have it all, but there is this.

Amen.

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