From Your Minister
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In “The Lanyard,” one of my favorite poems by Billy Collins, he describes making a plastic lanyard to give his mother. He details all of the gifts she has given him—the breath of life itself, flesh, bones, meals, a home, while he describes the clunky red and white plastic lanyard that he made at camp to give to her. He finishes the poem by saying that, as a boy, he was sure that the lanyard “would be enough to make us even.” Watch Collins read this piece.
The poem makes us laugh. And it shows, using one concrete example, just how completely the decks are stacked against us when it comes to giving back or doing “enough” to thank the universe for all that we are given. What could possibly suffice as adequate exchange for mountains, oceans, sunsets, the Northern lights? Or, for that matter, the almost unbearable sweetness of just one puppy or one human baby?
We have done nothing to deserve these gifts, and there is nothing we can do to earn them. I think of receiving unearned blessings as one way to describe grace. And the only whole-hearted response to such blessings is infinite gratitude. Whether our lives are blissful or miserable right now, support is coming to us from places we don’t even know about.
One year I engaged in a Buddhist meditation practice in which, every evening, I considered who and what had sustained me that day, and jotted down notes about it.
For instance, I might think about my child’s school. There were the teachers. There were the universities that trained the teachers, with all of their aspects. There were the families and communities that sustained the school, with all of their aspects. There were the taxpayers who sustained the school financially. There were elected officials who made choices about how to pay attention to the needs of children. There were the people who took care of the building, who built the school, and who made the materials to build the school. There were the children themselves. And on and on and on.
Digging into any of these aspects of just one elementary school could elicit a full page of writing, and I would barely have scratched the surface. And that school, of course, was just one part of my complicated life! My daily support comes from an infinite number of places.
I engaged in that meditation practice during “That Awful Year” for us, schoolwise. Most kids have one—the year they look back on throughout their lives as The Worst. I turned to this particular practice to sustain me during that time because I could feel myself getting bitter and closed-hearted. Meditating on all that sustained me made me see that, no matter how negative the daily experience might be, it was still impossible to name, much less write down, all of the sustenance and support which came to me every day.
Now, clearly, some of us are given much more daily support than others; we have privileges conferred on us that others do not. These should never be confused with grace. But, in fact, they often are. It is my experience that in the areas where I have more privilege, I am likely to begin to believe that I have earned, and actually deserve, all that is given to me. I begin to believe that the lanyards I’ve made entitle me to not just view the mountains and oceans, but to put a wall around them and claim them as my own.
But no one who has truly experienced even a moment of pure grace would believe that walling it off from others is possible or desirable. In fact, to do so is to make it abundantly clear that what you’ve experienced is not grace. Grace by its very nature cannot be owned. Trying to own it is the surest possible way to lose it.
In Toni Morrison’s book Beloved, a slave woman who has suffered one of the most horrific lives which human beings can confer on each other tells her community that “the only grace they could have was the grace they could imagine.” That if they could not see it, they would not have it. Morrison continues:
“Here, in this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard. Yonder they do not love your flesh. They despise it. No more do they love the skin on your back. Yonder they flay it. And O my people they do not love your hands. Those they only use, tie, bind, chop off and leave empty. Love your hands! Love them. Raise them up and kiss them. Touch others with them, pat them together, stroke them on your face ’cause they don’t love that either. You got to love it, you!”
We can’t earn a state of grace, and nothing we can do will reliably cause us to experience it. We can’t own it. No lanyard or anything else we create will be enough to make us even. But “You got to love it, you!” is good advice for all of us who seek to know grace. Whatever our circumstances today, there is grace to be remembered, grace to be imagined and grace to be received.
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