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Here is where I found my voice and chose to be brave.

Here’s a place where I forgave someone, against my better judgment, and

I survived that, and unexpectedly, amazingly, I became wiser.

Here’s where I was once forgiven, was ready for once in my life to receive forgiveness and to be transformed. And I survived that also. I lived to tell the tale.

This is the place where I said no, more loudly than I’d thought I ever could, and everybody stared, but I said no loudly anyway, because I knew it must be said, and those staring settled down into harmless, ineffective grumbling, and over me they had no power anymore.

Here’s a time, and here’s another, when I laid down my fear and walked right on into it, right up to my neck into that roiling water.

Here’s where cruelty taught me something. Here’s where I was first astonished by gratuitous compassion and knew it for the miracle it was, the requirement it is. It was a trembling time.

And here, much later, is where I returned the blessing, clumsily. It wasn’t hard, but I was unaccustomed. It cycled round, and as best I could I sent it back on out, passed the gift along. This circular motion, around and around, has no apparent end.

Here’s a place, a murky puddle, where I have stumbled more than once and fallen. I don’t know yet what to learn there.

On this site I was outraged and the rage sustains me still; it clarifies my seeing.

And here’s where something caught me—a warm breeze in late winter, birdsong in late summer.

Here’s where I was told that something was wrong with my eyes, that I see the world strangely, and here’s where I said, “Yes, I know, I walk in beauty.”

Here is where I began to look with my own eyes and listen with my ears and sing my own song, shaky as it is.

Here is where, as if by surgeon’s knife, my heart was opened up—and here, and here, and here, and here.

These are the landmarks of conversion.

From Victoria Safford’s book Walking Toward Morning, published by Skinner House Books in 2003, and available through the UUA bookstore.

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Rev. Victoria Safford

Lead Minister at White Bear UU Church, Mahtomedi, MN

The Reverend Victoria Safford was called to White Bear Unitarian Universalist Church in 1999, following a ten-year ministry at Northampton, Massachusetts, where she was ordained, and four years as a community organizer with the American Friends Service Committee.A native of New York State, she is a graduate of Vassar College and Yale Divinity School.She is the author of Walking Toward Morning and With and Without Candlelight, both from Skinner House Books, and her essays have been anthologized in many collections. She lives in Mahtomedi, Minnesota with her partner, Ross.

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