Offering: July 1, 2023

The thick history of grace

Image description: A hand is holding a Tarot card, Nine of Pentacles by Pamela Colman Smith. It is an image of beauty, richness and earned grace. A person is dressed in a luxurious gold and crimson gown in a vineyard full of ripe grapes with pentacles all around. She has a bird on her hand and the sky is golden.

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To listen to me read this Offering aloud, click here.

This month marks two years that I’ve been doing the weekly Offerings. I rarely look back on past writing. I’m similar to my mom in this way, who is a compulsive snail mailer and artist. She spends hours every week making elaborate paper objects which she sends out in every direction. Knowing she’ll never see what she’s made again, and being good with it.

The last years for me have been a time of such flourishing. The way it happened was—as many of you know—I’d been living in California and longing to go home, so I bought a twenty-year-old pickup truck and drove three thousand miles with a shaky heart to the last place I’d been where I knew I had people. 

Autumn in the northeast scooped me up into its arms in every way I’d been dreaming of for what felt like hundreds of years. I was relieved to discover there was nectar in my heart still, after all I’d been through. I was learning to tell the story of Tuan Mac Cairill, who fell asleep one night sobbing and woke up a new shape. Grief does that, can do that, and will do it, if you let it. 

Not long after that magic autumn I put the finishing touches on Tarot for Change. Having come into a new rhythm with writing that I wanted to keep and nurture, I took on the task of doing Offerings weekly instead of just monthly as I’d been doing in years passed. Two years later, the weekly Offerings are one of my favorite things about life. 

I will admit I often worry. At times it seems the energy I spend reading, thinking, and writing does little for my capacity to embody the ideals I so treasure where it matters; who I am with the people and beings I love most. These ideals include being responsive to others and myself, paying respect to old wounds that none of us chose, being hospitable to the strange, and so on.

The last two years of Offerings emerged from a time that I can only describe as beautiful beyond telling, not to be mistaken for easy. And I’m re-considering this flawed notion that for the work of carefully considering how I want to be in the world to be worth it, these ways must be not only named perfectly and precisely but embodied fully and completely as well.

Recent writings have helped me clarify in myself the political and spiritual necessity of taking risks, of acting imperfectly and to the best of my abilities, with the partial knowledges that I have in a given moment. Without airs or expectations around definitive solutions. Without needing to be the hero who shows up and does the perfect thing that yields the total healing. 

This is something that might be called faith. It has to do with doing the best we can each day to move in valued directions, knowing our steps are always flawed and partial. None of us have the whole truth, every vision is limited, every action is incomplete, and as James Hillman has written, drawing on the metaphor of sailing, “the plan is the sensitivity.” 

And if the plan is to engage keenly, carefully, and honestly as I can with the waters that I’m in—as opposed to reaching some particular destination completely and ultimately—I believe something will come from that. Something good. Something that might one day feel like a marvelous stroke of magic, or even luck. Something to give thanks for, and call grace. 

There is a religious idea that grace is by definition something one has not earned. Grace might include capacities and clarities one hadn’t expected to have access to in a smoky or sharp time. But I think this idea of grace as random and fluke-like overlooks the reality I prefer. Which is that moments of ease and understanding very often have thick histories. Said another way, there are times when the unexpected grace we experience has in fact been paid for. Often many times over. 

I don’t know about you, but I get surprised at times by my capacity to be okay when I’m in pain or deeply uncertain. And in such times it becomes necessary to remind myself that I’ve been earnestly and doggedly engaged in this struggle to understand, to accept, and to commit. 

And I don’t say this to be self-congratulatory, but to say that it’s been helpful for me to consider that the work I do day in and day out—to pay attention, to wonder, to clarify, to contemplate, to love the questions that I have, to name what I’m seeing and wanting, all of it—has an impact in times when I most need it. Even if, in the moment, these actions feel incomplete or insubstantial. 

It’s helpful because it can be easy to be mistrustful of the things we have learned to do, or won through hard and continuous struggle. I am finding it useful to consider the thick history of what I experience as grace, how I and the people I love have participated in crafting these moments of strength and clarity that appear as if by magic, in the times I least expect it.  

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To listen to me read this Offering aloud, click here.