Grace from Grace

I am not good with little girls, even less with teenaged girls.

I know that some of my difficulty arises from my own childhood, and even more from the death of my full term daughter in the womb. A still born child who is horribly deformed is a peculiar kind of grief, such a mixture of feelings. Ever since I find myself wondering what my daughter would have been like at five or ten or fifteen, wondering what books and colours and movies she would have liked and the grief spills, fresh and new. Over and over.

Recently one of my husband's oldest friends remarried, acquired a five year old daughter called Grace and returned home.

We met at Mass one fine but quite ordinary Sunday morning. Grace and I.

It was not love at first sight, not on my part, yet Grace took no notice of my lack of enthusiasm.

I discovered that even if I did not know how to be with her, she most certainly knew how to be with me. Gradually over the last four months we have become friends. She loves Winnie the Pooh and laughs hysterically at the stories of A A Milne, rolling on the floor with delight. I have learned a great deal about Barbie and Ken, about the giant purple dinosaur Barney, about playing in the rain, about laughing, about playing hide and seek, about sitting peacefully with a dozing five year old on my lap, about other ways of sadness and loss.

The thing about Grace is that she draws others into her magical circle that takes no account of years lived, being as she is, fully and seriously concerned with living vibrantly. She sometimes looks at me with sadness and asks how I never learned to play but brightens with the thought that she will teach me.

And teach me she does. In her lessons I find my raw grief for my own small daughter is transmuted in a way that I do not understand into something I do not recognise but which I receive with gratitude.

Grace from Grace indeed.

Ash Wednesday Words

For a while now Ash Wednesday and Good Friday have been difficult days for me to observe. The crushing grief of these days has robbed me of myself, and the lovingly prepared liturgies have rendered me incapable of movement.

Last year I did go to the Mass at my sons Jesuit high school and was given warmth and love by the boys who had been or who were in my confirmation group and that made the solemnity and grief bearable. This year I took a deep breath and chose to attend Ash Wednesday Mass at the school again. In the interim there has been a new Rector appointed, only in the last few weeks, so the preparation for the service was undertaken by  lay people who are members of staff. Both of them are incredibly conservative and the service reflected this. As such it was a potently painful service, full of thundering and hell fire and damnation and seven hundred boys sat restively and disconnected from the proceedings. In that moment I gave thanks for Terri Pilaski and those she works with saying that Words Matter, for here before me was the living evidence of the alienating power of words.

Where, I wondered from my seat at the back, is the Grace of God in all this? Where is the celebration of that Grace which to my mind should have been the focus to the service. We are sinners. Yes. But what we celebrate during Lent is that God’s Grace reaches out to us, offering reconciliation and healing in the form of His most precious gift. His only son.

I have lost an eighteen year old nephew who was in my care for several years as the result of suicide and I had a beautiful, if physically incomplete, still born daughter. Last year my Dad, who was also my friend and mentor died suddenly. Those losses, amongst others, have marked my life with grief and sent me out to dwell in desert lands where the Living God is silent, where his language is silence. Once more on Ash Wednesday, and no doubt also on Good Friday I will wonder at a God who is silent yet sacrifices his most precious possession, his only son for the forgiveness of my sins. 

I wonder at his own sense of loss, and how he bears it. For mine has been nearly unendurable. 

I wonder when I feel so alone how he is able to connect ...