Earlier this month I had the experience of winning tickets to an event that I have wanted to see for years. When I got word that I had won, I was so delighted by the opportunity, it did not matter where I would sit, only that I got a seat. You have had the experience too, of something landing in your lap that you had no control over. Good or bad, we all recognize this feeling: An invitation, a last-minute change in plans. When I arrived to pick up my tickets, the numbers and letters of the assigned seats meant nothing to me, until the docent directed us to our seats in the second row! I couldn’t believe it.
Absolute gift!
Nothing I did or could have done, changed this opportunity. It was simply to be received and enjoyed. It was my joy to share it with another friend who was equally shocked by the decadence extended to us. It was heartening to have someone to share in the gift, to bear witness to this unmerited goodness. The performance is over, but I have been lingering with the sentiment of being the recipient of ‘the gift,’ or not.
Recently, while reading Ignatius’ tools for discernment, I ran up against this theme again: All as gift. This is not to say that everything feels like ‘winning’ front-row seats or otherwise but acknowledging that everything that comes to us does so, having first come through the Word-Made-Flesh. Both a consoling and challenging reminder. This feels laughable to me following two hurricanes, and heavy news, on the cusp of an election of historical significance.
How and where can the Light of the World be seen amid these circling heartbreaks?
It is easy for me to accept my tickets, my medical clearance, or a job opportunity and praise the Giver from whom they came. The experience of receiving generous care, hospitality, goodwill, and justice confirms what we hope and believe to be true about the Creator. We expect these of the One who is all good. How different, how insensitive really, it can feel to entertain the same sentiment about someone who was passed over, who needs to come back for more tests, who just wants a little more time? Could it possibly be that their trials are gifted to them, guiding them to better know and trust the very God who allows these tragedies? Offered, but not optional.
And yet, how can we believe anything different?
I have long clung to the image that when allowed to ask God about the hows and whys of this upside-down experience of living, we will sit together with the tapestry that is my life. And because time will be limitless and unceasing, we can linger together there as God recounts the familiar and forgotten moments of my life with me. First, with the front of the tapestry, the one I recognize as the days I have lived. Next, the Lord will turn over the recognizable pattern I have held as the story of my life, and expose its backside—its underpinnings.
I imagine God will not begin by directing my attention to the even stitches, the cadence that was the day-to-day or status quo. Rather, the hand of God will hold my hand over the seasons that hurt, and trace the knots, the pulls, tears, repairs, and reinforcements that have been added but by grace—moments I never knew that affected me greatly, prayers prayed by me—or on my behalf. Providence’s guiding hand that I hadn’t noticed, gut-wrenching dark times that formed in me something more resilient. And I will run my fingers over these rough edges and lumpy, fraying mounds, and feel for the first time, what God has known all along: That the true tapestry, the masterpiece that’s been woven is reflected in these saving stitches of grace, by the guiding hand that knowingly and lovingly has held it together since the beginning of time.
Although it is not as smooth and appealing to the senses as the ordered, patterned design I may have desired for myself or another, I hope that rather than wishing away the unconventional beauty of the scars and reinforcements, I will come to a place of praise and thanksgiving for the grace that has been unknowingly sustaining me, underpinning my days all along.
On the feast of All Saints, we are poised to give thanks for the lives of holy ones who have gone before us—the patterns that make sense for having seen them in context. Just as important, and perhaps more consoling, is the time and space offered for All Souls, the lesser-known, those whose lives and witness may have been obscure, shorter than expected, ordinary, whose underpinnings have yet to be exposed to the Light and celebrated for the grace emulating therein.
Today I offer thanks for the hard and the holy, the smooth and gnarled, knotted-up grace that is core to how we are loved and sustained by God, even when it hurts.