I am so happy to have review of Katherine Ozment’s gorgeous Grace Without God: The Search for Meaning, Purpose, and Belonging in a Secular Age
In short, I loved Ozment’s book. I hope you’ll read my review, but I also wanted to share a few additional quotes here.
“When we begin to tap into that connectedness, we sense the potential to participate in some bigger purpose that both humbles and elevates us.”
“I felt the rush I always get when I see my family before they see me, as if I’m holding a precious photograph. They are my solar system, my closest and most lasting tribe … I had felt a bit of what I thought of grace – an abundance of gratitude for something I never asked for – that day gazing at my tulip and, later, at my family from across the street.”
“What was sacred was that very moment. I wanted to celebrate the smooth skin of my children’s curious faces, the roof over our heads, the rich traditions and great good fortune of being alive here on earth in the first place. I savored the way our voices, however unsteady, lifted as one. If I was going to celebrate anything, it was going to be the crooked, imperfect path of life that I and my part-Christian, part-Jewish, mostly nothing family had found ourselves on together.”
“Whether we call it science or religion, we’re all after a framework for understanding the mysteries inherent in being alive and the wonder we experience when we start to grasp them.”
“The key is not to flee ambiguity, shutting the door because we can’t answer the questions of why we’re here. Instead, we consider how we are here, how we exist in the world. We do this by embracing the messiness, the poignancy, and the knowledge that life will end.”
“I still don’t have answers to all the big questions. But I’m starting to see that becoming more comfortable holding the questions is the only way that makes sense to me.”
“Meaning came from the intense awareness of the moment itself, from my reverence for her, for this life we were joined in as family. I simply needed to remain still enough to notice.”
I loved this book. My review is here at Great New Books. I hope you will read the review and then order Grace Without God: The Search for Meaning, Purpose, and Belonging in a Secular Age
My friend Aidan recently asked a provocative question: what do people thank you for?
I’ve been pondering this for the couple of weeks since I read it. The answer does not come to me that quickly. That may be because I handle compliments poorly and generally react with redirection and discomfort or maybe it’s because the entire topic of being thanked makes me feel self-indulgent. Even writing about it makes me feel a little uneasy, like I’m tooting my own horn. But I’m forging ahead, because I do think there’s a lot of value in this question.
The value, of course, is in being aware of that which we do to which others respond. And using that awareness to guide how we spend our time. What people thank us for is probably something we ought to do more of. At least that’s how I think about this.
People thank me for talking openly about my experience of life. That is diffuse and hard to articulate, and sounds both enormous and tiny. But more often than not, people say thank you for sharing my heartache at life’s small passages, for being honest about things that are hard, for keeping my finger on the pulse of that which hurts in daily life (for me, that’s time’s passage).
People thank me for taking pictures of the sky.
People thank me for talking about books I love.
What’s interesting, when I think about the things people thank me for, are they are all things I worry I do too much of. I fret that I’m a broken record: another blog post about feeling sorrow mixed with joy at the world’s smallest experiences? another Instagram photograph of the sunset from my office window? another time asking “so, what are you reading?” at the baseball field? And yet these things I worry I do too often are the things that people seem to appreciate.
This worrying about saying or doing too often that which objectively the world seems to appreciate is a dissonance I experience at a very deep level. It reminds me of the feeling I have, more often than I like, that I am just too much myself. Gail Caldwell called it feeling like “the volume of the world had been turned up a notch” and that has always made sense to me.
Even as I write this, with a cloudy, pale sunset to my left and my son and husband in the room to my right, I feel slight goosebumps up and down my arms. Is this too messy to share, too self-congratulatory? Am I revealing all the ways in which I’m too heavy, too serious, too sensitive, by sharing this? I’m going to go ahead and hit publish because I think this is precisely the kind of honesty that people seem to react to, but for what it’s worth, it is still a complicated thing for me.
I think Aidan’s question is an excellent one, and likely points us to our true calling, or at least to the ways in which we can be most helpful to others in the world. There’s discomfort in both the asking and the answering, at least for me, but I suspect that’s part of the value of the exercise. Here I go. Honest and candid, and a sunset, and a book, too (book review coming on Wednesday!).
What do people thank you for?
Hurry is beside the point, useless, an obstruction.
The thing is to be attentively present.
To sit and wait is as important as to move.
Patience is as valuable as industry.
What is to be known is
always there.
When it reveals itself to you, or when you come upon it,
it is by chance.
The only condition is your being there and being
watchful.
~ Wendell Berry
Yet another beauty I found on First Sip.
Monday evening, June 6 – not the classic both-in-white photo, because they didn’t have the same last day.
June 4, 2015, their last last day together until high school
Today, we’re out of school. Actually yesterday was Grace’s last day, and today is Whit’s. It is the first year in a great many that they haven’t had the same last day of school. Yesterday I spent some time wandering down memory lane, falling headfirst into the tunnel of nostalgia where I spend too much of my time. This 2012 post has many years of photos. And that was already four years ago. I can feel time whistling by my ears, I really can. A tired cliche. And an outrageously deep truth.
I don’t have a fifth grader and a seventh grader anymore. This year is over, finished, a door is closed.
Farewell.
And, also, allelulia: summer! tennis! ice cream! camp! sleeping in! reading books! There is so much to celebrate and I love summer. We consciously under-schedule our summer and make very few commitments (other than sleepaway camp, which both kids go to and love), and as a result there are long empty days and evenings on the porch with family. I can’t wait.
But I also feel sad at what’s over. Farewell and alleluia coexist for me in inextricable ways. This year, with its particular drop-off routines and rhythms, was a good one. Just yesterday morning, Grace, Whit, Matt and I were having breakfast in the kitchen. Grace yawned before complimenting the fried egg I’d made her while trashing the one her father had made her a few days before. We all laughed but then I said, “just wait, guys, you’ll miss these mornings, all four of us in the kitchen.” I poured myself another cup of coffee and explained that it wouldn’t be long until they would be homesick – at least a little – for this particular morning, drooping peonies on the island, a friend egg and Life cereal for Grace and a waffle and some yogurt for Whit.
The thing is, I already am. I am nostalgic for yesterday.
The first last day they shared, June 9, 2010
This photo makes me physically ache. Now they’re tall and lanky – Grace is within an inch of my height – and becoming the people they are. Not that they always weren’t – in fact one of my primary learnings about parenthood is the way they are who they are from the minute they arrive – but they are young people now. Childhood itself is in Grace’s rearview mirror, and it’s soon going to be there for Whit, too.
Farewell.
They are smart, and funny, and wise beyond their years. They are sometimes also moody and irritable, and they leave dirty socks around the house and forgot where they put their water bottles. But they are the light of my life, no question about it, and I love who they are more every single day.
Alleluia.