I usually ask myself two* questions before I write for a
public audience:
1) Does this need to be said?
2) Can I do it justice?
(*I often ask a third: Why
can’t Brian remember to plug in the #&$!@ laptop charger? But that’s a separate issue entirely.)
For the purposes of this blog entry, I’m ignoring question 2. No matter how poorly it turns out,
this entry was in the “star,” so to speak.
It all began in January, when I closed my eyes and chose a
paper star from among a hundred other paper stars in a wicker basket. It was “Star Sunday” at church; the idea
being whatever word we selected would somehow guide us through the upcoming
year (or something like that.) I hoped
I’d choose one that said “napping” or “Chianti.”
I got Grace.
I pinned the star to the bulletin board in my office and
wondered, for the first few days, what it might mean.
I’ve long been known as the klutz of the family. I’m the daughter who spilled her milk so
often my parents were convinced I did it on purpose. In Kindergarten I once dropped the milk tray and
my teacher asked me to take my seat and “never carry anything again.” I silently blamed it on my coke-bottle glasses
and eye patch; I clearly had no depth perception. And possibly something against dairy.
I wondered, half seriously, if the star meant I should work
on my coordination and balance. A friend
suggested I take a yoga class, but I’d tried that before, twice. The first time, an older woman across the
room passed gas while holding a particularly difficult pose. I laughed out loud, because THAT’S WHAT NORMAL
PEOPLE DO when someone farts in yoga class.
No one else laughed, so I never went back.
I can’t have that kind of negativity in my life.
More recently I tried yoga again, and my impossibly patient and
cheerful instructor/friend interrupted the session four times to rearrange my
limbs into something approximating an actual pose. She learned quickly what I’ve always
known: I am not, nor will I ever be, Holy
Kara, Full of Grace. But would any
God care whether I can “downward dog” or balance a lunch tray?
Grace.
I briefly considered the star a reminder that my family
should say Grace…which meant we’d have to sit around the dining
room table for a change. We rarely do,
and I apologize if that horrifies you. It seems whenever I confess “My
family does not sit at the table to eat” people actually hear “I like
setting buildings on fire,” because that’s what their faces suggest. The truth is,
we raised two picky kids for whom eating wasn’t a pleasant experience, and we discovered
distracting them with television made it possible for them to get through a
meal (on occasion) without crying. We
picked our battles, and a bad habit formed.
(For the record, I believe a family can engage in meaningful conversation
anywhere, not just around the table.
But what do I know? I’m a serial arsonist.)
Gradually, I forgot about the star. It faded in the sunlight on my bulletin board
and caught my attention only when I periodically replaced the monthly
newsletters hanging alongside it.
Grace.
Whatever.
Then a couple of months ago I was invited to lead a
discussion series on “Shakespeare and Faith.” I’ve taken a break from college teaching, so I
jumped at the chance to dust off a couple of my old lectures for a new audience.
I sat at my desk one afternoon, wondering
where to start. I know it sounds suspiciously like It’s a Wonderful Life meets Walt Disney’s Pinocchio, but I actually
looked up at the star.
I’d start with King Lear.
I’ve delivered some version of my Lear lecture at least 40
times over the course of my teaching career, and it always includes this same (true)
story:
I was once about ten minutes into class when a student
interrupted me to confess she couldn’t possibly follow what I was saying,
because she couldn’t keep all the characters’ names straight.
I was sympathetic.
It’s a BIG play, and there are a lot of players. So I stopped and drew a line down the center
of the board. I suggested we put Lear’s
friends on one side, and his foes on the other.
Under “Foes” I listed his daughters Goneril and Regan, their
husbands Albany (sort of) and Cornwall, and Edmund, obviously—. She interrupted me a second time and said,
“Ahhhhhh, I see where this is going.”
I didn’t see it.
“The acronym!” She said, pointing to the board. “It spells GRACE.”
I looked back at the board and winced. Shakespeare didn’t pull cheap tricks like
that. The idea of his characters’ first
initials spelling out some word pivotal to an interpretation of the play is
hokey and frankly, embarrassing even to contemplate. But there was GRACE spelled out, plain as
day, and so we couldn’t avoid talking about it.
It turned out to be a much better discussion than the one I
had planned.
What is grace, we asked, in theological terms? The Christian definition is deceptively
simple: an unmerited gift from
God.
Unmerited.
Undeserved.
What could grace possibly mean in this depressing (and
nominally pagan) play, in which no one is saved, and everyone
suffers and dies? Where is this
unmerited gift?
Lear, for anyone unfamiliar with the play, suffers from a
disease that affects many in positions of wealth and power: Pomposity.
Arrogance.
Self-aggrandizement. Call it what
you will…the man thinks a great deal of himself. When he chooses to “retire” and live out the
rest of his brief life “unburdened” by the duties and responsibilities of king,
he finds it not the least bit cringeworthy to demand his three daughters publicly
profess HOW MUCH THEY LOVE HIM in exchange for one-third each of his kingdom. His youngest daughter (wisely or not) refuses
to play the game. The other two over-praise
their father in a sickening display of false flattery, and Lear divides the full kingdom between them.
It’s a foolish move on his part, and he suffers for it. Those two wicked daughters immediately turn on
their now powerless and penniless father and kick him out—cold and hungry—in
a raging storm that ultimately drives Lear mad.
In that punishing madness, however, Lear learns something about
himself. Stripped of his kingly garments
and all the other trappings of worldly wealth and position on which he
constructed a horribly inflated sense of self, he realizes he is no different
from, nor better than the impoverished members of his kingdom to
whom he never gave a moment’s thought when he was king. He suffers the pangs of genuine remorse and
the ache of human compassion.
And then he is punished still more.
And more.
And more.
I’ll spare you the gruesome details of this brutal play. The point is most critics agree Lear’s unrelenting suffering far outweighs whatever dumb mistakes he
makes (“I am a man more sinned against than sinning,” he protests, and for
centuries, horrified audiences have agreed).
But in his undeservedly intense
suffering, Lear experiences the gift, however painfully acquired, of becoming more
fully human.
Yep, that entire class discussion was born of an accidental
acronym. It’s a good thing the initials
didn’t spell “SPINACH” because we would have found a way to make that work,
too.
Anyway, in the middle of prepping Lear for my “Shakespeare
and Faith” series, I happened to catch the tail end of Anderson Cooper’s interview
of Stephen Colbert. I couldn’t help but hear echoes of that class
discussion.
As a child, Colbert suffered the tragic loss of his father
and two older brothers in a horrific plane crash. When asked about that punishing loss in a
2015 interview in GQ, Colbert was quoted as saying, “What punishments of
God are not gifts?”
Anderson Cooper, himself mourning the recent loss of a
parent, quoted Colbert’s rhetorical question back to him and asked, incredulously,
“Do you really believe that?”
What follows are Colbert’s own words:
“Yes. It’s a gift to
exist […] and with existence comes suffering. There’s no escaping that. We’re asked to accept the world that God
gives us. And to accept it with love. […]
You can’t pick and choose what you’re grateful for. So, what do you get
from loss? You get awareness of other people’s loss, which allows you to
connect with that other person, which allows you to love more deeply and to
understand what it’s like to be a human being.”
Dammit, Stephen.
You had me at hello. You had
me at hello.
How unbelievably courageous must a person be to accept the
idea that unmerited suffering and loss and pain might be construed as gifts? King Lear, at least, had some punishment coming for his blind arrogance. Colbert did nothing to deserve his loss. And yet, he accepted the worst kind of suffering
as an opportunity to love others more deeply.
And that brings me to the most difficult part of this post. The part I have no business writing because
it’s so much bigger than I am, and because I cannot possibly do it justice.
But I’ll blame it on the star.
Earlier this month I was half-paying attention to the evening
news (because no one in their right mind can look directly at the news nowadays)
when the anchor teased an upcoming segment on the guilty verdict in the shooting
death of Botham Jean. That got my full
attention. This was the story of an innocent
26-year old black man shot to death in his own apartment by a white woman who
claimed to mistake his residence for her own.
I’d followed the proceedings with interest, hoping first for
a guilty verdict, and then for whatever sentence might bring Botham’s family
some measure of justice.
Then I saw the video.
I saw Brandt Jean, Botham’s 18-year-old brother, sitting on
the stand and loosening the collar around his neck repeatedly, as if suffocating
under the weight of his own grief. I
heard him forgive his brother’s murderer.
I heard him make an unthinkable request:
“I don’t know if this is possible, but can I give her a hug,
please?”
Then he walked across the courtroom and hugged the killer.
There are those more “woke” than I who were sensitive to a
disturbing undercurrent in Brandt Jean’s gesture, and especially in the judge’s
actions that followed. Let me be
clear: I heard those words. I sought them out to learn from them. And I want to be sure others hear them and
learn from them, too. Among them:
“Black people forgive because we need to survive. We have to forgive time and time again...”
--Shanita Hubbard
“Racism and white supremacist ideology can’t be ‘hugged out.’”
--Bernice King
“Black people repeatedly demonstrate an otherworldly beauty
in the granting of grace to the undeserving.
But the question remains: where is America’s reciprocity? When are black people, in the wrong and in
the vice, granted this grace? When are
*innocent* black people granted this grace?”
--Charles M. Blow
To them and to countless others who caution against oversimplifying Brandt Jean’s gesture, I say thank you for broadening my
perspective of that courtroom video. There
is much in it for me to consider more deeply, and much that I will never fully
appreciate.
But from my own limited and imperfect perspective, I humbly offer
this:
Brandt Jean is as good as we get.
Black or white, young or old, rich or homeless, this is as fully human as any of us can ever hope to be.
Even in the midst of his brokenness, and under the crushing
weight of his own suffering, Brandt Jean offered his love and forgiveness, freely given and profoundly undeserved.
He courageously received and generously bestowed the most complicated and divine of all gifts.
I'm pretty sure I became more fully human simply for
having witnessed his amazing grace.