Throwing in the Towel

About five years into writing my doctoral dissertation I sat down to compose a difficult email to my advisor.

I had decided to give up.

I told him I appreciated his unending patience with me, through my relocation to Connecticut, my engagement and wedding planning, my struggle to conceive, and all the anxieties of a recently confirmed pregnancy.  I didn’t want to spend another minute analyzing the allegorical implications of Troubleall’s madness in Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair.  I was sick and tired.  I was throwing in the towel.  He wrote back almost immediately.

Dear Kara,

I wonder if you are aware of the origins of that phrase.  Boxers cannot throw in the towel.  That is a decision reserved for their trainers.

Keep writing.        

Yours,

Ken

Shit.

I did go on to finish my dissertation, and as clumsy and terrible as the final product was, I defended it before a panel of faculty who shook my hand at the end of three long hours and called me Dr. Russell for the first time.  My advisor, trainer's towel stubbornly secured around his shoulders, took Mark and me to his favorite diner and ordered himself an egg crème.  It was his victory as much as mine.

Fast forward two decades and I find myself in the throes of another long battle.  In this corner, a 50-year-old wife and mother of two who thrives on regular, close proximity to friends and family.  In the opposite corner, mother-effing COVID-19. 

I’m tired.  I don’t want to “do” social distancing anymore.  Like many of you, I’m ready to give up the fight.  But every day the damn bell rings to signal a new round.  And every day, I strap on a mask and wash my chapped hands and maintain a six-foot distance from all but three other human beings on the planet.  It doesn’t matter that I’m sick and tired of it all.  I can’t throw in the towel, because the choice is not mine to make.

Please, please don’t listen to the idiots who suggest otherwise.

See, I know about idiots, because I am one, too.  And not just when it comes to boxing metaphors. 

Like you, I’ve known people who have fought harder and more horrible battles than mine.  They’ve battled homelessness.  They’ve battled the grief of losing parents and children.  They’ve faced terminal cancer diagnoses.  They’ve gone off to war, or they’ve been left behind to carry on, alone.  I have always been stunningly inarticulate when it comes to offering encouragement to the battle-weary.  I eventually settled on an all-purpose condolence catch-phrase: “You are so strong.  I don’t know how you do it.”  It felt like the right thing to say.  (Ok, maybe not “right,” but at least not terribly wrong.)  I wanted people to know how much I admired them.  I meant it as a testament to their courage.

With unbelievable grace, they’d smile weakly and accept my attempt at sympathy.

Then one afternoon my best friend lost her sweet and humble husband to suicide.  In the grueling aftermath, I watched in awe as she kept putting one foot in front of the other.  I didn’t know how to express my admiration, so I fell back on the phrases I knew best. 

“You are so strong,” I told her.  “I don’t know how you are doing this.”

She didn’t smile.  She looked me square in the eye, as only a best friend can, and said “What choice do you think I have?”

Thank God she loved me enough to school me. 

I think this virus is teaching all of us a similar lesson.  We do not have a choice but to keep fighting.  It doesn’t matter how tired we are of the masks, or the isolation, or the monotony.  We can’t give up.  Not yet.  If we start pulling our punches now, we’re going to be blindsided. 

Just yesterday, my uncle sent me a music video.  He’s a Christian with a capital C, in the same way that I’m more a “christian” with at best a lowercase letter…maybe even a “k”.  (Which is to say, he’s quite a bit further along on his faith journey than yours truly.)

I wasn’t familiar with the song.  It was performed by an all-boy worship band, and my first impression was that they had beautiful voices and really excellent hair.  

Then I paid attention to the lyrics:

“I count on one thing / The same God that never fails / Will not fail me now / In the waiting / The same God who’s never late / Is working all things out.”

Well, that’s comforting, I thought.  It’s nice to imagine (even believe) there’s a God in heaven who won’t fail us, even now.  “It will all work out” may be unforgivably cliché, but wouldn’t it be something if it were also true?

And then came the chorus:

“I will lift you high in the lowest valley” the perfectly-coiffed boys sang.  And I thought to myself, YES.  THAT is the kind of God I can get behind.  We’re in a pretty low valley right now, and we could sure use a divine hand to lift us out of it.

Except that, as I mentioned earlier, I’m kind of idiot.  Not only when it comes to boxing metaphors and expressions of condolence, but also when it comes to Christian music lyrics.

Turns out, it’s not God speaking in the chorus of “Yes I Will.”  It’s just some dumb old human being.  Some guy who is in his lowest valley and is still praising God.

Well, that’s bullshit (was my first thought).  I need a God who will scoop me up and rescue me, and instead I’ve got one who expects to be praised even when I’m sick and tired?   

And that’s when I had a teeny, tiny epiphany…the only size epiphany idiots are capable of having.  I realized my prayers throughout this pandemic have sounded an awful lot like that email I sent twenty years ago to my dissertation advisor.   

In essence, I begged both of them to call an end to the fight.  And they both gave the same reply:

Keep fighting.

I know my dissertation advisor wasn’t a sadist.  I trust the reason he didn’t throw in the towel is because he knew I hadn’t yet given it my all.  I like to think the same is true of God.  I trust that when He throws in the towel for me, it will only be because I have no fight left.  If I trust in that, it becomes a little easier to keep swinging.

So whether you watch Fox or CNN, whether you believe in God or in Dr. Fauci, please don’t stop fighting.  Not yet.  When the bell rings for another round, come out swinging.  If it helps, try doing it in a bright satin robe with your alter ego emblazoned on the back.  You’re probably not leaving the house, anyway. 

Come on.  I had to. 

For How Long?

I wonder if the same three words haunt you, too.  

Looks like you won’t be going back to school, kids.  (For how long?)

Guess I’ll be working from home beginning Monday.  (For how long?)

I found eggs!  This should last us a while.  (For how long?)

I’m doing ok.  I can handle this.  (For how long?)

Truth is, the individual days themselves haven’t seemed so bad.  I’m wholly aware of how fortunate I am to be able to say that.  I married a good guy, and I enjoy his company.  For the most part, I think he enjoys mine.  My kids are home and I like them an awful lot, too.  In between Zoom meetings and distance learning and conference calls, we’ve finished a puzzle together.  We take long daily walks. We smile and wave at strangers and they smile and wave back.  We’re watching The Great British Baking Show from start to finish.  We have plenty of food.  (Ok, it’s mostly a giant stack of tortillas, but we have food.)

And yet…

It’s the “for how long?” refrain that plants a pit in my stomach.  How long before I can walk into my parents’ house again without fear of making them sick?  How long before I can see my sister?  How long before I can pick up my phone and not feel dreadfully compelled to consult an exponentially increasing line graph?

I generally consider challenging things “endurable” so long as they have a set finish line. 

5k races.

Childbirth. 

Holding my breath during a mammogram x-ray. 

Elementary school concerts.

But when “how long?” is met with silence, or confusion, or a brutally honest “no one really knows,” a challenge can feel damn near impossible.  This morning I let a friend know I was struggling.

“The how long part is the worst,” I confessed.

“You know,” she replied, “that’s very biblical.”

(Pastors, amiright?  Even at 9 am on a Saturday they can’t shut it off.)

So I literally typed “how long Bible” into the search bar and up popped Psalm 13. Trust me, you don’t have to be religious, or even believe in God, for that matter, to get something out of this one:

How long, LORD? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? How long must I wrestle with my thoughts and day after day have sorrow in my heart? Look on me and answer, LORD my God.  

I know as much about the Bible as most Catholic high school graduates, which isn't saying a whole helluva lot.  I know the word itself means “song,” and I know they’re often set to music or chanted in both Christian and Jewish services.  I sense this particular singer has endured something miserable for quite some time.  His patience is wearing thin.  He’s getting a bit antsy…even angry…and he wants an answer to his question, dammit. 

Just like many of us right now.

And guess what?  He doesn’t get one.  Here’s how the Psalm continues:  

But I trust in your unfailing love.

You see, this is why people get so pissed off about the Bible.  The answer to “How long?” is “But I trust."   

That’s, like, not even an answer. 

Unless that’s precisely the point.

Maybe fear and anxiety and suffering isn’t about how long.  Maybe it’s not about endurance.  Maybe it’s about trust.  And maybe it’s helpful to frame things that way for a minute.

Endurance demands a lot of us.  We have to be strong to endure.  We have to fortify our bunkers and tighten our muscles and keep our anxieties in check.  Trust is completely different.  Trust is about letting go. Trust isn't about self-reliance;  it's about interdependence and human connection.  And while I’ve had some hot mess moments over the last few weeks trying to endure the challenges of an unfolding pandemic, I’ve also had some incredible glimpses of what trusting in unfailing love looks like.

I bet you’ve seen it, too, so I won’t bother linking to viral clips of neighbors gathering six feet apart on the sidewalk singing “Happy Birthday” to a six-year old.  Or the husband holding up a “thank you for saving my wife’s life” sign to the glass window of an Emergency Room.

Instead I’ll narrow my experience down to just yesterday.  And not even all of yesterday.  This is some of the love I witnessed on one 40-minute walk with my husband:

I saw my friend Tammy, who was delivering a box of rice to our friend Joe.   

I saw a brother and sister spreading out hand-painted rocks on a beach towel on their front lawn.  “Come take one!” they said, stepping back to maintain a six-foot distance.  “They’re for free!”   

I saw my friend Pam, whose first question was, “Is your mom alright?”   

I saw Michelle and Riley, honking and yelling from their car that they can’t wait for Sunday night’s Zoom meeting. 

I saw stuffed animals propped in windows and hope-filled messages chalked on driveways.

And that's not an exhaustive list.  

How long will this last?  We don’t know.  No one does.  So I think it's perfectly okay to feel the pit in our stomachs. It's ok to feel our anxiety growing and our patience wearing thin.  And it's ok to keep demanding answers. 

But it’s also important to accept that the answers may not come…at least not anytime soon.  And in the meantime, even when answers fail us, we can trust that love does not. 

The "Hope Rock' we selected. And yes, I washed my hands.

So I Married a Prepper

I don't mean to sound all 1950’s about the whole thing, but my husband is the family provider. 

Don’t get me wrong.  I do my fair share of supporting the four of us.  Over the years, I have secured such lucrative positions as “volunteer board president for a start-up non-profit,” “adjunct lecturer at a state university,” and “part-time youth director at a local Congregational church.”  Despite the tens of dollars I rake in each week, Mark has insisted on providing our family with still more. 

Which is why it shouldn’t surprise me that during this global crisis, he has voluntarily extended his role of family provider to include the responsibilities of family “prepper.”

I didn’t even know the word existed until a month ago.

Preppers, it turns out, have been prepping for a long time.  They build subterranean bunkers stocked with personal water filtration systems, medical kits, 50-pound bags of rice, propane, firewood, firearms, and something called a “sun oven.”  My husband, new as he is to prepping, has amassed none of those things.

His cache includes eleven bags of BBQ-flavor Pop Chips, twenty-four canisters of Crystal Lite lemonade mix, and a jar of yeast specifically packaged “for bread machines.”

Reader, we do not own a bread machine.

As nervous as we all are about what’s happening, and about what could happen, Mark is the first to admit he’s handling it worst of all.  I’ve banned him from making Amazon Prime purchases without permission.  I’ve encouraged him to practice “exposure response prevention” by walking past a half-gallon of milk we don’t need, and leaving it on the shelf for someone who needs it more.  His WebEx calls are professional and on point, but he cannot be trusted to walk through Price Chopper alone.  I’ve pointed out to him repeatedly, and I hope lovingly, that his temporary lunacy arises from a very real threat to his provider instinct.  He wants to make sure we’ll all be ok.  It is killing him that he cannot make sure of that.

After reassuring him of the unquestionably noble source of his anxiety, I’ve done what any good wife would do:  I’ve laughed at him. 

And the boys have joined in.

Yesterday a package arrived from Amazon.  He swore it was the last of the purchases made before my “ban” went into effect.  He glanced at the three of us sheepishly before opening it, and made us promise not to make fun of him when we saw what was inside, because he could not remember what he had panic-purchased.

We promised. 

(We lied.)

It was like getting a present from Santa, if Santa was a drunken amnesiac.  Mark carefully sliced the box open and lifted the contents for all of us to see.

Tortillas.

“Dad,” Brian said, exasperated.  “Are you kidding me?  Our refrigerator is already 45% tortillas.”

Mark snort laughed.  

And that’s how I know we’ll be ok.  Not that we won’t get sick, or be scared, or be scarred in possibly permanent ways by this pandemic.  But as long as we can still laugh, both with and at one another, we will at least be us.  

Our family went through our own crisis nine years ago.  One minute, it was situation normal.  Then suddenly, and without warning, we slammed into a brick wall at full speed.  For the next several months we intentionally retreated from coworkers, from extended family, and from all but a few of our closest friends.  We “turtled up,” as Mark dubbed it then.  Today, we’d call it social distancing.   

As much as we agreed isolation was the best course of action for us, there were times it felt as damaging as the illness.

And then one day we discovered a weapon in our arsenal we’d forgotten.  It was a very wise doctor who pointed it out to us, and who gave us permission to use it.

We’d forgotten our sense of humor.

It seemed irreverent and irresponsible to laugh during that time.  But slowly, and timidly, we tried it anyway.  And I swear every time one of us laughed, our "family spine" straightened a bit.  Humor didn’t shrink the threat we were facing, but it made us all feel a bit taller, and a little more up to the task.

We do not have a hospital-grade medical kit or a sun oven in our arsenal. But we’ve been honing and stockpiling our sense of humor for years, because we learned it’s pretty essential to our survival.  (That and Crystal Lite lemonade, apparently.)  It’s who we are.  And it’s one of the ways we’ll do our best to get through this, however long “this” lasts. 

And now if you’ll excuse me, I believe that's Mark’s powdered milk delivery at the door.   

For My Husband: A Lo-Carb Valentine

Shakespeare’s Cleopatra used the phrase “my salad days” to describe our youth:  that green time of life when we’re too inexperienced to know what we’re doing, and too foolish to care.

I married Mark in my salad days. 

Despite not knowing what the hell I was doing, I chose well. I know this for a fact because I recently entered the meatball salad years.

It wasn’t Shakespeare but my oldest son, Kevin, who coined this newer phrase.  We were on our way to my parents’ house last summer, and I assumed both he and his brother were zoned out on their phones, having not heard a peep from either of them for some time.

I was deep in conversation with Mark about the dinner I’d ordered the night before:  a beautiful salad with mixed spring greens, toasted walnuts and fresh goat cheese.  Atop the salad, three meatballs in marinara sauce.  It was fantastic.

“You wouldn’t think to put meatballs on a salad,” I told him.  “I would never think of it, anyway.  But it’s on menus everywhere now.  I guess it’s part of the lo-carb craze.  And the funny thing is, you don’t even need dressing.” 

“Well, you don’t like dressing, anyway,” Mark said.  

“I don’t,” I agreed.  “But what I mean is you don’t even miss it.” 

Mark was quiet for several seconds.  “Didn’t you have a meatball salad that summer we were in Tennessee?”

“I did!” I said, amazed and touched that he remembered.  “They didn’t prepare it that way, but I was trying to eat lo-carb on that trip, so I just skipped the pasta and put the meatballs right on the salad.”

A few minutes passed, during which I began to doubt myself.

“Wait…” I said.  “They weren’t meatballs.  It was a meat sauce.  I put meat sauce on the salad in Tennessee.  And Janet did it, too.” 

“That’s right,” Mark said.  “I remember they served a meat sauce.”

“I’m pretty sure that was the first time I’d ever mixed red sauce with salad, though,” I said, with renewed confidence.  “It was good, but definitely not as good as those meatballs last night.”

I paused for a minute, remembering the meatballs.  And mid-memory, a voice came from the back seat.  

It was Kevin.

“Hey mom and dad,” he said, an obvious smile in his voice. “Tell us more about the meatball salad.”

And that was the precise moment we together realized what Kevin and the rest of the world had known for some time:  we were old. 

Even if time continues to bless us both, we are already well into the second half of our lives.  These are the years that will slow us down a bit, even as the world speeds up around us.  These are the years that will likely bring us in-laws and grandchildren.  These are the meatball salad years.  And on this Valentine’s Day, I want you to know there is no one with whom I’d rather spend them.  

Love,

k

For Kobe, Who Probably Never Met Ted Knight

My little sister cried when Ted Knight died.  He was the white-haired, bumbling news anchor on The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and I didn’t realize (until word of his passing reached my grandparents’ mobile home, where we were spending the last few days of summer) how much she loved him.  She confessed it through sobs.

It struck me as odd then, because she didn’t know Ted Knight.  And as much as I wanted to feel a little of what she was feeling (sisters do that for each other), my 17-year-old self couldn’t muster anything more than mild confusion, which I masked with a weakly sympathetic pat on the back.

I don’t remember how long she “grieved,” but I can assure you she was fully recovered by day one of her senior year.  Her world moved along...Ted Knight-less.  

I have a 17-year-old of my own now, and Wednesday morning he texted me from his chemistry class:

NAH IM NOT HAVING IT TODAY

I know Brian’s penchant for drama, so those midday all-caps messages don’t faze me anymore.  I glanced nonchalantly at my phone screen, waiting for whatever garden variety teenage angst would follow.  And what followed was this:  Brian’s chemistry teacher had returned to school that morning after an extended absence.  While he was initially happy to see her, the reunion went south when discussion turned to Kobe Bryant, who was killed three days prior in a helicopter crash along with his daughter and seven other souls in Calabasas, California.  

Brian's next text:

No ounce of exaggeration [she] went on a 5 minute rant about how it’s not that big of a deal and he didn’t affect us personally so we shouldn’t care I’m so upset

It's safe to assume that unlike countless others grieving the loss of Kobe Bryant, and unlike millions who will likely remember where they were and what they were doing when he died, I alone thought immediately of Ted Knight.  

My son never met Kobe Bryant.  He's not even a Lakers fan.  But both of my boys live and breathe NBA basketball, and both of them cried when Kobe died.  

Would they have cried for those seven strangers if Kobe hadn’t been on board?  Of course not.

Because they didn't know those people, I’d argue.  And Brian’s teacher would probably argue back: That’s precisely the point.  They didn’t know Kobe, either.

Except that they DID.

No, Kobe wasn’t family.  And it should go without saying that the loss of a celebrity figure in no way compares to the loss of a friend or family member.  But to suggest Kobe’s death was “not that big of a deal because he didn’t affect us personally” is wrong.  And like all good English teachers, I’m going to use prove my point using a poetry term.  Enjambment, in this case.   

Much like a teenage boy’s texts, enjambment is signified by a lack of punctuation.  It’s defined as “a poetic device in which a line of poetry extends, without punctuation, beyond the limitations of the natural line break.” 

That definition is horrible, as are most literary definitions.  It’s easier to understand with examples.  

A poem without enjambment looks like this:

This little piggy went to market.

This little piggy stayed home.

This little piggy had roast beef.

This little piggy had none.

It’s not great poetry, but you get the point.  Every line ends with a mark of punctuation:  a “natural break” between one line and the next.  

And here’s a poem with enjambment:

April is the cruelest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

It wouldn’t make sense to read T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land one line at a time.  It must be read in one continuous breath, each line of verse extending beyond the limitations of the natural break.  That's the magic of enjambment:  the last word of one line is connected to the first line of the next in a way that creates meaning, despite the fact the words will never touch.  

No, my little sister never met Ted Knight.  But that bumbling white-haired news reporter on MTM must have meant something to her.  It doesn’t matter what that something was;  her sobs testified that across time and space and television airwaves, she felt a meaningful connection.  And when he died, she felt the loss.

Just as my sons felt when Kobe died.

Just as millions of people felt.   

Because despite his flaws (and given his admitted marital infidelity and alleged sexual assault, I’m asking a LOT from that single word), Kobe Bryant inspired.  He thrilled and awed.  He brought irrational confidence and unrelenting hope and immeasurable joy to kids who wanted to be like the Black Mamba.  He extended his reach beyond the natural break, across time and space (and wealth and race) to create meaningful connections with people he would never touch.  

Fortunately for all of us, we do not live out our lives full stop.  Our inspiration and our pain, our joy and our grief are not limited to the natural breaks of physical contact and geographical proximity.  We do not have to touch one another to be touched by one another.  The universal poem of which we are all part would make no sense that way.  

Any kind of meaningful human connection, especially in a world that feels increasingly splintered and hell-bent on barriers and full-stops, should probably not be called into question by even the most well-meaning of chemistry teachers.  Yes, my son took time to grieve for a man he never met.  

But hey, he never met Jesus, either.  ;) 

Catch and Release

I have a friend who is an amateur aerialist.  I have no idea where her fascination with circus arts originated, but every so often she’ll share a photo of herself swinging on a trapeze.  I’m not talking about the kind you see at amusement parks.  I’m talking a legitimate freaking trapeze.

I admire the hell out of her, because I’d never do it.

I don’t have a fear of heights, or even of falling.  But I’m pretty sure any non-lethal turn on the trapeze involves a rudimentary understanding of catch and release points, and I have zero concept of either.  

I’ve never caught an object with my eyes open.  When someone tosses me a football, I clamp my eyes shut, stretch out my arms in the general direction of the last place I located the object in space, and clench every muscle in my body in anticipation of impact.  I’m sharing a pic to prove what I’m talking about.  It’s quite possibly the least flattering photo of me ever taken, but it gets the point across in a way that mere words cannot.

Go ahead.  Try un-seeing that.  Oh, and here's another, in case you think the first was a fluke:

I’m no better at release points.  Most of the balls I throw end up short of their intended target, apparently because I hold onto them too long.  I once joked the chances of an object returning to me when I toss it up the stairs is 100%.  And it’s true.  There are scuff marks in the ceiling above our staircase from toiletries aimed at the landing.  I’ve toppled lamps, drilled my husband in delicate areas, and injured innocent bystanders. 

Sometimes I overcompensate and let an object go too soon.  This is the only plausible explanation for the time I rolled a bowling ball behind me. 

Letting go too soon or holding on too long:  either way, I miss a lot of targets.

And that’s what I’m thinking about on this final day of this final year of the decade.

This was a year of “letting go” in many ways, and given my aforementioned struggles, it was a challenging one for me.  The first and biggest example was releasing my son into the wild.  Winooski, Vermont, to be exact.  The timing felt too soon, and all wrong.  It’s a big effing deal to send your kid off to college.  It changes you and it changes them and changes your entire relationship…but for the better, maybe.  I don’t know.  We’re still figuring it out.  But I do know I love and appreciate him more now than ever before and I didn’t think that was possible. 

So that’s something.

I also let go of a job that wasn’t making me happy anymore.  I felt undervalued and (paradoxically) unworthy.  I suspect it was a weird midlife crisis of some kind, but I walked away from teaching for the first time in 24 years.  I walked away from a job I have always loved.  I’m in the middle of a good, deep, year-long “breath,” and I’m beginning to think I’ll be ready to return when I exhale. 

We’ll see.   

And finally, I let go of my board position at Family Promise of Central Connecticut, a nonprofit I care so deeply about.  It’s a strange feeling knowing I won’t gather around a table next month with folks I’ve gathered around a table with every single month for the last six years, but something told me it was time.  I think the “something” was the unshakable sense a successful nonprofit board requires people who understand spreadsheets. 

I have always, always fake-read the spreadsheets. 

For all the “letting go” I’ve done this year, I’m also keenly aware of a few things I’m still holding tight to…things I should have released a long time ago.  Things like doubt and fear and insecurity (so many boatloads of insecurity I am actually captain of my own fleet).  Things like not writing that book because I’m afraid my Real Author Friends will hold me in contempt.  (They would not.  Deep down I know that.)

I also know that as long as I hold onto these fears and insecurities I’m going to be stuck here, swinging above the safety net below me, and these 50-year old arms are getting awfully tired.

So on this last day of the last year of the decade I’m going to focus on letting go.  I’m going to try opening my eyes and unclenching my jaw and reaching for the next thing in front of me. 

I can’t promise my catch will be a clean one, but at least I’ll look better in pictures.  

Happy New Year, all.  xo

Amazing Grace

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.