I’m doing a writing workshop at the Duke Reconciliation Institute this week with Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove. As an exercise, today we had fifteen minutes to write what we would say if someone found us lying in a ditch with 10 minutes to live. Here’s what I came up with. Interesting to see what floats up in a snap exercise like this.
In the end it is all about grace.
This birth was a grace. You don’t ask for it. Maybe you don’t want it. But it was given and it was a gift, it was very good.
It hurts to be born but you don’t remember it. Your mother remembers, but she doesn’t remember the pain. The pain of birth is a grace. Forgetting the pain of birth is a grace.
Learning, gaining knowledge and wisdom, is a grace. One thing you learn is that you have to fight to learn, you have to wrestle to become wise. The people who want to teach you, they mean well, maybe some of them teach well, maybe some of them, maybe all of them, want to make you them. So you have to grow up, to see your teachers as human beings, like you, to appreciate them, to become a teacher yourself. And then you have to learn to repent of what you’ve presumed to know, the knowledge of good and evil you thought you owned, and learn unknowing.
Time is a grace. What is time but space God makes for creatures like us? It flies away like dry grass in the breeze. There is no past — it is gone; there is no future — it is not yet; there is no present: look, and it is past. There are only nows proceeding in succession, windows onto the timeless source, catchlights in the eye of God.
Death is a grace. “Except a seed be planted in the ground and die, it will not bear fruit.” This birth and death of mine may be the one thing I do that no other person in the history of the universe will do. Yes, Death, the big-D of Death, is a curse, the curse. It’s no-thing, that big-D of Death, it’s absurd. So this death we die must produce life. This is the meaning of the Resurrection. Life from death, new creation from formless void.
Let grace be all in all.