Terry Hershey

In This Issue:

• Sacred Necessities: Unreasonable Grace
• Words to Live By
• Parable
• Sabath Thought
• Gardens & Grace Conference
  Gentleness and Beauty, Spaciousness and Healing, Stillness and Delight (read more)
• Wild Geese by Mary Oliver

FEATURE ARTICLE
by Terry Hershey

Sacred Necessities:
Unreasonable Grace

“The greatest things in life are not reasonable. The mind may make sensible comments about these greatest things in life, but they are not reasonable. The love of a mother for her child has reason, but it is not reasonable. The love of a man for a woman, and the other way around, is surely not reasonable. Beauty, a sunset, the great plunging torrents of Niagara, the final tremendous thunders of the Hallelujahs in Handel’s Messiah, the catch in the throat when the sun sets over the sea striking a line of gold on the calm waters, touches us at a different level from logic and reason. And the love of God for us is not reasonable.”
Rev. Gardner Taylor

“Amazing grace! (how sweet the sound)
That saved a wretch like me!
I once was lost, but now am found,
Was blind, but now I see.”
John Newton

“ God is delighted to watch your soul enlarge.”
Meister Eckart

“Georgia O’Keeffe was not seduced away from the small, the common, the accessible, but instead made them huge, in her sight and in ours, so that we could not escape the visual beauty all around us by which we are so carelessly blessed.”
Alice Walker

“Everything that slows us down and forces patience, everything that sets us back into the slow circles of nature, is a help. Gardening is an instrument of grace.”
May Sarton

“God does not die on the day we cease to believe in a personal deity. But we die on the day when our lives cease to be illumined by the steady radiance of wonder renewed daily, the source of which is beyond all reason.”
Dag Hammarskjold

Mary had grown up knowing that she was different from the other kids, and she hated it. Mary was born with a cleft palate. She would hear the jokes and tolerate the stares of other children (some cruel, others, simply curious) who teased her about her misshaped lip, her crooked nose and garbled speech. Mary grew up hating the fact that she was “different.” She was convinced that no one, outside her family, could ever love her.

Until she entered Mrs. Leonard’s class. Mrs. Leonard had a warm smile, a round face, and shiny brown hair.

In the 1950’s, teachers would administer an annual hearing test. In addition to her cleft palate, Mary was able to hear out of only one ear. Determined not to give classmates another difference to tease, each year she would cheat on the hearing test.

It was called the “whisper test.” The teacher would stand 1-2 feet behind the student so they could not read her lips. The student would place one finger on the opposite ear to obscure any sound. The teacher would whisper words with 2 distinct syllables toward the student’s ear. The student would repeat the phrase to the teacher. When Mary turned her bad ear toward her teacher, she always pretended to cover her good ear. Mary knew that teachers would typically say, “The sky is blue,” or “What color are your shoes?” But not on that day. Mrs. Leonard changed Mary’s life forever. When the “whisper test” came, Mary heard these words: “Mary, I wish you were my little girl.”

Anne Lamott notes that Grace is an “unseen sound that makes you look up.”
Or, stops you. Right where you are, on an ordinary day, maybe with a cup of coffee in your hand looking out the window at a rain-leaden-sky, and at a narrow shaft of sunlight illuminating the ground near a mossed-covered log where a cluster of daffodil shoots defies winter and sprouts from the soil. Dag Hammarskjold got it right, “God does not die on the day we cease to believe in a personal deity. But we die on the day when our lives cease to be illumined by the steady radiance of wonder renewed daily, the source of which is beyond all reason.”

So. Where do you hear the voice of grace?

Physician Richard Selzer writes about such a moment. "I stand by the bed where the young woman lies, her face post-operative, her mouth twisted in palsy, clownish. A tiny twig of the facial nerve, the one to the muscles of her mouth, has been severed. The surgeon had followed with religious fervor the curve of her flesh; I promise you that. Nevertheless, to remove the tumor in her cheek, I had to cut the little nerve. Her young husband is in the room. He stands on the opposite side of the bed, and altogether they seem to dwell in the evening lamplight, isolated from me, private. Who are they, I ask myself, he and this wry mouth I have made, who gaze at and touch each other so generously, greedily?
The young woman speaks. 'Will my mouth always be like this?' She asks. 'Yes,' I say, 'it will. It is because the nerve was cut.'
She nods and is silent.
But the young man smiles. 'I like it,' he says. 'It is kind of cute.'
All at once I know who he is. I understand, and lower my gaze. One is not bold in an encounter with a god. Unmindful, he bends to kiss her crooked mouth, and I am so close, I can see how he twists his own lips to accommodate to hers, to show her that their kiss still works."

We make a mistake if we assume that we can orchestrate grace. And an even greater mistake if we assume we have to get dressed up for it. Like prom night. Or study for it, like preparing for some multiple choice test that has right and wrong answers.

I can relate to the young actress in the movie Jesus of Montreal. She has been asked to participate in the Passion Play (a play about the last days of Jesus’ life). Up to this point she has worked solely in ads for glamour magazines. She is disarmingly beautiful.
During the first rehearsal for the play, her lines feel forced. Stilted. Nervous.
Daniel (the actor who plays the role of Jesus, and who is directing the scene) tells her, gently, “Make it real. Just talk to me.”
Her response, “That’s hard to do. I want to.” She is clearly embarrassed, “I want to but I have no make-up. No costume.”

My costume? Whatever “image” I need to “wear” in order to be judged, measured, evaluated, approved, accepted. Appropriate.

To say that make-up is a fixation in our culture would be, well, enough to make you cachinnate (or chortle, whichever your druthers). But get this. There are 1700 anti-wrinkle creams on the market. It’s true. And did you know that we spend 12 billion dollars per year just on creams to help us look younger? Not that some people couldn’t use a little cream, just to help out. Truth is, there are those who could benefit from a tube of that extra-strength ointment. Lord knows I could mention some names here and now.

But it’s not about the make-up, is it? It’s about this cultural full-court press that we remake ourselves into someone who will be acceptable. Lovable. Even, one would hope, successful. Because, apparently, whoever we are now. . .well, that just isn’t enough.

So I give in to the latest can’t miss cream or treadmill or book or seminar that promises to make me spiritually or psychologically state of the art.

When I was a kid, my church taught me that Grace had a whole lot to do with giving up drinking and smoking and swearing and playing cards and dancing and women. Giving up dancing was easy since I wasn’t any good at it. And smoking burned my throat. And drinking a whole bottle of peppermint schnapps once on a dare, made me throw up. And women, well, they just confused me. (And yes, they still do. And any man who tells you otherwise is yanking your chain.) Long story short, by college, I didn’t drink or smoke or swear or play cards or dance or even think about women (okay, I’m lying about that part. I did a lot of thinking--and thought if I was lucky I’d find one woman versatile in all those trespasses--I was just scared to death to do anything about it). So I wore the costume. I learned the lingo. But it had absolutely nothing to do with Grace. The game plan was simple: getting to heaven. Jesus was like some Travel-Agent-for-Eternity. And my costume? It was window dressing. My uniform for the divine-hall-monitor, my free pass. Anything to keep God from being less than thrilled.

Because in the end, all I was, was afraid. And not just afraid of God. Or eternal damnation. I was afraid of being found out. As a fake.
I was afraid of facing the reality that performance for appearance sake and some hunt for perfection were booby prizes.
What was needed, was simply to be human.
To be Terry.
I needed to hear the voice of Grace.

The power of fear (that we are not enough) was brought home in the movie Hotel Rwanda. The story of genocide, as hostilities break out when the Hutu government decides to rid themselves of the Tutsi 'cockroaches' once and for all, using the army and all the forces of law and order. They planed to kill them all. There are scenes of massacre and heart-rending instances of people bewildered by what is happening to them. Pat Archer, a benevolent Red Cross relief worker in Rwanda evacuating orphanages, tells about Hutu soldiers raiding an orphanage. And one young orphan Tutsi girl shielding her baby sister from the guns, pleading, “Don’t shoot. Please don’t shoot. I promise, I won't be a Tutsi anymore.”

So. Where do you hear the voice of grace?

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