grace 2.0

This is a wonderful day
I've never seen this one before.

- Maya Angelou

Restarting this blog, I’ve been thinking a lot about grace and what it means, how my relationship to it has changed over the years.

It used to be an ungraspable ideal – an early tag line was “piles of dirt and tiny moments of grace”  - but I have a better appreciation of grace as more of a verb than a noun, something we practice and try in our perfectly imperfect way to cultivate in the best and worst of circumstances.

Over the past month I’ve listened repeatedly to an interview with Brother David Steindl-Rast on Krista Tippet’s podcast On Being. Steindl-Rast is a Benedictine monk in his 90’s who along with Thomas Merton was a pioneer of dialogue between Christian and Buddhist monastics. He's written about gratitude from a spiritual, psychological and physiological perspective, and is a conversation partner in the growing recognition by scientists and physicians that gratitude is a key to well-being. 

Not for everything given to you can you really be grateful - you can't be grateful for war, or violence or sickness - there are many things for which you can't be grateful but you can be  grateful in every moment. 

it's an important distinction to make, because it's not only normal but appropriate to be upset and saddened by things going on in the world and in our lives. We are not grateful for school shootings, for lack of gun laws, for cowardice and cruelty.  I am not grateful for a lot of the challenges I have in my life, no matter how much people tell me that they are a gift, or that what doesn't kill me makes me stronger. But I am more grateful every day than I ever could have imagined, for all sorts of small gifts that I otherwise might not have appreciated. Joy is the happiness that doesn't depend on what happens as he explains and I am finally starting to understand,

Gratitude and grace come from the same Latin root, gratis, and the more I can access one the more the other grows.  

The Buddhist grace before a meal illustrates that link:

Enumerable beings brought us this food; we should know how it comes to us.

It's grace as an act of investigation, a time to pause and consider how our meal got to the table and our interconnection to those who plant and harvest and transport and sell each item that ends up on our plate.

I've been thinking of that active sense of grace today, as we've just completed V's birthday week. It is a week and not just a day because it is a string of celebrations connecting the various people and places that give him the love, respect and help he needs to thrive. The fact that it is a patchwork rather than the cohesive inclusive community I had worked towards and hoped for has left a sting of anger and disappointment at the refusal and rudeness that we’ve faced.  But all that rejection only compounds the gratitude I feel for the enumerable beings that shows us kindness; that treat V with respect and recognize that he has unique abilities and deficiencies like everyone else; that see me as a person in my own right, eager to share my voice. 

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Thank you Friendship Circle for the kosher cupcakes, for the warmth and fun.

Thank you to V's awesome home therapist for the birthday donuts and all the help with independent living skills; thank you for state funding and Medicaid for providing this essential service.

Thank you teachers and therapists at Celebrate the Children for recognizing our kids' intelligence and attributes.

Thank you congregants at Temple Beth Shalom for singing Happy Birthday to V at kiddish after the sensory-friendly service where you accept him as he is (no photos at shul)

Thank you B for being the best big brother a guy could have, and for being a caring, sensitive and wonderful person.















Thank you aunts, uncles, Zeyde, cousins, friends and neighbors who wish us well and make efforts to include us. Thank you for the opportunity in all the challenges to be a better person, a bigger person, to keep fighting for what is right.  I still have a ways to go but I'm grateful for the opportunity to keep working on it. And therein lies grace.