I was 7 or 8 when Mom enrolled me and my younger sister in ballet class with Miss Eileen. Even though I am more of a jazz hands and tap dance kind of girl, I was enthralled with the shoes and the costumes, the pale and milky leotards, the discipline. Someone decrepit sat at the piano plinking music. Lines of coltish girls followed Miss Eileen’s croaky directives.
I don’t remember much beyond that, except for my effort. It surfaces from my recollection as a form of muscle memory. In that dance class I held my hands just so, turned my toes just so, stood at the barre just so. Earnest effort radiated from me. Love me, it said. See me and love me and approve of me and love me.
At that age I was a pleaser and a tryer, and I liked being both. I was first born into a thicket of siblings, plucky as a default setting, and drafted very early into responsibilities I fulfilled with bushy-tailed eagerness.
After class one day, Miss Eileen took my mother and me aside and delivered her withering pronouncement: “She tries, but she isn’t very graceful.”
Miss Eileen’s words stung. Stung and confused. I was not graceful? I was not full of grace? I wasn’t really sure what Miss Eileen meant exactly, but not being it was clearly an undesirable thing. At that time, the only person I knew for sure who was full of grace was Mary, the virgin who—as the story tells us—gave birth to Jesus. I knew that because of the first sentence of one of the prayers I droned frequently in church: “Hail Mary, full of grace. The Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou amongst women.” I took that to mean that not only was Mary graceful, she was really, really popular.
My childhood associations with the notion of grace and the state of fullness it induces in some were inextricably tied to God and all his mysterious maneuverings. Someone at the dinner table was chosen to say grace before dinner to bless our food. Grace showed up in the Biblical passages we read in catechism class. Grace was what God brandished to forgive sinners, which I was told by the nuns I would become if I wore the same gaudy blue eyeshadow that Nikki Younger striped across her lids.
As I’ve matured and forsaken organized religion in favor of disorganized spirituality, I’ve unmoored my definitions of grace. Grace, as defined by Western theology, perches on too narrow a bandwidth. Grace, as I see it now and know it now, isn’t a commodity dispensed by a higher power. It’s not a cattle prod for wayward souls or the spiritual equivalent of brownie points. Grace has a fluidity that spills outside religious boundaries. Grace shares some of the properties of water. You can’t contain it, it changes forms, and sometimes it rises off of things and fills the surrounding air like a vapor.
I prefer to think of grace as a weather pattern, as a linking verb. Grace is a soft gatheredness tufted by mercy, gratitude and kindliness. Sometimes we can call grace forth on our own but not without practice. Grace is the equivalent of arcing into a righteous camel pose after putting in our hours on the yoga mat. Grace can be like fortune—descending without warning, filling us, fulling us, and leaving gifts in its wake. And then, poof. It is gone.
Anne Lamott, one of my favorite arch evangelists, says this: “Most of us do as well as possible, and some of it works OK. We try to release that which doesn’t and which is never going to. Making so much of it work is the grace of it.” Lamott believes—as I do—that effort is one of the ingredients of grace. Grace doesn’t come without trying. You have to work for it. And then it works for you.
My beloved brother, sister-in-law and niece are a few days away from a long-distance move many, many miles from relatives, land they love, friends and familiarity. I wrote my sister-in-law a card a few days ago, the last one I will send to her South Florida address. “I know this is a difficult time for all of you,” I wrote. “A time of upheaval and transition. I wish you grace.”
I chose the word without really thinking. I don’t write it often, but it seemed fitting. How would I know? These days I feel full of it.
