by Harvey Lillywhite
Along the east coast of the U.S. in the early fall, tropical storms surge up from the south and pour lots of rain on us. Today, for instance, we’re in the middle of getting what’s forecast to be 5 to 6 inches of rain. As I stand with my front door open, the rain is heavy and the breeze freighted with tropical warmth. The leaves on the huge tulip poplars and cottonwoods and other hardwoods are just beginning to turn. And in the tumult, the street is already nearly covered with a fresh coat of newly yellowed leaves. For me, all the disparate elements coming together in the mid-Atlantic suburb in Maryland, this simultaneous coming and going, this is Grace.
But in that luscious moment of Grace, I realize what great comfort I have around me, how lucky I am to have a safe and satisfying place to be, with ready access to food and water, a hot shower, a clean bathroom, a well-stocked kitchen, a firm vitagenic bed, a regular source of income that usually manages to keep me afloat, and, right now, a full house—my wife and my 25-year-old, who’s living at home for a year while he works to make a dent in his student loans, and my 21-year-old, who had to take a semester off from college to convalesce from a sudden bout of mono that hit just as this fall semester began.
Meanwhile, I received news six weeks ago from my older sister, now 62, a licensed clinical social worker who has worked all her life, most recently with the Army in Germany doing family counseling with soldiers’ and their families as the soldiers prepared to go off to Afghanistan or have just returned. She emails me that she has left her job—just too much stress after 6 years—and is now back in California, Santa Barbara actually. But she has been unable to find another job. Her unemployment insurance has been suddenly terminated on some technicality that she’s trying to fight. And now, quite unbelievably, she’s homeless, living out of her vintage (though paid for) Honda Element while she looks for work, with no investments and precious little savings.
Immediately, of course, I suggested that she come across the country to live with us in Maryland. But she likes California, doesn’t want to move, is licensed to practice in that state, and hopes the situation will be temporary. By day, she visits various Starbucks and the public library, where she can be online to look for jobs. By night, she sleeps, afraid, in the back of her vehicle.
I’m alarmed and worried for my sister. My wife’s family has heard the news and, whenever they call, ask me if my sister is still “homeless.” The sound of that word is very strange to me. I try to tell them that there are various degrees of homelessness. There are, at one end of this spectrum, those high-functioning souls in bad luck who are trying their best to find work and a “home.” And then there are those, at the other end of the spectrum, who are crushed, completely indigent, and without prospects of any kind beyond hunger, illness, and the end.
I offer to send a little money—I don’t have much. But my sister isn’t taking any money from her little brother, or anyone else it seems. And she has no address. I tell her there are people who are homeless by choice. I find websites dedicated to this nomadic lifestyle. She’s offended and tells me she is not homeless by choice. But, at 62, it’s tough finding work.
Should my sister’s homelessness prove to be temporary, I imagine to myself that it will be another interesting life experience. At the beginning, I offer unsolicited advice to her, which only upsets her. So I’ve stopped giving advice of any kind. I’m here for you, I tell her. I “listen” when she sends me emails that seem bleak, more and more alarming, and fairly desperate. I worry what will happen if this lasts for six months, a year, and beyond?
So here I am, in relative abundance. The heavens opened and falling on the little garden in front of my house, still green. The two azaleas I got from the nursery, apparently imported from some country in the southern hemisphere, have just begun to blossom, totally out of season here. Their big scarlet flowers suggesting spring and better days to come, while the remnants of this hurricane spawn tornadoes just east of us. I’m thinking that Grace is a privileged idea. While my sister is literally worried about surviving, I’m here on a dramatic day, contemplating Grace. I wonder how many of the World’s nearly 7 billion living, breathing souls are engaged, at this moment, in such thoughts?
Is Grace loveliness, balance, dignity, beauty, elegance, finesse, refinement, or lithesomeness. Is it mercy, compassion, forgiveness, benevolence, forbearance, charity, generosity, tenderness, kindliness, or love? Is it moral strength, favored status, excellence of divine origin. Is it hard work? Is it just luck? Is it the light? The darkness?
I imagine that state of mind, an easy thing for me to consider. I think of it as having a wide perspective on life, the widest imaginable. As I think about it, I think Grace must be a way of seeing creation as a benevolent thing. But my privilege is showing. Creation is utterly violent as much as it is ever benevolent. I think of Zen monks sitting near a slaughterhouse. So maybe grace is utter neutrality, the ability to see life, at any extreme, and be unaffected. But in Grace there must be compassion. From my earliest memories, I’ve always been familiar with sadness, particularly the sadness that resides in the midst of joy.
Maybe Grace is the ability to see us all as little whirlpools in the big current of all there is. Sometimes we spin free and clean, sometimes we pull in sticks and pebbles. But we spin through our allotted time until we stop spinning and rejoin the bigger current, what we always were. That big perspective that realizes the simultaneous importance and insignificance of any given self, that perspective that sees the idea of a self as fictional at best and essentially unreal, that big perspective confers some sense of Grace. “O momentary grace of mortal men. . . .”
That which is pleasant and pleasing, Grace. What suburban guilt I harbor. An unimportant man, doing unimportant things. The world is huge. I’m very small. I go on with my day.
One of my college students this semester, from Baltimore, says, “I am an applied math major; I hope to work for NSA as a cryptologist or cryptographer. I am a member of the university Marching Band. I spin the flag.” Nurbeck, another of my students this semester, from Uzbekistan, says, “After I become wealthy, I plan to own all the fast and beautiful cars like Aston Martin, Bugati, Ferrari, Koenigsegg, Lamborghini, Rolls Royce, Zonda, and whatnot. I plan on buying a racetrack for my personal use so I can drive these cars fast, to their fullest.”
What dreams we conjure to grace our lives.
Still it’s raining. The winds have come up. The big trees are nearly failing. There is the sound of the ocean all around us. Fat, red, heart-sized leaves are falling in my garden from the two old dogwoods. It’s exciting. It’s lovely. A tree full of sacred hearts, some falling, some wavering, glistening with the rain.
So privileged, here I am with nothing better to do but watch all this, while my sister must just now be waking up, wondering where she can find a bathroom, a meal, too proud to ask for help, full of dreams that never happened, full of dreams nonetheless, dreams of how bad things could become, or of some salvation, hurting. And I am well, imagining Grace, watching the tempest outside my window, for real. My wife calls down, “It feels muggy, should we put on the air-conditioning?”
When I ask my son, out of the blue, how many of the earth’s nearly 7 billion people are, at this moment, thinking about Grace, he reminds me that about half of them are asleep. And of the remaining half, many are too young or too old to be thinking about much of anything. But, among those awakened souls, he reminds me that hope and religion are extremely important, and that Grace may be the only thing that gets many people through the day. Fair enough, I say.
But for me, being privileged, as most of those who will read this are, no doubt, Grace is something different. I think of Grace as something startling, something to be wrestled with, something uncomfortable and difficult to retain.
At 9, I was sent outside—my father having custody of me for the weekends and the problem of how to get me relatively safely out of the house so he could entertain a friend— on many a Saturday to watch movies in downtown Salt Lake City. He lived in the Kessler Apartments exactly across the street from the state capitol building at the very top of State Street, the thoroughfare that runs for 22 miles straight as an arrow through the center of the city, ending near the state penitentiary at the end of the valley the city sits in. About a mile down the steep hill from his apartment, in the center of town (in 1962) were several movie houses. My favorite was the Gem. It showed three features throughout the day (only one screen in those days).
I remember seeing To Kill a Mockingbird, Lawrence of Arabia, and The Manchurian Candidate, back to back to back. Another weekend I saw Dr. No, The Miracle Worker, and Cape Fear (the one with Gregory Peck and Robert Mitchum). At another theater, the Rialto, I saw less famous movies like Carnival of Souls. At the Centre Theatre I saw The Music Man. But the Gem was my favorite. Cheap popcorn, air conditioning, and bums who’d go to the balcony to sleep through the hot summer days. In a row, I watched Whatever Happened to Baby Jane, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and The Brain That Wouldn’t Die. At the Lyric, I saw Mutiny on the Bounty, and, two of my favorites, Long Day’s Journey Into Night, and Days of Wine and Roses.
In those days, anybody with four bits (50 cents) could come in and stay all day. And while these movies played, and, at the judicial age of 9, I tried to figure out how to spend my time with divorced parents, both suffering at least as much as the characters on the big screen. So how does this connect to my idea of Grace as an uncomfortable, important moment? It was the experience, that came in two versions, when I’d leave the movies to return to my Dad’s bleak one-room apartment—that long walk up the hill.
Version one would happen when I’d go to see a single movie, entering usually just after noon, and, having been sitting in the dark, air-conditioned space for 2 hours or so (they had cartoons and short features), I’d leave the theater and be stunned by the bright white-hot glare of the mid-day sun. It was quite literally blinding. It was disorienting. The thought would cross my mind that I could never live in such a bright place. It was painful. I’d shut my eyes and try to find some shadow to stand in for a few minutes while my eyes adjusted.
Version two would happen when I went to the Gem to see the triple-features. I’d enter in the afternoon, and, when I came out, it was dark, as though the day had been gobbled up forever. It was equally disorienting. It would frighten me. The bums who’d sleep in the balcony were now out on the street asking for change. I’d run the mile and a half back up State Street, up the steep hill, worrying about murderers behind every bush.
Yes, I always made it back “home.” But these sudden, disorienting moments are how I think of Grace now. So much of my waking moments are spent in the theater of my mind, engrossed in my own personal movie dramas, worrying about what I have to do, problems that need attention, trying to figure things out in my complicated life. It’s tough for me to come out of that theater, to come out of my own thoughts and feelings long enough to actually see what’s there in front of me. But, when I do, I’m amazed by what I see. This world around me. How lucky I am even to be in the bad shape I’m in. This is “home,” the true home I’ve always known, as uncomfortable as it is. And like a turtle out of its shell, I witness this Grace, uncomfortable, wanting nothing more, really, than to get back into my armor.
So, there it is. Today the heavens opened up, flooding roads around here. The light rail my son takes to come home has closed down because of fallen trees on the tracks. So I drive through the torrents to pick him up at North Avenue to bring him home, where it looks like he’ll be for another year. It’s then that he reminds me of the importance of religion in the lives of so many. It’s odd, I think, being so privileged—“home” never really an issue for me—that religion seems extremely distant to me. I’m quite sure that no God is manipulating the strings up there, rewarding and punishing HIS children. I’m quite sure that there’s no afterlife, that this is it. And I’m also sure that this cosmos is so big that my tiny mind doesn’t know the half of it, the one-billionth of it.
“To elaborate is no avail, learn'd and unlearn'd feel that it is so. Sure as the most certain sure, plumb in the uprights, well entretied, braced in the beams, Stout as a horse, affectionate, haughty, electrical, I and this mystery here we stand. Clear and sweet is my soul, and clear and sweet is all that is not my soul.”
Again, I’m moved to recall the only prayer I feel is legitimate, “Thanks.”
There is a moment when I come out of myself, when, for a quick moment, I can see what’s there in front of me, hear the actual noises around me, feel the strong winds, the dangerous tropical breezes, the glistening calm. Privileged as I am, I have all the home I need, maybe too much home. Maybe I’m too blinded by home. My sister, out on the left coast, on the other hand, is vulnerable. In her emails I read fear and huge disappointment. In my comfort, I can honor birth and death endlessly wrestling, one the same as the next, neither better than the other. But worrying about her, I’m brought out of my comfort for a time, into Grace, into reality. I hope she’s okay. She knows I’ll do anything to help. When my in-laws call, again I explain to them about the different degrees of homelessness.