Grace by Any Other Name

Perhaps the beginning of my book... we'll see. The time has come to be brave I think.
***
Our family was a rain forest: lush and rotting, with little in between. When I was flailing between childhood and adulthood, I never knew whether it was a blessing or a curse — I had to learn a different language to finally accept it as both. The pivotal word in that language is “grace”. I gradually came to realize that I had been aware of moments of grace in my life right from the time I had words at my disposal for speaking — perhaps even earlier. "Grace" itself, however, was a word that I would not find until much later.

HOW I GOT RELIGION ©2007
And there were angels in the willows,
And fairies on the water,
All singing,
All sighing,
All circling her soul.

Closing ranks, they called Hosannas
To the God who saved a child,
flying to her in a mouse,
In the shine on water,
And the sound of silent saviors
Who cleared the wayward strand
from wide eyes too terrified to see,
Who wiped big tears
from the face too tiny to know death and blood.

Yet she knew.

They circled her soul in innocence,
And in the stillness of a mouse
beneath her hand,
She heard the answer “Love.”

She already knew.

And there are angels in the willows, still,
And the fairies on the water dance.
And the question and the answer are the same.

... And she knows.

We had mice in our first home, a gingerbread Victorian farmhouse in Connecticut. Mousetraps were a part of country life, and I knew full well not to touch them; and I knew what the telltale snap meant. I was always the first one to rise, from the day I discovered how to escape from my crib. Even at three, I loved the solitude of the dawn, before my mother must have been aware that her youngest was on the prowl and it was time for her day to begin as well. That morning, as I wandered into the kitchen, I heard the snap in the basement, and decided that was the day to explore.

To my dismay, it squeaked. The mouse. It squeaked and I thought it was wriggling.

I ran to get my brother, Jim. His room was the nearest. “Jimmy, Jimmy. Get UP! We have to make it stop!”

I remember pulling at him, and I remember his face: cold, dark, masked. He hated being wakened, but I was too little to understand what that meant. I knew only that I could not play with the trap and that the mouse needed our help. “Come ON, Jimmy. NOW!” I pulled at him and he quietly accompanied me downstairs.

I remember his looking at me, down to the mouse, and back at me. He smiled and said, “Put your hand on him to keep him calm, Jetty.” Jim walked away and I squatted down. The mouse was warm, but he was quiet; I must have calmed him down. He was very soft and warm.

“We’ll stop him now,” Jim said. He gently placed a board on my hand, and in the time it took me to look up to ask why, his foot met the board and my hand met something different. In that meeting of my hand and another life, I met God.

My God, forever the God of a three-year-old. I might have come away with only horror, or, even worse, a sense of myself as a murderer, but I did not. Instead, I became The Watcher, defender of all mice. I was their companion and friend. Every morning I checked the traps and, if a mouse was there, just to be sure, I would sit by it for a time, stroking it with my pinky, whispering that soon it would be okay. I simply loved them, and I loved them simply.

My innocence died with the meeting of my flesh and a mouse’s, but I clung to something greater. I knew only that Love was It. That simple thought, “Love is God.” No more, no less.

***
And this is grace, to me. Through the moments of terror, agony, and loss, Grace has surrounded me — a cloud that envelopes me to usher me home, rather than an epiphany or some grand wisdom from within. I was far too little to understand the enormity of my brother’s act, and too little to wrap my mind around the feel of death beneath my hand. It was the birth of the writer, perhaps more than the death of innocence. I transformed the horrible into Myth, at the center of which was Me, the hero. I liked that. Who wouldn’t? It was a way to rise above most anything that happened. I spun episodes of torture into television episodes of Robin Hood and Maid Marion, Flash Gordon, Sky King. If I was the hero, then Jim could not really touch me. God was my buddy; Love was my mantle of invincibility. It worked for me.

Unfortunately, it never went over big with some adults. Particularly the minister’s wife. She taught Sunday school at our Baptist church, back when I was nine. That’s when I was expelled from Sunday school.

Mrs. E. told us we were to pray to Jesus, and I asked, “Why?”

I can still hear her gasp and see her shudder. “Jeannette, what do you mean, Why?”

I couldn’t figure out why she was so mad, but I explained what was obvious to me. “Well, look. Jesus taught us to pray saying ‘Our Father, who art in Heaven,’ right?”

She nodded, but still didn’t seem to get it. And she was still mad.

“Well, he didn’t teach us to pray saying, ‘Our Jesus who art in Heaven,’ so what do I need to pray to Jesus for? I can pray straight to God.”

She grabbed me by the shoulder and shouted at me to stand up. She pushed me to the front of the class and said, “Don’t any of you listen to this girl. She is a sinner. Jeannette, you go home right now, and you think about this blasphemy. I will be calling your mother. Go on like this, child, and you’ll find yourself in Hell.”

I suppose I should have been terrified when she made me walk home. It was a pretty long walk, a couple of miles at least. I was embarrassed, and I was vaguely disturbed about the Hell business, but it was a sunny day, and it was warm, and there were flowers in bloom and I found myself singing instead, and reasonably sure that God and I were still buddies.

Of course, then I saw my mother’s face and it was clear that Mrs. E. had called. That held far more fear than Hell.

“What happened, Missy?” The dreaded 'Missy.' Nevertheless I looked her straight in the eyes, took a deep breath and auto-fired the entire story in one breath, ending with, “I don’t get why that was so bad, Mom.”

She came to me, then, and tipped my face up toward her, as was her custom, two fingers under my chin. She didn’t look all that mad. “Do you think you were sinful and bad?”

“No!” The force of the word scared me quiet a moment, but my mom was smiling then, so I added, “I think God likes me just fine.” I could feel myself scowling and the stupid tears would make an appearance then.

But there was my mother’s kiss, right on the tip of my nose and her only answer, more whisper than spoken, “I think He does, too.”

I never went back and my mother never even asked me to. Furthermore, I never did pray to Jesus, preferring to take it all to the Big Kahuna, directly.

***
Grace came to me crashing or creeping; who’s to say which was what? Sometimes as simple as the love in my mother’s eyes. To my child’s line of sight, the moments loomed large, and God danced around in them all. To my older eyes? It all dances pretty much the same.