Every time I was forced to write a thank-you note growing up, I wanted to set myself on fire.
(I may have been a dramatic kid.)
What I didn’t get at the time, though I’m sure it was expressed to me on multiple occasions, was that the note-writing wasn’t an exercise in empty Southern etiquette or an attempt for my mom to gather a few minutes away from the constant “Why“ing and hanging-on of her young daughters. Not just that, at least. It was an expression of gratitude, of appropriate appreciation. But I was a child of the law: I filtered everything through shoulds and have tos. I obeyed obligation. And it would be decades before that changed.
Now that I’m older and have had many more occasions to express gratitude–finding a husband, bearing his children, acknowledging the silver and linens that arrive with such events–I’ve had to squeeze writing notes in between more time-consuming and, dare I say, more important activities than bike-riding and swinging. I’ve bent over stationery while surrounded by moving boxes begging to be unpacked, or put pen to paper while one child poops his pants and the other screams to be fed. The note-writing, gratitude-conveying duties that complement adulthood can feel squelched of fun and, compared to what I could be–or want to be–doing, devoid of meaning.
It all seems like obligation, like law, when grace is a casualty of my busyness. Of my perceived self-importance. Of the laundry and the mundane.
Which is why it feels counter-intuitive to have landed ourselves in an Anglican church, where liturgy is the order of the (Sun)day. It could feel like we’re jack-in-the-boxes, bobbing up and down for hymns and readings and prayers with fancy-sounding names. It could feel like meaningless repetition, empty exercises with divine intentions slapped on for good measure. It could feel like law.
Spoiler alert: it doesn’t.
Why?
Flannery O’Connor wrote, “I distrust pious phrases, particularly when they issue from my mouth. I try militantly never to be affected by the pious language of the faithful but it is always coming out when you least expect it. In contrast to the pious language of the faithful, the liturgy is beautifully flat.” Beautifully flat. I wonder how much of my day, how much of my Sunday, how much of my life I could describe that way–resentfully, as though the flat were the only part that mattered, the daily rhythms reduced to monotony, and sameness becoming equated with negative. And yet she calls it beautiful, these repetitions and re-dos and returns that all look alike. Revisiting the same material, the same places, over and over.
It could all lead to a loss of meaning…or an infusion of it.
This time last summer, The Husband headed west for a trip and I headed south for a visit: I, round with seven and a half months’ pregnancy and a two-year old in tow. A two-and-a-half hour trip became three with a stop at Chick-Fil-A and a stint at the playground there, The Kid stepping gingerly around the structures and remaining resolutely on the padded floor. Our last night at my parents’, TK woke up in the middle of the night, punctuating my own insomnia with his cries, and I was debating whether to call my doctor because there were contractions and I didn’t know whether to drink more water (and ensure a night full of peeing) or just try to go back to sleep. I called The Mom for back-up and she curled into bed beside TK while Little Brother kicked at my belly and I tried not to worry (a fool’s errand). Last weekend, four of us made the trip, and at the playground, I fed LB on the bench while TH kept an eye on TK and a little girl with a lip blister kept getting too close and I tried not to breathe in as she lisped at me. TK climbed the whole damn thing, and LB kicked away on my lap. There were no sleepless nights, just one where I shared a bed with The Niece and she curled up beside me and migrated all over the mattress in her slumber and consistently took up over three quarters of the bed as LB slept in the pack and play beside us, breathing sweetly. It was…better. Sometimes similar. Sometimes harder. But better. It was more than it had been before.
The next morning LB woke up on Eastern time, and I padded through the dark house with him. He drained his bottle and we watched the sun rise together–one of many sunrises we’ve shared, day after day, after padding through one dark house or another. And that night, the fireworks show we had anticipated after last years’ experience–the one that looked like this?
That show never came, because a different one happened: one with yard-drenching rain and pounding thunder and cracking lightning, and TK loved this one too–kept turning to us and grinning in delight, clapping his hands together and laughing deliriously. At the end of it, The Niece turned to us, and she said, “Well, that was a fireworks show too.”
The same, but different.
And I think about it, how it’s not that the notes or the words or the rituals become infused with meaning, but that I finally gain eyes to see the meaning they always had. How my heart gets retuned, one of the many saving works of grace, to gratitude and awareness and appreciation. How a trip through the backyard becomes an expedition. How a recitation of the liturgy becomes a formation of community through time. How I followed the rules back then, but I didn’t feel the freedom. How I cursed less, but was more of an asshole.
How all things, even the old–especially those–are made new, even in their seeming sameness.
How I’ve always known that grace meant love, that of course if there’s a God he loves me, but on that anxiety-fueled ride to work yesterday, as I allowed my mind to stretch from the present moment to next week’s cross-country flight and the trip after and the day ahead and even this school year and past that–how, in a breath of a moment, I felt the love: felt it like rain on my shoulders, and with it the thought that capsized all the fears: If you’re really loved this much, then how can you worry? How can you feel anything but joy?
The words that I’d heard over and over, becoming life. Becoming real. Becoming, as he makes all things, new.