I keep telling the same damn stories.
I was listening to the Masterpiece Studio podcast the other day, as people do, when Mark Gatiss was interviewed. He’s the prolific writer and actor from Doctor Who and Sherlock, among others, and in case you haven’t seen either, allow me to assure you that he does some quality shit. He quotes a favorite author of his, Wilkie Collins, who wrote underneath a sign that read, “Make ’em cry. Make ’em laugh. Make ’em wait.”
I wonder now if he borrowed that idea from the author of my own story.
My younger years were spent in movement, flitting from one item on the list to the next: high school, college, grad school. Montgomery, Birmingham, New York. This relationship to that one to, mostly, not one. Scrambling to find myself, construct an identity, figure out this life. It’s no coincidence that a deeper understanding of grace has coincided with a less mobile period in my life, one in which I am staying put both out of necessity (two pretty cute and challenging little anchors) and rest: I don’t have to create a life, a self. I can be still. It’s already happening.
Bertrand Russell wrote that “a child develops best when, like a young plant, he is left undisturbed in the same soil.” I don’t know about the age specification, but it’s certainly true for me now, the whole bloom-where-you’re-planted thing. Since I came to the realization (kicking and screaming at first, death grip on my plans intact, then gradually moving on to acceptance and surrender–most of the time) that I’m not running this show or writing this story, I’ve become aware that my actual role–one of living it, and telling it–involves a fair amount of waiting. And watching, for themes seem to keep repeating themselves. Grace is a story told a million different ways and times.
Ever the student, I’ve begun studying the components of the liturgy that we hear every week. Like the ancient monastic orders, I downloaded an app to my phone that provides the three daily prayers and their scriptural accompaniments, which, in my often graceless hands, would just represent my attempt at trying to be “good”, at scrambling to secure my own righteousness. Cross another prayer off the list and get back to ordering my life. I mean, these prayers are hella long. That deserves some credit, right?
Funny how grace changes the alchemy of words read and offered up, of what is taken in and what remains behind, stirring almost imperceptibly in my heart and mind to create a moment of understanding: oh yeah, there’s a God. And he’s, like, in charge. And he loves me. Funny how these truths that I thought I always knew become new, go from known to now, both connect me to and free me from the present moment and send me into a deeper reality. It’s all such mystery: how much of faith feels like starting over, yet coming back to the same place. The first couple of times I read the prayers, I noted with annoyance that there was so much repetition. “Is this on purpose?” I thought irritably, ruing the apparent lack of efficiency when you’re rooted in the same spot, then noticing how being rooted in the same spot might just lead to growth, the truth unfurling within me now that it had room to move.
There is a beauty in the repetition, I am beginning to see, a wonder in the never-quite-complete that is constantly returned to, that has its fulfillment down the road in something bigger than myself. It’s like a promise always being kept, and one day being revealed. And this liturgy, these lines that could just be words said over and over, they are showing me the more that they are: showing me how little rests on me, how much is already held, how insufficient I am and others are yet how full of potential. They are giving me something to return to: a rhythm to my days that might have remained hidden.
Little Brother and The Kid and I are developing a new rhythm too, now that I’m embarking on a Stay-at-Home gig for the foreseeable future (more on that later), and mid-afternoons is when we head upstairs for diaper changes and potty time. I sit next to the toilet by TK while he peruses the iPad, and LB’s newest trick is to sit behind my and TH’s bedroom door and slam it shut. Next come the tears: this block of wood separating him from his people?! The inhumanity! So I open the door, explain what he’s doing, return to my perch by the pot, and hear the whole damn scene repeat itself. The door slams, The Kid doesn’t pee, and we’re sitting here doing the same thing every day while tiny changes occur without our seeing, movement toward the next thing, learning. The story unfolding as it is written to. All of it, a mystery.
What if I wrote the story? There’d be no waiting. There’d be no difficulty. There’d be no tension. There’d be no mystery. And, like Dean Young writes in his poem “One Story”, there’d be no beauty:
…I mean what
would you do if you had to create Beauty?
I’m afraid I’d start screaming, the most irksome
forms of insects coming from my mouth. I’m afraid
I’d come up with Death.
And the mystery continues every day, incomplete but with glimpses of its future full beauty: this same moment every day, when we climb into the rocking chair where I held them as newborns, and we read the same books, turn the same pages, sit in the same spots: one on my lap, the other beside me, doing the same things, waiting to be made complete even as we rest in our stillness.