Yellow Leaves, Golden Memories

By Rev. Terry A. Davis

Delivered at Northwest Unitarian Universalist Congregation on

Sunday, October 14, 2012

 

If I were to describe my childhood family to you, I could tell you many things about us. There were five of us. We were middle class. We lived in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, DC. We ate spaghetti after mass every Sunday. We played Monopoly a lot. We fought a lot, cried a lot, and laughed a lot.

We were also a family who liked rituals, particularly those associated with the changing seasons. In the winter, we made our snowmen and ate our grilled cheese sandwiches. In the spring, we visited the blossoming cherry trees along the Tidal Basin and flew our paper kites. In the summer, we went to Ocean City, collected our seashells on the shimmering beach, and rode the rides in the amusement park at the end of the old boardwalk.

And, in the fall, well . . . we became leaf people. We would pile into Grandma Gosnell’s blue Ford Galaxie with fried chicken in a picnic basket in the trunk. Grandma and the rest of us – with my father at the wheel – would then drive from Maryland to Virginia until we came to the 105-mile stretch of road in the Shenandoah National Park known as Skyline Drive. Then, leaf people that we were, we would drive the entire route . . . at the posted speed limit of 35 miles an hour.

We’d twist and turn our way over high ridges and through colorful fall foliage, stopping to stretch our legs, take photos, and eventually eat our chicken. Mid-way on the parkway, we’d stop at Luray Caverns to take in the weird and wonderful stalactite and stalagmite formations with names such as “Titania’s Veil” and “The Fried Eggs.” Finally – with tired muscles, sore butts, and carsick stomachs – we’d make the long car trip back home as the evening approached and the skies grew purple.

In recalling these times of yellow leaves and family rituals, I am aware of memories that are truly delightful. I have memories of wonderful bonding experiences with my grandmother, my sisters, and my parents. I have memories of how much we enjoyed simple pleasures . . . how we celebrated Nature’s beauty with nothing more than Grandma’s binoculars to enhance the experience.

Those fall leaf trips also bring back memories of difficult times. They remind me of those stresses and strains that chipped away at my parents’ marriage and eventually made family outings a thing of the past. They remind me of my painful teenage years . . . years that were filled with lots of fear and self-loathing. And, they remind me of my dear grandmother . . . someone who was such a loving presence in my life and who – I learned much later – was privately fighting her own demons of depression and alcohol abuse.

These golden memories of fall rituals and all the beauty and pain that I find there make me keenly aware of the spiritual concept Linton referenced in his moving reflection . . . the concept of grace.

I believe that grace is a concept worth paying attention to, which is why it is the topic of my sermon this morning. It’s worth paying attention to because I believe that grace can lead us to lives filled with more gratitude and peace.

I believe that grace gives us the ability to see all things – even tragic loss – have their season, just as summer green must give way to the golds and browns of fall. Grace enables us to see and experience those saving moments that restore our hope. Grace gives us the ability to go on. It may not rewrite the painful history of our past, but I believe it makes it possible for us to heal enough to rediscover gratitude and find a measure of joy and hope again.

To examine this notion of grace and how we as Unitarian Universalists with diverse beliefs can use it as one of our spiritual lenses, it might help to begin by exploring some definitions of grace.

Rooted in Judeo-Christian theology, grace in the theistic sense is understood as being an unmerited gift from God . . . a really big and deeply profound gift . . . one that comes in the nick of time or when we least expect it.

Grace usually arrives in the form of someone being saved from experiencing pain or a tragic outcome. Examples of God’s grace can be found in the Hebrew and Christian bibles, starting with the book of Genesis and the story of Noah and flood. As the story goes, Noah was spared from the flood that God sent to kill humankind not because of anything Noah did. Rather, the scripture says that “Noah found favor in the sight of the LORD.”[i] Therefore, Noah and his family lived, while other men, women and children drowned.

The Hebrew word for “favor” was translated as “grace” in the Greek version of the Hebrew bible written in the 3^rd century.[ii]  Thus, grace is understood as a favor from God.

This understanding of grace as a divine favor may work fine if you believe that God is all-knowing and wouldn’t drown countless human beings without just cause. However, my guess is that most of us recognize that bad things happen to good people every day. So this understanding of grace as a random divine favor becomes for many – including me – hard to swallow. Why would God spare me from tragedy, for example, but be okay with you going through one?

To illustrate my point about the irrationality of the random nature of grace, I want to share a pastoral care experience of mine. It occurred again in a hospital, where I was providing support to two different families visiting the ICU, where each had a loved one in critical condition.

While I was talking with the family members of one of the patients, the other patient in the room next door went into cardiac arrest.  After furious and repeated attempts to revive him, the doctors concluded that nothing more could be done. Because of the close proximity of the rooms, the family whose loved one was still alive overheard and witnessed the activity taking place. As I left the room of the deceased patient, a family member of the still-surviving patient came up to me and said, “Pastor, they must not have been praying the right way.”

“Excuse me?” I said, feeling stunned by his comment.

“Well, we’ve been praying all day for Victor. He coded once today, too, but he made it through. We think God showed favor on our prayers and, therefore, decided to let him live.”

My heart sank at this remark. “I’m sorry,” I replied. “While I’m glad to know that your loved one is still with you, I can’t help but think that the other family prayed as earnestly as you did.” What I didn’t say, of course, is that I also didn’t believe that God had anything to do with sparing the life of their beloved . . . which brings me to my own definition of grace, that I’d like to share with you.

I believe that the word grace describes a profound and precious experience . . .  one where we sense that we’ve been spared a great pain or loss. Grace describes those moments in life that challenge our reasoning because their outcomes are so unexplainably wonderful and right on time. I believe that experiences of grace can ultimately cultivate within us deep feelings of gratitude and of peace.

It isn’t necessary for me to connect grace to a divine force or higher power to accept that grace abounds in my life. In fact, to do so makes the notion of grace problematic for me. It leads me down the path of imagining that someone or something is deciding who experiences pain and who is spared from it. And, I don’t believe that anyone deserves anything more than a chance at healing and peace. So, rather than attempt to determine the source of grace, I find it more beneficial to my sense of well-being to accept grace with gratitude.

In thinking back about my fall leaf trips with my family, they have become golden memories for me because I can see where grace was present. I believe that on those family outings it was grace that enabled my hurting grandmother to reconnect with a sense of hope and wonder. At roadside overlooks, she would take my hand, and we would climb out of the car and onto a nearby large rock. Together, we would look out onto the colorful ridges that rippled like waves in the distance before us. She would lend me her binoculars for closer inspection, saying “Isn’t it just beautiful?”

Author Anne Lamott wrote, “I do not understand the mystery of grace – only that it meets us where we are but does not leave us where it found us.” I believe that the painful and tragic circumstances of my grandmother’s life – the sudden death of her husband long ago, the struggle of raising two young children as a single parent, the loneliness of her tiny apartment and her later years – were soothed and softened on those autumn afternoons in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia.

In those moments, grace met my grandmother where she was, and I believe its timing and beauty left her not as it found her. My grandmother, in spite of her struggles, had a deep love of Nature and for us. That she managed to stay present in our lives and share herself with us was indeed a tragedy averted. We were the ones who were spared the tragedy of not having her loving presence in our lives. And, I am left with a deep gratitude for all she was and all she gave to me.

The human experience is one that involves pain and loss . . . sometimes in ways that are horrific and defy our understanding. We have only to read the morning headlines to see examples of senseless violence and heartbreaking despair. Where is the grace in these times? In our own lives?

I think the answer lies in our ability to cultivate gratitude . . . even for the smallest and most temporal of things . . . and even after devastating tragedies. I believe that when gratitude is present, our eyes are opened in a new way to the grace that exists in our lives.

Unitarian Universalist minister and chaplain Kate Braestrup compares grace to miracles. She reflects on the role of gratitude in her life after the accidental death of her husband Drew. In her memoir Here if You Need Me: A True Story, she writes, “A grateful heart beats in a world of miracles. If I could only speak one prayer for you, it would be that your hearts would not only beat but grow ever greater in gratitude, that your lives, however long they prove to be and no matter how they end, continue to bring you miracles in abundance.”

Miracles in abundance are grace in abundance. And I believe grace is available to all of us. To find it, we need only approach our lives with some measure of gratitude . . . gratitude for the memories of seasons past . . . and gratitude for our willingness to keep saying “yes” to life and all its joys and challenges.

May a life of revealed grace and rediscovered gratitude be yours and mine . . . today and each day. Amen.