Privilege and Gratitude in Everyday Ramblings

After a week of rain we are finally getting a break. It has been so dark and damp and cave-like and it is affecting everyone’s mood.

Well that… and the news.

I guess one good tidbit is that our unfathomably crude president has now canceled his London trip. At least someone gets a break for now.

Diego is rubbing up against the screen of my laptop as I type this because he is convinced it absolutely is time for him to get wet food. He has also been licking my sweat pants (gross!) where Frida was drooling earlier as I sat outside with her sharing a dog biscuit as Mrs. Sherlock went into Starbucks to get us some warm drinks.

Both of us are finally well and we had a most engaging and interesting talk as we walked.

The main point of the conversation was about getting together in groups and having interactions and finding that no matter how much one prepares, the situations never ever go exactly as planned.

This happens to me with classes. I prepare for them but it is a rare class where there isn’t something that comes up that doesn’t require some sort of adjustment.

Mrs. Sherlock led a discussion at Women’s Circle recently that was theoretically supposed to be about the road not taken. She is deeply interested in the choices folks make that influence how they lead their lives, particularly unusual choices.

But the Circle participants tend to be more on board with the traditional role or road taken and that is what they wanted to talk about, and then their regrets about that, which is not what she had in mind at all.

I asked her about what was on the upcoming agenda for the program of spiritual development she is participating in through the church.

She said that this upcoming week they are supposed to talk about God.

Eek.

So we talked about that. I wanted to listen and help her articulate her feelings on the subject but I was also curious about her beliefs and point of view. What was interesting was she said more than once that she didn’t want to offend anyone in the group and particularly those who have expressed that they have a close personal relationship with God and ask for his help daily. Mrs. Sherlock is a non-believer.

And it turns out that her husband who is about to turn 80 has a slow growing mass in a very inconvenient place as well as what has turned into a profound limitation on his mobility and needs a hip replacement.

And that got us to talking about the difference between grace and gratitude. Her theory is that right now there is too much emphasis on gratitude, which she sees as being a product of privilege and not enough focus on grace.

And that got us talking about vulnerability.

And how it is important to allow oneself to be vulnerable because, you know, really, we often are, and how that is the only way in for grace.

Grace is not something we generate for ourselves, (mighty bootstrap puller uppers we) it is something that comes from outside.

And that it is okay to be scared and upset and disturbed when one gets say a diagnoses of cancer, or even something as minor seeming as standing at a bus stop like I did yesterday waiting patiently but somewhat irritably for a bus and when it came, oh cold dark afternoon, it just blew right by me and left me standing there.

She told me this story that has haunted her for over 20 years. She was in Yugoslavia with a well-heeled group and they were taking this old bus through a rural area to a shrine or a market town and as they drove through this outlying area, there would be these old women, heads wrapped in scarves, with baskets over their arms, waiting, waiting for the bus. But it did not stop because it was full of well off American tourists.

She says it was the look of long suffering defeat on their faces that broke her heart and stays with her to this day.

There is a poem in there, in this unfair, frazzled crazy world; a poem but also an opening for grace.

It can’t come soon enough.

Last updated January 14, 2018