Have you read something that stays with you, popping into mind out of nowhere, bringing insight to the moment? Recently, I read Pure Act: The Uncommon Life of Robert Lax by Michael N. McGregor. Lax was a great American poet and close friend of Thomas Merton. I took heart in Lax’s long search for the “right” place to live and write and his eventual realization that there was more than one. In his later years he made his home on the Greek island of Patmos, embracing poverty, free to write. If his work found its way to publication, good. But that wasn’t the goal. The goal was to be faithful and to write what was given to him to write, what was in his heart.

Not long after finishing the book, I read an interview of the author in “Bearings Online,” the Collegeville Institute blog. Answering a question about whether people should emulate Lax, McGregor said “No” and that his friend would never expect that. To live out of love was what mattered to him. No matter peoples’ circumstances or what they pursued, they should pursue it out of love. Then McGregor added, “For Lax, what was important was to put ourselves in a place where grace can flow, because once we do that, then things start happening.”

“To put ourselves in a place where grace can flow”—that phrase has taken residence in my heart. I think that’s what Lax was seeking while looking for the “right” place to write. And as he discovered, there is more than one.

Super Moon Rising Over York River, VA
PHOTO: Mary van Balen

Where are those places? Are they physical places or people we are with? “Both/and” I would say.

We might experience the flow of grace with family or in quiet morning hours while sitting alone with a cup of coffee and God, watching the sunrise. Maybe writing in a journal or practicing Lectio Divina. Perhaps our work opens us to grace. Volunteering. Painting. Immersion in nature. We know it when we find it. The important thing is to make sure we put ourselves there. Often.

I read another post, this time from the “On Being” blog, by Erin O. White. For her, the small church she attends is a place where grace flows. She describes it this way: “… church isn’t about order or quiet or even ritual so much as it is about showing up. For yourself, for God, and for the people around you who need to feel—just as you do—that the blessings and burdens of being a human are not theirs to bear alone.”

That’s what the flow of grace does. It binds people together, experiencing God dwelling within every person and in creation. Indeed, “things start happening.” It creates interior spaciousness. It enlivens. When we are open to that flow, everything is prayer.

But, there can be times when the usual places don’t work. Something may happen to turn a place where we once encountered grace into a place where that can no longer happen. Then it’s important to move on.

Sometimes an event or circumstance shakes us to the core, and we feel isolated. Grace seems stuck. In those moments, we might find additional people and places of grace: Counselors, support groups, people who have traveled a similar path, new prayer practices.

Some places of grace remain constants in our lives. Some change. Lax found them throughout his life, with friends, while traveling with a circus family, with poor fishermen on Patmos, and other people and places in between. Being attentive and open, we find them, too.

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A book has come to my attention that helps provide a “place where grace flows” for a particular group of people facing such a time—women who have experienced breast cancer. I mention it here since October is the International Month of Breast Cancer Awareness and most of us have been touched in some way by this disease.

A New Song to Sing: Breast Cancer as Journey of Spirit, by Rev. Linda C. Loving, is a workbook for small groups of women at any stage of living with their diagnosis. The book leads women through seven sessions of sharing stories, deep listening, ritual, prayer, and reflection on provided texts. The gatherings of women drawn together by common experience become places where grace flows.

You can visit Linda Loving’s website, Spirited Voices, to learn more about the book and about Linda.

© 2018 Mary van Balen

Originally published in “The Catholic Times”  10.14.2018

When my oldest child was three, friends with a son about the same age asked how I liked Sesame Street. I admitted that neither I nor my daughter had seen it. We rarely turned on the television, but after hearing other young parents extolling the show’s merits, I watched. The constant fast pace and short snippets put me off. (A former elementary teacher as well as a mother, I knew kids had longer attention spans than that.) Later, I came to appreciate what the show had to offer, and Sesame Street and other public television shows became common fare. But at first, if we were going to watch children’s television at all, I preferred Mr. Rogers.

“Preaching” with his life

It was the pace. The real time. Taking time to let a story unfold without interruption. And the calm kindness and grace of Mr. Rogers himself.

After delaying seminary training to work in the new field of television, he eventually was ordained a Presbyterian minister to be an evangelist to children through the media. But Fred Rogers was no televangelist.

While St. Francis of Assisi probably never uttered the admonition attributed to him, instructing his followers to preach at all times and to use words if necessary, those words come to mind when I think of Mr. Rogers. His faith was integral in his life and it informed every show. But when the cameras rolled, he didn’t mention Jesus or make religious statements. Who he was, what he did, how he spoke to his young audience, how he reverenced all (each child and of course all the “neighbors”) spoke right to heart.

Tikkun Olma

On the one-year anniversary of 9/11, he came out of retirement briefly to record a public service announcement addressing parents about how to talk with their young children about such tragedy and violence. Like the rest of us, he wondered what he could do in the face of such overwhelming evil.

With pain and sorrow in his face, he reminded parents to reassure their children that they would do all they could to keep them safe. He recalled his mother’s words: “When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.’”

He looked at the camera and said we are called to be tikkun olma, a Hebrew phrase that means “repairers of creation.” It includes the sense of cooperation with God in mending the world, restoring it to wholeness.

You are special. So is everyone else.

In today’s world, those words are powerful. Rogers had spent his life using his particular gifts and grace to help children understand they were loved, each a special, unique creation cherished by God. He was acknowledging a foundational truth of Christianity: God dwells in each of us. We are all loved and carry a spark of the Divine within.

The Hindu word Nameste says it: The divine in me bows to the divine in you. Acknowledging this truth about ourselves and others makes atrocities like separating immigrant children from their parents unthinkable. Judging others to be less than because of skin color, ethnicity, social standing, or education cannot stand when we recognize the dignity of all.

In an interview for Christianity Today, Rogers said “The underlying message of the Neighborhood is that if somebody cares about you, it’s possible that you’ll care about others. ‘You are special, and so is your neighbor’—that part is essential: that you’re not the only special person in the world. The person you happen to be with at the moment is loved, too.”

Today we desperately need to heed the gospel message of “love your neighbor” and the Good Samaritan parable’s understanding of just who our “neighbors” are. Mr. Rogers spent a lifetime being that neighbor to millions of young children and their parents.

Be a helper. Be tikkun olma. And if you have the opportunity, treat yourself to the movie, “Won’t You Be My Neighbor.”

©2018 Mary van Balen   Originally published in the Catholic Times, July 15, 2018