Grace

“I know nothing, except what everyone knows – if there when Grace dances, I should dance.”  W. H. Auden

Writing on grace, Anne Lamott notes that grace is “the help you receive when you have no bright ideas left, when you are empty and desperate and have discovered that your best thinking and most charming charm have failed.”  Been there, experienced that!

That said, it would seem to follow that “when Grace dances” I would jump up and dance.  Granted, as Lamott notes, in doing so I may look “a little like Peter Boyle in Young Frankenstein, putting on the Ritz” (she apparently has heard about my dancing).  Still, I find it easy to “sit this one out” even with Grace dancing right beside me.  But here’s the kicker – no matter my response, Grace keeps dancing, inviting me to do the same.  As Lamott writes, Grace “can be received gladly or grudgingly, in big gulps or tiny tastes.”  That is, I think, what makes Grace Grace.  It appears unobligingly, uninvited, and does its thing no matter my response.  And I think Lamott defines “its thing” as well as anyone.  Whether we get up and dance with Grace or not, it “meets us where we are but does not leave us where it found us.”