The Slow Way Newsletter: On Vulnerability, Or How the Space In-Between is Grace
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unhurried thoughts
The space in-between is grace
My grandmother died yesterday. My last living grandparent. She was one hundred years old and in these last months of her life I’ve thought a lot about dying, what it might mean to be an old woman at the end of my own life. I was with her for Mother’s Day this past May, fully vaccinated and thrilled to be in her presence without fear that I would pass along some terrible invisible disease. At that point she couldn’t walk or use the bathroom on her own, but she was able to live in the house she shared with my aunt, who was her main caregiver for the last year of her life. I watched my grandmother exist in the most vulnerable position any of us can imagine, her needs met by her daughter, holding my hand while she was cleaned up in her bed, a fresh adult diaper pulled up around her. She was frail and frustrated, confused, but when she looked in my eyes her recognition was all love. She couldn’t always remember who I was, but she knew she loved me, and though she hated the feeling of being unable to care for herself, she looked at me with eyes that told the truth, lying on her side. Then she’d quietly whisper, “You’re so beautiful.”
The Davises were here for a week until this past Tuesday. Leah has been a friend of my heart for the past decade, and has walked with me through all of the challenges of mothering, miscarrying, marriage, and having a child with multiple disabilities. Her son Jonah was born two days after Ace, and her support during my pregnancy and prenatal diagnosis with Ace’s Down syndrome was everything. Jonah and Ace have played together and shared a birthday party all of their lives until this past birthday, and to have them together again was wonderful and excruciating in the way that all real love is. Jonah is Ace’s one true friend, a friend who knows him fully and accepts him exactly as he is. A friend who doesn’t push him to play what Ace doesn’t want to play, but receives from Ace naturally whatever it is that Ace is able to give. Jonah and Ace did a lot of hugging, running, and swimming together, Jonah talking for both of them. And watching them leave on an airplane to the other side of the country, no reunion in sight, left me with the melancholy ache I’ve learned to associate with most true loves. Life is full of beauty and gut-losses, and the space between those things is grace. (That’s why grace is so hard to receive.)
This week I’ve been reading Leeana Tankersly’s beautiful book Hope Anyway, in which she documents her process of healing after her marriage ended unexpectedly. Her wisdom and genuine openness to allowing herself to grieve and feel and ultimately heal is deeply inspiring to me. I love when others set an example for the rest of us in what it actually looks like to feel it all, the pain and goodness, and let ourselves move through it, so that we come out of the process more wise, more gentle. Able to be tender to others and ourselves.
I keep thinking of this moment in the book when Leeana is alone in the woods, feeling her own grief and brokenness and loneliness during the Christmas holidays while her kids are away with their dad. She lies all the way down in the grass and the leaves, telling God, “I need a plan. Tell me what to do.” God’s whisper comes to her this way: “You don’t need a different plan, Leeana. You need a different posture.” A posture. A posture of receiving the goodness and suffering of life with open hands. A posture of prayer, of awareness of God at work all around us. A posture of gratitude. A posture of hope.
“We ask for a plan,” Leeana writes. “We receive a posture. This is infuriating and also resonant. A posture requires trust. I have so often wanted to stand at a safe distance from my own life and figure everything out . . . The problem is that often the only way to figure anything out is by stepping into it . . . Sometimes, and this is the most counterintuitive thing in the world, walking to the center of our lives, toward the things we want and believe we need the most, and lying down. Palms up.”
How many of us feel that deeply? The longing to stand at a safe distance from our own lives, to do our best to avoid the pain and loss, the vulnerability and the love that can rip us apart? But, like Leeana says, often the answer to the pain can only be found by walking toward it, laying down in the middle of it, and letting it cover us. In other words, the only way out is through.
A posture. Like my grandmother on her side in her bed, allowing herself to be cleaned, holding my hand with both of hers, and looking in my eyes with those blue, glassy one hundred year old eyes. This woman who had rocked me as a baby, helped me buy my first bra, visited my college musical performances, driven with me from Texas to upstate New York for graduate school, was able to hold all of that in her eyes. Goodness and kindness lives in the space of grace, between the beauty and loss, and I felt that with her in her last days. I was with her 19 days ago, when we celebrated her life with a 100th birthday party. She exclaimed over all her handsome grandchildren, kissed my husband full on the mouth (much to his surprise and delight), and let me hold her hand as long as I wanted to.
A posture of openness. Of receiving the gifts along with the suffering. That’s what I am learning from her, and what I think I’ll hold close as I age. And if I receive the gift of living to see 2079, it won’t come without a lot of grief. But grace is the space in between the grief and the joy. And that’s where real life is found. Not in a plan, but in a posture: Letting the friends you love stay in your house for a moment in time, knowing that it won’t, it can’t be forever, and believing that friendship is lived in that in-between space as well.
Did I mention it’s my birthday tomorrow? I’ll be forty-two, making my way down the long, beautiful road of adulthood. Someday I will possibly find myself old and vulnerable. So I think I’ll practice the posture of receiving now, of surrender, of walking “into the center of [my life] . . . and lying down. Palms up.”
a slow practice
This week I wonder if you can practice the posture Leeana shares in her book. Corpse Pose, also known in yoga as Shavasana, which as Leeana writes in Hope Anyway "is the most difficult of all yoga poses because it requires us to be aware, present, and totally surrendered."
Set aside ten minutes this week to pray in an entirely new posture. If you're used to sitting to pray, this might be uncomfortable. Let yourself feel the embarrassment, strangeness, or discomfort of coming to God in a way that might feel foreign to you.
If you're able, lie down on your back on the floor (the bed will just confuse you and make you think it's nap time!) Let yourself take deep breaths for a while before you speak to God. I recommend allowing yourself to feel your inhale move down the left side of your body, all the way to your toes. Then feel your exhale move up the right side of your body, so that your slow breath is making a circular motion from head to toe, toe to head. Breathe for as long as you need to, allowing yourself to focus on the circular movement of your breathing.
Allow your hands to lie open on the ground beside you, and let your thoughts turn to prayer. Maybe there's something on your mind that you need to express to God, maybe you're not sure what you need to surrender today. This time of prayer is more about putting your body in a posture of surrender and less about having something to say.
Maybe this is a moment to think about vulnerability, about the reality that you will one day die. St Benedict instructed his monks to "keep death always before your eyes." This isn't meant to be morbid. It's meant to be a form of wisdom. As the Psalmist prays in Psalm 90, "Teach us to number our days..." Recognizing that we are mortal allows us to live with gratitude, wisdom, and see the Really Real around us.
Let this vulnerability sit with you. Invite God to sit with you in it.
End with a prayer from an old hymn from my childhood:
I surrender all
I surrender all
All to thee, my precious Savior
I surrender all