"...when I try to understand them?" (For the rest of the story, see A Poetry Reading at West Point by William Matthews.)

Just updated Vary the Line with some more notes on David Orr. (I've enjoyed a fair number of Orr's essays over the years, so I don't actually have a major axe to grind against him. Although I would bet $100 in ghost galleons that Mary Oliver will be in major anthologies 100 years hence, and none of the men mentioned in my post. Sic transit...)

Speaking of anthologies, the collection I am currently enjoying is Sweeping Beauty: Contemporary Women Poets Do Housework (ed. Pamela Gemin, University of Iowa Press, 2005). And not just because I am a domestic goddess whose bathtub is now sparkling and who converted yesterday's leftover pho into today's tofu-and-egg soup. (The BYM will probably laugh himself sick on seeing the start of that sentence, considering the piles of dishes in the kitchen sink and the stacks of paperwork on the dining room table...)

I elected to miss church today in favor of time with the BYM, but I did spend part of the afternoon reading parts of the Spring 2011 issue of UU World, which has been sitting on my bathroom counter for weeks now. I'm still not sure what I think of Chance Hunter's essay on karma vs. grace: to be specific, I'm not sure how convincing it would be to someone not already persuaded of the presence of grace. But as someone who still struggles painfully with the if, when, and how of speaking the truth in love (and who has benefited mightily over the years from friends and teachers who did so lovingly) -- as well as someone for whom the line between "generosity of spirit" and "being played for a fool" so often feels like a tightrope, there were parts of Hunter's piece that I will want to revisit, including:

In Methodist Sunday School, we learned that the word "grace" was an acronym standing for "God's riches at Christ's expense." ... We also learned that being a good Christian meant being nice, above any other virtues, or, as we say here in the South, being sweet. It was the highest of compliments to say of someone, "Well, isn't she sweet." In fact, being sweet was a great excuse for avoiding other virtues, like telling people hard truths, or calling them out when they were hurting people.

Above all else, being sweet meant not rocking the boat, not making waves. It meant bringing a friend a casserole when a family member died, but it also meant not confronting that friend about their growing problem with alcohol. For ministers, it meant preaching "nice" sermons that only dealt with sins that members were a comfortable distance away from, and not confronting the congregation about, say, gossip couched as prayer requests about other church members.

Being sweet is a small virtue. There is some grace in being sweet, but much of being sweet lacks grace altogether.

. . . .

At times it's hard to trust in grace. Whether it's our karma or someone else's we suffer from, the path of grace can be hard to make out. We may be tempted to despair and say that no good deed goes unpunished. We may be tempted to take advantage of the grace of others and say that it's their job to provide grace to us so that we can consume it. But no one owes us grace, and grace will not be consumed. Grace--however received, however given--is always a gift.

Another piece in the issue is Kate Braestrup's reflections on saying grace before meals. I was struck in particular by a quote from Gandhi ("To the hungry, God's love can only reveal itself in the form of bread") and the prayer that concludes the essay: "May the hungry be well fed. May the well fed hunger for justice. Amen."