It may not be any of my business,
but let us suppose one day
that everyone who placed those vacant chairs
on a veranda or a dock sat down in them
if only for the sake of remembering
what it was they thought deserved
to be viewed from two chairs,
side by side with a table in between.
—Billy Collins, The Chairs That No One Sits In
This is an essay I first wrote in November 2016, which I cannot believe was nearly a decade ago.
I was reminded of it because it contains a quote that my friend’s mother, Nancy, just included it in a lovely profile she wrote of her mother-in-law, Eileen, for a series on the ordinary saints in our lives. I read a Billy Collins poem this morning as well, so it seemed like some quiet kismet that Billy Collins was my epigraph on this essay from so long ago.
I did not have the words to say it then, but this short essay was prompted by reading over the transcript I had printed out of the extensive conversations my abuser carried on with me four years prior.
That fall, I was printing out a lot of these exchanges to give to his superior. In the midst of one of these transcripts, I discovered a small exchange that surprised me. It was a moment in which I laid down boundaries with a wisdom I didn’t know I had at the time. And perhaps I didn’t. This essay is what I wrote about that re-discovering that moment four years later.
The past is wilder country than we remember it to be.
When we dig back into our memories, there are often novel revelations hidden in the familiar stories of our selves. We neuter our memories, colonize them with the flavor of our own identity. The memories we've tamed—the ones we thought we'd known; churned into submission; declawed from their stunning factuality and historicity, and assimilated into our own story—the ones we thought we had understood, often rear up strange under our scrutiny. They frequently shock us with their stunning other-ness, and jolt us into the past, back to that particular moment.
The past is wilder country than we remember it to be.
The person that I am now remembers the past as the continuity of who I was and who I currently am, proleptically inserting the anachronisms of twenty-five-year-old me into those memories. But when I return to those memories, recorded without commentary or interpretation, simply raw fact, I collide into my past self sharply, like rounding the corner of the subway staircase too quickly and knocking into the woman juggling her Gristedes bags.
When I look back on the story—as it was, not just as I have woven it into my memory—I am amazed to find grace.
In this re-reading, I have discovered that my younger self is, according to my current standards, an irreversible embarrassment. I cringe as I read old rants full of self-righteous narrow-mindedness. My empathy skills on display are less than state-of-the-art. I am neither subtle nor flip: I am breathtakingly earnest and peppered with dramatic, enthusiastic, bombastic ALL-CAPS. I exhaust the "shift + 1" keys. That younger self, there, on the page, is inelegant, and blissfully ignorant of being so.
I squirm as I re-encounter this old image of myself. This is not who I remember being. Or perhaps I do remember her—too well—now that she is sticking out from my comfortable synthesis of memory like a sore thumb. She is too much with me.
But even in the deep embarrassment of the private past, I feel grace tumble off each page of conversation. I see patterns she was missing. I look back at the dynamics of give and take that had her caught in their tidal pull, which she was unaware of. I watch as her naïveté is advantaged, and as her stubbornness rears its head. Then, in one single sentence, she speaks a word of such grace, with a wisdom I can now see, in retrospect, is far beyond what she possessed on her own.
Reading through the story, I feel my heart quicken and my palms begin to sweat as I approach that climax of grace. Will she say the saving words? Will she let this moment, on which so much plot, later in the story, will hinge, this small but significant watershed, pass by? As I read and re-read, I am surprised, each time, that she speaks up. Each time I re-read the conversation, I watch with dread as it seems that she will say nothing. The moment almost marches without arresting her attention. But then she does. She speaks. I can hardly believe it. Even though I know the story: I lived it, it is a part of me. But I am overwhelmed each time with surprise and relief. I feel a shiver of grace run up and down my spine.
Grace is an interruption. Grace says to us: There is another way this story can go. Grace veers us away from the cliff edge we were careening towards. Grace can be a roadblock, a u-turn, a fork in the road, a new path opening up.
To witness grace breaking into our own stories, to re-discover how grace has interrupted, transformed, and molded our own narratives is a great gift. I should not be surprised that grace remains so fresh, so many years later, that its presence shines brightly, despite—or perhaps because of—the years that have passed. But I am surprised. I did not know that grace stamps herself so clearly into our stories.
The more time that has passed, the more clearly grace and sin seem to be revealed. In the heat of the moment, the wheats and the tares were all tangled together. Several years after the story’s denouement, it is suddenly easy to identify the grace amidst all the dross. Grace is not only in the story, but in the storytelling. Grace illuminates the narrative, her light opens up, continually, with each new read. Grace shines through the fog of memory, teeming with its own unmistakable radiance.
Grace truly is in the storytelling, and so I was graced to share a part of my own story of abuse as it shimmered to the surface during my reporting on the conclave. My friend Casey Stanton at Discerning Deacons was gracious enough to ask me to write a reflection and even more gracious when I shared my reflections on the wounds that marked that experience. You can read my blog post for Discerning Deacons here.
I enjoyed your article at Discerning Deacons.