I take the idea of grace very literally. And we could all use a little grace around here.
Several years ago, I went with my dance company to spend the day training on the trapeze. The trapeze school was hidden in the Sonoma hills. The wooded site, with gentle folk milling around and hand-lettered signs tacked to trees, had the aura of a hippie fair crossed with a circus encampment.
I was looking forward to the trapeze lesson. In elementary school, I ruled on the playground bars. I could even do the cherry-drop, a maneuver the teachers outlawed after a girl broke her arm attempting it. However, I hadn’t remembered that this trapeze would be six or seven times taller than playground equipment.
The ladder that led to the trapeze platform was about a thousand feet high -- or maybe 50, I couldn’t tell. When I climbed up to the little platform at the top of the ladder, it seemed to creak in the breeze. The instructor helped me hook into a harness, and then demonstrated how to get swinging. Basically, I was to reach out over the now-blurry ground, and when the instructor shouted, “Hup,” catch the bar that was swinging toward me. I was to swing my legs over the bar, and then curl into a ball as I somersaulted into the net below, where I would probably land on my back. “Easy,” the instructor said.
Since the trapeze was built for a taller person, I would have to take a little leap in order to catch the trapeze bar. I’m not usually scared of heights, but the ends of my fingers and toes were tingling. I couldn’t feel my feet. I was a little dizzy. “Hup,” shouted the instructor. I couldn’t force my arms to move to catch the bar. The instructor re-set the bar and shouted “Hup,” again. My arms moved in slow motion, and I was still too slow to catch it the second, third, and fourth times. Finally, on the fifth “Hup”, I wrenched my hands up, stepped forward and grabbed the bar.
At that moment, the heaviness and tingles disappeared. As I swung, the treetops near the trapeze came into view. I felt a lightness that echoed the momentum of the swing. As I had been instructed, I folded my legs over the bar, let go with my hands, and swung upside down for a few swings. It was a delightful feeling. As the momentum slowed, I disengaged my legs, and -- miraculously -- I rotated in a leisurely back layout flip and landed on my feet. Surprised, I quickly sat down in the net.
I like to think of that moment of physical “grace,” as a very small illustration of God’s more figurative gift of grace. It was totally unexpected and undeserved, and it was in the middle of an unfamiliar, uncomfortable, scary situation where I really had no clue what I was doing. It was just a little gift of coordination that gave me the courage to go through the rest of the trapeze lesson, which continued to be much harder than I had expected it to be.
On a larger scale, when I look at the seemingly intractable problems we face – the war, pollution, political corruption, poverty, family conflicts, traffic jams, (and the rest, large and small, that we can all name) – it seems that we could collectively use some moments of grace to give us some hope that things could be better, and a little courage to make it so.
Christina, thanks for that beautiful image. It's definitely made me look for grace in my own life. Your observations are always very insightful.
Posted by: Nick Larson | May 02, 2007 at 03:47 PM