Gratuitous Grace

"For winter's rains and ruins are over,
And all the season of snows and sins;
The days dividing lover and lover,
The light that loses, the night that wins;
And time remembered is grief forgotten,
And frosts are slain and flowers begotten,
And in green underwood and cover
Blossom by blossom the spring begins"
      Algernon Charles Swinburne 1865

Like the poet Swinburne, as the seasons flow and lurch from winter to spring, we notice and rejoice. We think of spring as the time when nature is most gorgeous, assailing not only our sight but also our scent with blossoms, our very skin with warm air and gentle breezes - the lessons of life's enduring, delicate, robust, character are everywhere around us. From time immemorial, poets and theologians have commemorated this powerful time of year when nature confronts us with all those most essential truths - not only about what is old and what is dead, but also what newness comes out of generations past and present, what myriad forms of beauty appear to shock and renew us in our own lives, calling us to mindfulness whether we will or no. Unlike winter, spring is a season that no one can simply hunch their shoulders and stride hastily past, blind to beauties that might be right beside us, even in winter, in the line of a tree or a night sky.

Yet, it was during winter that I had one of my most powerful learning experiences nature has offered me. I moved here from a cottage on a farm in the Hudson River Valley. A number of people rented apartments and houses on the property which we shared with an assortment of dogs, cats, peacocks, chickens, goats, pigs, and horses kept by people who lived there.

A few years ago on that farm, one of the other residents was Tinker, an elderly bay horse belonging to the owners of the farm. He had been a hunter-jumper in his day, but in his old age mostly spent his days in the pasture at his ease. One day he developed colic, an intestinal condition which in horses can easily be fatal. The owners were away and the vet was unreachable - a friend from the farm and I spent all day working on him.

The most important thing, when a horse is colicking, is to keep him from rolling on the ground, which they do sort of like a big dog. Horses naturally want to roll when their stomachs hurt as a way to try to dispell the ache, but if their intestine twists as a result of the rolling, the only treatment that can save them is surgery, which in horses is usually prohibitively expensive. So you have to try to keep them from rolling, which with something as big and strong as a horse, is really, really hard.

I did my best, which meant walking Tinker around in the field for hours, always keeping him moving, never letting him stop and start to go down. But often I was alone while my friend was on the phone trying to find a vet to come and help us. Eventually Tinker got himself on the ground and rolled. It was January, and he was rolling on snow. About the third time he rolled, as he lay tired and still for a moment, I saw blood spotting the snow crimson - it was coming from his mouth. It was hard to tell whether he was bleeding from the throat or if he had injured his mouth in his throes, but either way, the sight of the tired, old, kind horse lying on the snow with that inward look that animals and people get when they are suffering made me sure we were losing him.

Eventually the vet came, and gave him a treatment and injection to try to give him ease and time for the treatment to work. In six hours we would know - either he would again be in pain or his digestive system would resume functioning. Six hours passed during which I walked him every hour to try to help get his digestive works up and going again. He looked around, interested and vital again on our walks, gentle, his breath blowing beside mine in the winter air. After about 5 1/2 hours, when I checked on him again, he turned his head and looked at his stomach - a bad sign. Soon he was again in great pain, and now there was nothing more to do. The vet came back, and the owner came home, and I said goodbye to Tinker, and went to my house, leaving them alone to put him down with an injection.

Spring won through and renewed us, summer unfolded into long, green, hot days, and then fall began to crisp the air at night. One day in early autumn, I was working at the computer in my office at home, when I heard something bang against the inside of a window. Almost at the same moment, from the corner of my eye I saw my two cats streak avidly into the room behind me. I turned around and saw something move in a plant on the windowsill. I went over and parted the leaves and sitting on a frond was a small, young, black-capped chickadee with a wing twisted awkwardly behind him. His beak was parted, his breast was heaving and he was looking straight at me. I shooed the cats away, picked the bird up and took him far into the upper field.

I sat by a rock under a wild crabapple tree, and looked at my handful. He was very small, with bright black eyes and very tiny, thick, short, dark eyelashes. He was still looking right at me, into my eyes, and panting, and I saw there was blood on and inside his beak. I thought of Tinker, and the blood on the snow, and wished this wouldn't end in death again. The bird didn't move or try to get away, he seemed perfectly comfortable in my hands. After about ten minutes, I gingerly began to try to ease his protruding wing into a position like his other, which was lying smoothly against his side. He let me, and soon at least the wing looked okay, but I was afraid it was hurt, perhaps broken.

I tried lifting my hands to give him some impetus to make a try at flying, but he didn't move. He just sat in my cupped hands, panting less, looking at me and looking at me and looking at me. Slowly he closed his beak and his breathing slowed, and finally he ruffled his feathers and settled his wings, just a little. Still he showed no inclination to move, and so after another few minutes I moved to rise, thinking to try to place him on a branch of the tree and see if he could hold on himself. As I moved, he burst out of my hands and flew himself right onto the branch I was about to place him on. He looked at me some more, and then he flew away.

These two experiences are linked in my mind. The huge horse, the tiny bird, the one familiar, named, known to me, so powerful that finally I couldn't control him; the other wild, fey, trembling, dainty in my palm. Both had dark eyes, both were gentle in their pain, both put up with my efforts to help, the great strong one suffered and died, the small fragile one suffered and lived and flew away.

The essayist and novelist Annie Dillard wrote:

"Cruelty is a mystery and the waste of pain. But if we describe a world to compass these things, a world that is a long, brute game, then we bump against another mystery: the inrush of power and light, the canary that sings on the skull. Unless all ages and races of men have been deluded by the same mass hypnotist (who?), there seems to be such a thing as beauty, a grace wholly gratuitous."

Annie Dillard published her thoughts on cruelty and grace in a volume titled Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Beyond the coincidence of incorporating Tinker's name, her writing informs my sense of the day he died, and the day the bird lived. Nature illustrates the human condition, that life is breathtaking in its heartlessness, but also in its beauty and even its beneficence. We have all felt the cruelty of life at one time or another for ourselves or those we love. We all know the feeling of being devastated, the sense that the world is a long, brute game. We have all felt the shock and pain that come with an experience of the fundamental unfairness of life in a world we strive to order and make better. We have all felt the hurt that comes not from chance or circumstance, but from the intent of someone who intentionally gives us pain, or who does not care enough to help us when we are suffering.

There is the difficult reality that cruelty exists not only in nature or life, but also in people who ignore or even take pleasure in the suffering of others. But we have also our experiences of unexpected blessings and reprieves for ourselves and our loved ones. There is the compassion of those who care for us when we need it most or expect it least. There are moments of joy or laughter or love, beauty, a grace wholly gratuitous, in the midst of great sadness or mourning. We are too often powerless over evil, but also we are also freely given more beauty and moments of transcendence than we could ever dream of or create. And it is the gratuitous grace that makes the cruelty of life bearable. Grace gives us solace and reminds us that there are reasons to hope.

The contemporary poet Wendell Berry wrote:

"When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world and am free."

Berry's words underline another aspect of Dillard's words - the interrelationship of humanity and nature in some moments of cruelty and grace. Many people express a deep sense of relief, succor, peace that comes with being immersed in nature. Humanity's perception of nature has had deep spiritual impact since at least the onset of recorded religious experience. Berry's experience of peace and exaltation beside still water recall the experience of another person, thousands of years ago, recorded in the 23rd psalm of the Hebrew Bible:

The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures; he leads me beside still waters, he restores my soul. He leads me in right paths for his name's sake."

Even in this traditional theological context, the connection between simple experiences of nature and sustenance of the spirit is apparent and profound. The psalmist lies in green pastures, walks beside still water, and his soul is restored. The gratuitous grace in the canary singing on a skull is apparent only to human perceptions, which apprehend the immanence and inevitability of death and suffering, but also the vitality and beauty of bird and song.

Nature shocks and challenges us, but it also sustains and calms us. It shows us mystery and the waste of pain, but also beauty and even charm. Animals and plants live and die and consume each other, but also lambs frolic, roses bloom, sea horse and emperor penguin fathers nurse their young with anxiety and tenderness, trumpeter swans trumpet and mate for life, puppies exist and so do rainbows and dolphins and elephants and northern lights. Nature is powerful and awesome, but also minute and even sometimes, sweet.

So can be people. So can be life. There is summer as well as winter and spring as well as fall. We love life more because we lose it, and we love each other though we know death parts us. We anticipate spring, we luxuriate in summer, we appreciate the bounties of autumn and we endure and enliven winter.

It is more than four years since the day I tried and failed to help Tinker. It is almost three years since the bird flew from my hand. His flight does not redeem or even lessen Tinker's loss, or the pain of that day. But it does stand, somehow, against it. I couldn't save the horse, but I could save the bird, and that comforts to me. I know that even if it never worked, I would have to keep trying to save things regardless of the odds, but the bird's story reminds me sometimes it is possible. We can save some things sometimes.

In this joyous season, when life has survived the challenges of winter and bursts forth in all the vibrancy of spring colors, all the delicacy of flower petals, all the robustness of green everywhere, it is wonderful to experience in the buds and blossoms we see, the flowers we scent, the young life we touch, the returned birds we hear, that spring is as much a part of the yearly cycle as winter, that life can rise anew, that hope is justified not only by our highest human efforts and determination but sometimes by timing and luck and all that is beyond our efforts and control. Part of the mystery is a grace wholly gratuitous, which exists as surely as it endures.

Amen.