It’s one thing to speak of love. It’s another to hold a newborn in your arms, to sing someone to sleep, to lean down and listen for their breathing.
It’s one thing to speak of faith. It’s another to press your forehead to the floor, to cry out in prayer, to ask the hard questions and still thank God for the meal.
It’s one thing to speak of the Divine. It’s another to walk under a tunnel of wisteria, to stand barefoot at the edge of the sea, to hear the birds sing as the sun returns and whisper, Thank you, thank you, thank you.
It’s one thing and another, so I pray, Give me both, please. Show me both, please.
When my father died, my extended family gathered at the funeral home a couple of hours before the visitation. Though the occasion was sad, the initial energy was pragmatic, making sure everything was prepared for people to arrive soon. Then the staff gathered the family together near the television, which would soon play a video of photos for the next few hours. This was our opportunity to see the photos on the screen together for the first time, honor his life, and feel connected to one another.
As the images scrolled and music played, my family shared moments of smiling and remembering, along with feelings of grief and tenderness. We saw pictures that spanned decades—not only of him but also of us. It was a lovely remembrance.
And that’s when we arrived at the end of the video. Some final images were shown, accompanied by text that read:
And so we give thanks….
(screen change with new image)
…for the life of… Beulah.
As you might have guessed, my father was not named Beulah.
There was a pause, and the contrast between the faces of the funeral home staff and our own could not have been greater. While they stood there in horror, realizing that they had forgotten to change the name from the last person honored in that very room, we suddenly burst into laughter. They apologized profusely, thinking they had ruined our moment, but we found it so funny.
In fact, my family thought it was so funny that, when my grandmother died five years later—she who had laughed the first time—they specifically asked the funeral home staff to show us her video with the same conclusion.
And so we give thanks….
(screen change with new image)
…for the life of… Beulah.
I have no idea who Beulah is, but she has now been honored twice, in addition to her own video. In times of grief, challenge, pain, difficulty—or simply change—it’s important to feel our raw emotions. But it’s also a great gift to find moments to laugh.
I appreciate this paragraph below from Rebecca Solnit, who is currently writing a newsletter on Substack entitled, Meditations in an Emergency. Before I share that paragraph, I want to recommend her writing generally. She doesn’t hold back in naming concerns and harms in this era, and that’s important. But at the very same time, she points to empowerment and possibility. I have more trust for a writer — and for that matter, a leader, or a fellow-human — when they can do both.
And she does both in this paragraph. I hope we will challenge ourselves wherever we fall on this continuum:
“Americans often seem to me to be complacent or despondent about the idea of radical change–complacent if they deny threats such as Trump, despondent when they deny the possibility of participating in change for the better. How change works and how civil-society organizing has succeeded again and again in this country from the abolition of slavery to immigrant rights and environmental protection is not nearly well-enough known. Mainstream narratives disempower us when they portray power as something possessed by a small elite and change as something handed down from above, and when they depict ordinary people organizing for change as foolish rabble or annoying interference.”
In 2017, I also heard Rebecca Solnit give a lecture on these themes. Here’s a post about that. I like this sentence she repeated several times: “You can never anticipate what what-you-do does.”
Sometimes, you’re busy, or you run out of things to say, or both, so you conclude, “You know what? Let’s make this a baby animal day on Smuggling Grace.”
And then you remember how wonderful it would be to hug baby goats repeatedly. Yes, let’s definitely share that.
Smuggling Grace 