New York Times Op-Ed: To Deepen Love, Consider Duty, by Valerie Pavilonis:
Is [it] a sign of adulthood, to become aware of your own limitations, as well as to welcome someone to witness those limitations? When I was around 13, my grandparents, nearly 90 years old, had reached the point that they could no longer perform some basic functions independently. My mother and father made it their mandate to help them, and I remember quite clearly my father taking my grandfather — his father-in-law — to the bathroom and, in several instances, helping him shower.
As a 13-year-old, I watched this distantly, perhaps too young to register how significant it was, that my dad was not required to help my grandfather, who was not his father, and could have left him to his indignity. But he didn’t. …
I have tried, for many years, to find words for this phenomenon. Maybe it isn’t even a phenomenon. Maybe I am affected by a cynical bubble of a world where individuals have become so siloed that such kindness can seem indescribable. But it has touched me, and it has changed me, and the word it all comes down to might be deceptively simple: grace.
Grace is a tricky concept to define. One definition among many others is “courteous good will.” But that does not encompass what I saw from my boyfriend and my father: They were not merely being kind or merely tipping their hats. Perhaps my Catholic self is biased, but I like this definition from the catechism better: “favor, the free and undeserved help that God gives us to respond to his call to become children of God, adoptive sons, partakers of the divine nature and eternal life. Grace is a participation in the life of God.”
As someone who could have paid more attention during high school religion classes, phrases like “divine nature” and “children of God” have always turned me off as inaccessible theological terms. But as I grow older, the world becomes less literal, and I begin to like these phrases, with their rounder, more ethereal shapes. It’s accurate to say that my boyfriend and my father gave me “free and undeserved help.” But I can’t help feeling there is an added element: of self-sacrifice, of honor, maybe even a little bit of the divine. People help one another all the time. But there is something else at work in moments like those I’ve experienced, moments when, in retrospect, there might have been a third party, silent but supportive, in the room with us.
J.D. Flynn, the editor in chief of the Catholic publication The Pillar, has two children with Down syndrome, and he wrote recently about the grace he receives while caring for them. “These people require that I cast out into the deep — that in patience, and presence, and assistance, I go beyond where I wish to go, and beyond even where I can go, on my own,” he writes. “Because here’s the thing: Out there in the deep, beyond my own self-giving, that’s where grace is. That’s where I’ve found something that seems like joy.”
Giving, it seems, is a conduit to grace. And I hope that at some point, I can give to my children, family and friends what has been given to me.
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