In the emergency room, Benny's face is black and blue, caked in dried blood, his eyes pinched shut, his lips swollen and bleeding.  In the middle of the night, two men had broken into Benny's home, beaten him severely, and then robbed him.  A terrible thing to happen to anyone, but especially heinous when you know that Benny is a seventy-year-old mildly mentally handicapped man recognized throughout his neighborhood for gentleness and generosity.  Even more evil when the detective concluded the thieves knew Benny well enough to know he'd cashed his pension check that day.  

"In moments such as these, it's hard to believe in the triumph of grace," Philip Gulley writes about his encounter with Benny.  "Evil seems far from defeated.  I'm tempted to believe in a salvation that includes everyone but the men who beat Benny.  I had to fight my rage as I tried to comfort him.  We talked about the attack, his injuries, the good prognosis from the doctor, and then I asked him if I could pray with him.  Benny nodded his head and said, through swollen lips, 'Don't forget to pray for those men.'"    

I can tell you I don't believe I would have been that magnanimous (large-souled).  But, then, you never know until you're in that bed.  This much I do know... if you guzzle the news, we live in a world where fear trumps grace.      

If only in a small way, each one of us knows that there are times when life is just "too much."
Too heavy.  

Too precarious.  

Too uncertain. 
Times when we've said (or prayed to any deity that would lend an ear), "Please help me, I don't think I have what it takes."   

Do you remember the movie Jaws?  There's a great scene where the local sheriff is chumming for the great white shark.  And out of nowhere Jaws appears.  The shark is gigantic, more enormous than the crew imagined possible.  They are, understandably, terrified.  (Of course, the music--da-dum, da-dum, da-dum--amplifies the suspense.)  The sheriff says carefully, "We're going to need a bigger boat."

Yes. "We're going to need a bigger boat."
What a fitting metaphor.  Our "boat" is that internal reservoir--of strength or resolve or grace or permission--which assures us we cannot be undone or defeated by life's cruelty or capriciousness.

Here's the deal: Benny lived his life from a bigger boat.

(Which means that his "forgiveness" is not a ploy to "move on."  This is not about making our lives into a nice tidy narrative.)   

I received an email this week inviting me to "get the life I deserve."  ("Now that's what I'm talking about!  I mean the things I've put up with... when I deserve sooo much more...")  Truth be told, the email made me laugh out loud.  And, I thought of the story of Benny.  Life is not about what I "deserve," as if life must yield or bend to my druthers.  No. This is about the life we create... 

The life we choose.

The love we share. 

   The light we shine.   

I guess the part that puzzles us is that we cannot live this way unless (or until) we are vulnerable, and tender-hearted.

It's not that I have anything against striving or praying or achieving or dreaming.  They are all well and good in their place.  But it backfires if there's an implicit agreement (or hope) that I can avoid life's pitfalls--as if a pitfall means that I've failed at life.  Because I can tell you exactly what I do with such an agreement: I live cautiously.  I choose to be afraid.  I close down my heart. I withhold my love and my forgiveness.  And I rage on the inside.

I suppose that there are many reasons I don't believe that my heart (my "boat") is big enough.  I do know for certain that when I believe my identity is owned by fear, I am stuck, and I shut down.     

Benny's overture of grace came from a reservoir, deep inside.  It was not required.  It was not done to impress.  Yes, any one of us can be selfish, petty, fearful, controlling, conflicted, wary and driven.  But Benny's story reminds me that every one of us has the capacity to be open, vulnerable and heart filled.  Yes... with the capacity to be moved, trustworthy and generous.

Jean Houston told a story of being befriended by the extraordinary French Jesuit, paleontologist, and philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. She'd literally run into him in Central Park when she was 14 years old; following their collision, the two became friends.  "It was extraordinary. Everything was sentient; everything was full of life. He looked at you as kind of a cluttered house that hid the Holy One--and you felt yourself looked at as if you were God in hiding, and you felt yourself so charged and greened with evolutionary possibilities." 

We may not see the Holy One in ourselves, but it shouldn't keep us from singing, "This little light of mine, I'm gonna let it shine. . ."   

I am in California this week; first a parish mission in Fremont, and later on to Anaheim for the annual Religious Education Congress, where 40,000 of my closest friends vie for parking spots, in order to participate in a 3-day infusion of gladness and delight. A friend wrote me this week, wondering if I was okay, mostly because he knows how necessary my garden is to my sanity. On the way to the car the other morning (quite early) I made it a point to walk by the tete-a-tete daffodils.  And I know it is the reason why March does my heart good. Unpredictable, even capricious weather; and just when you wonder if you've had enough, you see a clump of butter yellow daffodils with open blossoms, unafraid, reaching toward the light.