A Note of Gratitude for Brian Doyle
On May 27 of this year, the writer Brian Doyle passed away at age 60 from complications due to a brain tumor. Brian Doyle was one of those rare people who are open and honest, genuine and true, a student and teacher both. He was a lover of nature and stories, which he considered prayers. His writing could move you to tears of laughter and sorrow in one sitting. After he was diagnosed, he asked us to be tenderer with one another to laugh more often. Important!
He was also a very generous man, who when asked if we could use an essay of his for the “Letting Go” issue of Living Peace, sent back an offering, and wrote: “My first thought is the attached, for obvious reasons, but why don’t you tell me the essays you were thinking of. Or maybe just print all of them over the next few years, and inundate your readers with peculiar prose.” Of course, we would like nothing more.
For now, we are sending prayers to Brian Doyle’s family and other loved ones, and silently thanking him (repeatedly) for his radical grace and generosity. Below are a few of his musings on Grace, from his book, Leaping: Revelations and Epiphanies in a chapter called, “Grace Notes.”
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Grace lifts, it brings to joy. And what, as we age, do we cherish and savor more than joy? Pleasure, power, fame, lust, money—they eventually lose their fastballs, or should: at our best and wisest we just want joy, and when we are filled with grace we see rich thick joy in the simplest of things. Joy everywhere.
Notice how many saints—who we assume were and are crammed to the eyeballs with grace—are celebrated for their childlike simplicity, their capacity to sense divine joy in everything: the daily resurrection of light, the dustiest of sparrows.
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Can grace be granted all men, all women, all faiths, all nations, whether or not they have the word of God in their mouths and hearts? O yes, O yes, the church says—interestingly, has always said, no controversies or wrestling matches or murders over the issues—a miracle. And it, has eloquently said it, here and there. Orosius, one of Augustine’s many disciples, said that grace was showered upon us all quotidie per tempora, per dies, per momenta, cunctis et singulis—“daily through the seasons, through the days, through the moments, to all of us, to every one of us.”
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Each person experiences grace as he or she does human and divine love—which is to say, idiosyncratically, in ways different from all others. So we are all writing essays about grace all the time, in all sorts of languages.
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Oceans of grace, fountains of grace, rivers of grace. Water is an apt metaphor for grace; it is such a
graceful creature itself, sinuous and ungraspable, the first ingredient of life, the substance that composes, cleanses, rejuvenates us, the sea in which we swim before birth.
This article was published in the Summer 2017 issue of Living Peace.