There was a time in my past when the lies of depression led me to believe that life was not worth living. A once fortifying faith had eroded to a sense that though God probably existed, they did not have much to do with me in my small, grey corner of the world.
One such grey day, on a random wander through a bookstore, I came across a sales rack with a stack of dated agendas— two years old, priced at a dollar each. The cover photo, of a monarch butterfly, caught my eye and I began to flip through the pages of stock photos & inspirational quotes. Under one less than remarkable photo, I read:
It is time, then, for us to embrace this frail flesh of ours with love. If we want to be disciples and saints, we must claim and cherish our humanness. What was good enough for God to embrace must be good enough for us. -Macrina Wiederkehr [1].
I bought the calendar for that page alone. It would be inaccurate to say that my life turned around in that moment, but something shifted in me because of those words. My heart opened to the possibility of the truth in that brief quote, and, from its lowly perch on my refrigerator door, that calendar page nourished me for years as I made the long journey from depression to hope. In growing appreciation for the tremendous grace shown in the Incarnation, I began to receive that grace and learned even to extend a measure of grace to myself. I learned how to claim and cherish my own humanness in the embrace of God, in the embrace of a God that bothered to fully and physically enter my small, grey world.
[1] I found out much later that this quote was taken from Macrina Wiederkehr’s A Tree Full of Angels: Seeing the Holy in the Ordinary (1988, Harper Collins, NY, NY).
