Two Tales of Faith

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My paternal grandmother was a woman of faith. She was a good woman. A pious woman. Coming from a rural, working class background, she married well and lived a life of relative comfort in middle class suburbia. Not flash, but secure. Comfortable. When her own children were grown, she gave her time to her church and community. I remember outings to church social events, cucumber sandwiches and chats with the vicar, that kind of thing. My grandma never drank or swore or raised her voice—her purse-lipped silence was enough to quiet us. At her house, we said grace at the table, dressed our best and behaved impeccably.

My grandparents’ world was alien to me. Me the scruffy, heathen bumpkin, shy and awkward, out of place. But they were good people. They put a lot of effort into making our stays enjoyable and maintaining a relationship with us across miles and an ocean. We were their only grandchildren, my brother and I, and their link to their firstborn son. And they were our link to our dad. As I grew up and my grandma grew older we kept in touch by letter. She softened with the passing of the years and the weight of her grief. I became a mother myself and grew in my understanding and compassion for my grandma. What I once found to be stuffy and judging, I came to see as simply turning the other cheek. My grandma chose to only see the good in the world—a reflection of her own good heart. She I can thank for teaching me to write a letter. I wrote to friends too, after we left the home of our early childhood and sailed to a new life across the Irish Sea, but when I wrote to my grandma it had to be tidy, polite, proper. She wrote to me not long before she died. She told me the roses I had sent for my grandfather’s funeral eighteen months earlier were blooming again. A mild woman. When it was her time, she swept the drive, went to bed, and left quietly in her sleep.

My grandma carried immense grief of the kind only a mother who has raised a child—my father—and then nursed him to his early grave can know. And she carried it with the grace of her faith, supported by her church, her community, and her marriage to the love of her life. Her grief mellowed into humble acceptance by her faith in God’s grace. At least that’s what I saw of her.

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My mother’s mother was also a woman of faith, but of a different kind. She, too, carried grief. Hers was layered with bitterness and hate and she kept it in a whiskey jar on the high shelf behind the television where it fermented and festered, turning sour as it aged. On Saturday nights she’d pour a glass and it would spill tears and spit spite.

My dear old Nan. Hers was the home of my childhood, where there were dog hairs on the sofa and mud in the porch, where the kitchen smelled of yeast and jam and she would bustle about with sizzling pans of Yorkshire puddings and roast potatoes and plates piled high with an unrelenting supply of apple pie. She taught me to cook and sew and knit and forage for blackberries and make them into jam and drink goat’s milk fresh from the udder and drink poky home-brewed wine and be fearless in the face of a hissing goose or a bugger of a billy goat or a thunderstorm.

My dear old nan was made of grit. Her faith was in the power of her own steel will. I was raised on the tale of how she beat all the odds when, as a young girl sickly with TB, she overheard her doctor tell her mother she wouldn’t live to see her tenth birthday, and she decided, there and then, that she would live to be one hundred years old just to prove them wrong. Her lungs finally packed in aged ninety, having smoked and drank her whole life, leaving a legacy of grandchildren and great-grandchildren who, none of us, would be here if a little girl hadn’t decided to live. My nan wielded her faith in fortitude like a fist. She had no tolerance for ineptitude, can’t means won’t. And if we failed, with a derisive snort, God loves a trier, she would mock.

And the phrase that stuck with me the most, God helps those who help themselves, which I take to mean that life is what we make it. My nan’s grand age and all of us, her descendants, are proof of it.

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I have lived by that motto: life is what we make it. By that I don’t mean fluffy, woo woo positivity. I mean positively taking action to make it. The effectual power of action along with the steel certainty of reaching the goal: having faith. God helps those who help themselves, not those who sit around and wait. I am most like my nan. I share her steel will, her grit, her unwavering belief in her own determination. Not her scathing hatred, no, that I make sure of, but her power of mind over matter, of personal agency. I too have wielded my will and fortitude like a fist. I have succeeded, got what I wanted, made my life my own. And I have wound myself up into a tight ball of wire trying to force every outcome, obsessing over every step of it until I’m tying myself in knots and getting in my own way.

Lately, I have found myself softening. Unravelling. Learning to accept events and outcomes that are out of my control and find the wisdom and grace in that acceptance.

If I can take anything from living for the last two years in a primitive shepherd’s hut at the mercy of the weather and all the things I cannot control it’s learning to accept what is, no matter how uncomfortable. Learning to trust in what will be because no matter how hard it gets the seasons will keep rolling on and everything will still come around exactly as it’s meant to. There’s another kind of strength in the grace of acceptance, letting things fall into place as they will without a battle of will. The strength of faith that it takes to let go, to trust that all is as it should be and surrender to God’s grace.

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