Grace House
Christmas 2008
“I know nothing, except what everyone knows—if there when Grace dances, I should dance.”
- W. H. Auden
Dear Family and Friends:
I write this letter from the wooden desk we’ve borrowed from a friend, alone in our small office at the front of our new multi-family house. The desk faces windows, and from here I have a view of two cities—Lynn, which stretches down our hill and towards the ocean water—and Boston, rising from the water beyond against the clear winter sky. The glass doors to the office are closed, but from my desk chair I can hear Orilüs and Jackson as they go about their weekend chores, singing loudly to Christmas songs on the radio and occasionally making up their own words to familiar tunes, (“And Santa came to say… Orilüs and Jackson are so cool”). Jason is in the kitchen, baking pumpkins. Downstairs, our friend Jodie is preparing a beef stew lunch for all of us while her dog wrestles with our puppy in our living room. It’s only eleven-thirty on a Sunday morning, but already our dining room table has hosted friends for our weekly “house church” of breakfast, discussion and prayer.
We live now in what we’ve come to fondly call “Grace House,” a two-family that rises from the top of a hill in Lynn—a hill that is a contested political battleground, rife with gangs and the kind of disillusionment that comes from urban poverty and frustrated dreams. We moved this summer. It’s difficult to live here—two nights ago, our sleep again interrupted by a mob-like party across the street, and two shootings in the last two months nearby—and we are still adjusting. Sometimes—like after we saw a few more mice last week, or something else suddenly breaks and needs fixing—we wonder why we moved at all. But we persist in calling it “Grace House,” persist in reminding ourselves of all the graces of the last year.
And these graces have included the realization of our dream to begin a faith community in our city. In August, we sold our single-family house and bought this one. Our friend and fellow dreamer, Jodie, moved into the downstairs condo this fall, and we have been delighted to work out the rhythms of a new kind of community life—sharing a washer and dryer, taking care of each other’s dogs, cooking meals for one another, and a Tuesday night tradition of eating together. We’ve begun to get to know our neighbors and are working with them to make plans to renovate the decrepit park at the top of our hill this spring and summer. It’s been a grace to see the community house actually happen and to anticipate together the ways in which we can become part of our new neighborhood and work with our new friends for transformation.
And there have been so many other graces this year. Orilüs and Jackson have “settled” into our family and into this new house with surprising ease; the turmoil of years past has given way to the normal kinds of fourth- and fifth-grade behaviors we’d expect. We are so proud of the ways they’ve navigated the move, made new friends in the neighborhood and improved in so many ways at school. Another grace has been my return to school as a doctoral student of education at UMass Boston, an endeavor that has been energizing for me as I’ve begun to research refugee education and marginalization. Jason, too, has begun taking classes as part of a CAGS (post-master’s) program in educational leadership. Between my new job working directly for Lynn’s school department, our class schedules, the boys’ growing repertoire of interests (piano, drama club, sports), our new house church, and the move, we’ve needed—and experienced—so much grace in the forms of connectivity, joy and friendship this year.
And the year is ending with an added amount of grace, as Jason and I learned this fall that we are expecting a baby this July. It’s hard to explain how we feel about this news—excited, but as third-time parents might, and not as first-time starry-eyed couples seem to. Orilüs and Jackson, as you might anticipate, are thrilled—in one year, they’ve gotten all they’ve prayed for (new friends, a new dog, and a baby)!
And so our Grace House will grow, even as we wrestle with how to grow grace here. How exactly do we show grace to neighbors we are just beginning to know, neighbors who are increasingly afraid of the neighborhood? How do we live grace in a city beset by a rise in crime and gang activity? What does grace look like in a smaller house with a larger family? How does grace direct us with regards to how we spend our time, our money and our energies? How exactly do we continue to believe in grace when our daily experiences in our schools and in our neighborhood would seem to indicate that force, not grace, is the solution to what ails? And how do we foster grace as personal and spiritual practices, even as our natural personalities are anything but grace-filled?
We do not have many answers to these questions. We know that we have journeyed through a season of suffering as a family (the transplant year and the year of adjustment that followed) and emerged this year into a sudden, joy-filled dance that can only be called Grace. While the rest of the world worries, fears, fights and hoards, we pray we will have the courage to live for the wild mystery of God’s grace.
If Christmas means anything at all, from where I sit overlooking our neighborhood now alit with police lights and roaring again with sirens, the birth of Christ must mean that Grace can be among us and make a home among the conflict and terror of the world. A Grace House, indeed. May we all have courage to enter there and the faith to know we are truly welcome.
Praying your family will experience Grace this Christmas,
Melissa for the (growing) Winchell family
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