Hadley has made the decision to become confirmed, and here is what I said at her confirmation:
This is our daughter, Hadley Grace. Her first name comes from Mr. Arthur Radley, otherwise known as “Boo” Radley, from Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird, and her middle name comes from my mom, Grace Ayanoglou Lewis. I suppose knowing Radley’s story gives us insight into what grace is and what it does, but the wonderful and mysterious thing about grace is you don’t have to be like Boo Radley – or anyone – in order to experience it. Grace is with you wherever you are and whoever you are. Sometimes it looks like love. Sometimes it looks like justice. Sometimes it’ll feel like a 70 degree day in February, and sometimes it’ll show up like snow in April.
Grace’s story, like Boo Radley’s, like yours, like everyone’s, is complicated and at times unbelievable, and so here are words from Lauren Winner that I’ve found helpful when grace and doubt, or grace and fear, or grace and sorrow make belief hard:
“I think of a story my friend Julian told me. She was twelve, and she was preparing to be confirmed. A few days before the confirmation service, she told her father – the pastor of the church – that she wasn’t sure she could go through with it. She didn’t know that she really believed everything she was supposed to believe, and she didn’t know that she should proclaim in front of the church that she was ready to believe it forever. ‘What you promise when you are confirmed,’ said Julian’s father, ‘is not that you will believe this forever. What you promise when you are confirmed is that that is the story you will wrestle with forever.’” (from Lauren F. Winner’s Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis
May you always wrestle with this story, Hadley Grace. May you always wrestle with yourself, believing that it is in this grappling with the world and with others, that you are very much at home in grace.
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