Failing Well

About a week before Christmas, I ran downstairs with my laptop open to a job posting at the University of Notre Dame that I knew in the depths of my soul was the perfect job for me. The position was basically a full time storytelling gig. I would write stories. FOR A LIVING.

“JESSE LOOK AT THIS RIGHT NOW I DO NOT CARE IF YOU ARE ON THE PHONE WITH THE TAIWANESE GOVERNMENT,” I said (because sometimes he is, and I have been told that even if I’ve gotten into a car accident due to eating too many donuts, that it’s a no-no to interrupt this kind of meeting).

There is no one who’s been created as more of a realist than Jesse. He is concrete. He is facts embodied. And so I knew I had to apply when I saw him fight a smile because he too knew that this job was for me.

So I did. And I didn’t get it, but the head of the department emailed me back telling me that he doesn’t have time to personally respond to all the applicants, but my cover letter made an impression and he wanted to let me know. The only reason I wasn’t considered for an interview was because I wasn’t willing to relocate.

I miss teaching. But I don’t want to go back. That makes me sad, but at the end of last year it felt really good to not only step towards something that sounded right and good, but it was something that I knew I could do. So, I’m sharing the cover letter on my blog.

Go, Irish, and also I love Ann Arbor.

It was in the Hammes Bookstore I believe I first experienced the expansiveness of God’s grace. I was teaching 6^th grade at Covenant Christian School in Mishawaka, and I was looking for a book my students and I could study during Lent. I found a slim devotion whose title I’ve forgotten, but it told the Holy Week story from the voices of different people who lived it: Mary, Mary Magdalene, and Peter, for example. The person who surprised me the most was Judas. I was taught that he was the bad guy. Yes, of course Jesus died for all our sins, but wasn’t he the one who got the whole thing started?

            It was clear from Judas’ story that he’d been forgiven, and reading it I felt the shock of hope that I now believe is God’s grace. Because of this, the story became more complicated and nuanced, and my understanding of what grace is deepened and grew more mysterious. I wanted my students to experience this kind of grace; I wanted them to consider this kind of grace in their lives. I ordered a class set that day.

            My husband, Jesse, was a graduate student at Notre Dame from 1998-2004, and we spent our first years of marriage in South Bend. It was on a snowy evening when we were first married that I was lamenting the fact that I was no longer a college student, and Jesse took me to the Hesburgh Library where I found a copy of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and checked it out. We walked to The Huddle, and filled up white paper bags with gummies from the Wall of Candy, and I spent the rest of the evening eating candy and reading about creations left unloved turning into monsters, while Jesse worked equations having to do with hurricane storm surge.

            In the summer, when I wasn’t teaching, I would ride my bike to meet Jesse for lunch. His lab was across from Ivan Mestrovic’s sculpture of Jesus and the woman at the well, and I liked to sit and look at it while I waited. I liked that the woman looked strong, and confident, and not ashamed as I’d imagined her to be whenever I read the story in the Bible. I liked that Jesus seemed to be reaching toward her, offering her something; desiring to convince her of something. Mestrovic’s sculpture, like the book I found in the Hammes bookstore, helped me see the story differently. 

            I believe stories told well bring us into communion with God and with each other. They help us bear what we cannot by ourselves, and in sharing them, they serve as a compass on our quests for grace that astonishes, expands, and haunts us. They bring us a grace that brings us into the palm of a Creator who wonderfully and fearfully created us. In my work as a teacher, a writer, and a mother, I believe I am called to help bring forth that kind of grace, and I believe storytelling is the gift God gave me to share with others. I would be honored to work for Notre Dame as a writer and storyteller.