“As a fan’s notes for grace, a quavery chant against the dark, I sing a song of things that make us grin and bow, that just for an instant let us see sometimes the web and weave of merciful, the endless possible, the incomprehensible inexhaustible inexplicable yes,

“Such as, to name a few:

“The way the sun crawls over the rim of the world every morning like a child’s face rising beaming from a pool all fresh from the womb of the dark, and the way jays hop and damselflies do that geometric aero-amazing thing and bees inspect and birds probe and swifts chitter, and the way the young mother at the bus stop has her infant swaddled and huddled against her chest like a blinking extra heart… and the way faces curve around the mouth and eyes according to how many times you smiled over the years, and the way people fall asleep in chairs by the fire and snap awake startled and amazed, unsure, just for a second, what planet exactly they are on, which is a question we should probably all ask far more often than we do.

“Look, I know very well that brooding misshapen evil is everywhere, in the brightest houses and the most cheerful denials, in what we do and what we have failed to do, and I know all too well that the story of the world is entropy, things fly apart, we sicken, we fail, we grow weary, we divorce, we are hammered and hounded by loss and accidents and tragedies. But I also know, with all my hoary muddled heart, that we are carved of immense confusing holiness; that the whole point for us is grace under duress; and that you either take a flying leap at nonsensical illogical unreasonable ideas like marriage and marathons and democracy and divinity, or you huddle behind the wall. I believe that the coolest things there are cannot be measured, calibrated, calculated, gauged, weighed, or understood except sometimes by having a child patiently explain it to you, which is another thing that should happen far more often to us all. In short I believe in believing, which doesn’t make sense, which gives me hope.”

by Brian Doyle