I was touched by Garrison Keillor’s story on Prairie Home Companion (October 11, 2014) about barely avoiding some kids while driving a little buzzed one evening. He was in his mid-twenties when he was driving home from a party and coming over a rise to see three boys walking on the road. He grabbed the wheel, but didn’t see how he could avoid them. “I waited for the bump of the bodies,” he recalled, but it never came. Instead he found himself pulled over to the side of the road and the boys scurrying off into the woods, laughing at their narrow escape.
“Had I hit them, this would have been a deep shadow over the rest of my life . . . It did not happen what should have happened. “ The event haunted him. “Through pure grace your own future did not catch up with you,” he reflected as he concluded his Lake Woebegone monologue.
How soberly he recalled this incident with not a trace of Woebegone irony. He was really living by grace and gratitude for being delivered from tragedy. He remembered the story in the context of a horizontal eclipse, the wonder of the sun rising and the moon setting simultaneously and the moon turned red by the spectacle. It was what the modern mind reduces to superstition, feeling pangs of regret and relief in conjunction with a natural phenomenon. It was either a spiritual moment or an ironic one, depending on your perspective.
Keillor, a man who loves to skewer his religious upbringing, chose the spiritual reflection and willingly shared it on National Public Radio. That is what touched me . . . the vulnerability that says I am here by the grace of God and says it to a secular listening audience. The whole story is recorded on an audio-file on http://prairiehome.org/shows/october-11-2014/ to be reviewed by any cynical ear that wants to judge it.
Most everyone has these near tragedies in their lives, and some are not so lucky in their escape. How we catalog those events matters. Were we lucky, gritty, resourceful or saved by grace? It is not easy to judge. But if we find ourselves habitually lucky or resourceful, we may be missing the humbling moment that helped define Keillor’s life.
In the nadir of my life my marriage was breaking up, and I was living in a cottage rental in January on Cape Cod. A phone call interrupted my anguish. My uncle was dying from cancer, as we knew he would. My wife and I drove to Connecticut, hardly able to speak to each other in the car. I spent four days struggling with my uncle’s passing and weeping through his funeral. My wife stayed an extra week to help my aunt and mother gather the pieces of their lives.
When Kathy returned we suddenly resolved to save our marriage, and that has made all the difference. Whenever “I am the Bread of Life” echoes from my uncle’s funeral, I am reduced to tears. I am not only mourning my uncle, although he meant a lot to me. I am re-living the grace that sent me down a different road, the one that made all the difference.
You could interpret it differently. You could say you summoned your spiritual resources or you backed away from inevitable divorce. Or you could sing “Amazing Grace” and mean it. I like the way Garrison Keillor interpreted it.