Quotes by Cathleen Falsani

“I was often turned down. Most of Hollywood turned me down, and I spent a lot of time trying to figure out why that was. There was a real reticence among actors to do this. They have more gatekeepers.”

“The Goth kids ... are searching for something, he says, and its not him. But he can try to point them in the right direction, toward the things he was searching for as a Goth teenager and as a depressed, self-absorbed young adult.”

Together, on his back porch, his cigarette smoke rising like incense to the heavens, we spoke to the God of grace we both are so grateful to know up close and personal. It may be the most beautiful prayer Ive ever heard. Jesus, for some reason youve given us another day, and youve set us in Narnia. There are people who still think its frozen, and there are people who are longing to be thawed but dont know it. God, I pray that what youve called us to do would be the subversive work of the kingdom, that we would help participate in the melting of Narnia, and that people would come alive and would drink and dance and sing and just celebrate life in ways that are so marvelous that the world would press its face against the glass and see the redeemed celebrate life. Amen.

Good morning, God. Another beautiful day. Im still here, and so is the sun. Thank you. Right, now lets get down to business.

Ive heard it said that grace is God reaching Gods hands into the world. And the Bible tells us that we are part of the body of Christ, that if we let the Spirit move through us, we can become the hands of Christ on earth. Hands that heal, bless, unite, and love. Id like to think Gods hands are a bit like Graces man hands—gentle but big, busy, and tough. Gods hands are those of a creator—an artist who molded and shaped the universe out of a void, who hewed matter from nothingness.

Then round about the age of twenty-five, I was tired of being tired of being scared about doing something that, if I deconstruct it honestly, might somehow cost me my salvation and make God love me less. When I understood, in Gods grace, that there was nothing—not a thing—I could do to make God love me any less or any more, when I understood that there was nothing wrong or right about who I am in Gods eyes, that Im just loved, I started to live. Boldly. Or at least as boldly as I can muster much of the time.

Jesus must have had man hands. He was a carpenter, the Bible tells us. I know a few carpenters, and they have great hands, all muscled and worn, with nicks and callused pads from working wood together with hardware and sheer willpower. In my mind, Jesus isnt a slight man with fair hair and eyes who looks as if a strong breeze could knock him down, as he is sometimes depicted in art and film. I see him as sturdy, with a thick frame, powerful legs, and muscular arms. He has a shock of curly black hair and an untrimmed beard, his face tanned and lined from working in the sun. And his hands—hands that pounded nails, sawed lumber, drew in the dirt, and held the children he beckoned to him. Hands that washed his disciples feet, broke bread for them, and poured their wine. Hands that hauled a heavy cross through the streets of Jerusalem and were later nailed to it. Those were some man hands.

Maybe thats why Jesus was so fond of parables: Nothing describes the indescribable like a good yarn.

Wait, go back to that Southern Baptist part,” Julia said, interrupting, as she does. “Are you a born-again?” articulating her question as if she were asking me if I were really a headhunter or a Martian. “Yes,” I said, “but Im not an asshole. At least not theologically speaking.

I have a complicated spiritual history. Heres the short version: I was born into a Mass-going Roman Catholic family, but my parents left the church when I was in the fifth grade and joined a Southern Baptist church—yes, in Connecticut. I am an alumnus of Wheaton College—Billy Grahams alma mater in Illinois, not the Seven Sisters school in Massachusetts—and the summer between my junior and senior year of (Christian) high school, I spent a couple of months on a missions trip performing in whiteface as a mime-for-the-Lord on the streets of Londons West End. Once I left home for Wheaton, I ended up worshiping variously (and when I could haul my lazy tuckus out of bed) at the nondenominational Bible church next to the college, a Christian hippie commune in inner-city Chicago left over from the Jesus Freak movement of the 1960s, and an artsy-fartsy suburban Episcopal parish that ended up splitting over same-sex issues. My husband of more than a decade likes to describe himself as a “collapsed Catholic,” and for more than twenty-five years, I have been a born-again Christian. Groan, I know. But theres really no better term in the current popular lexicon to describe my seminal spiritual experience. It happened in the summer of 1980 when I was about to turn ten years old. My parents had both had born-again experiences themselves about six months earlier, shortly before our family left the Catholic church—much to the shock and dismay of the rest of our extended Irish and/or Italian Catholic family—and started worshiping in a rented public grade school gymnasium with the Southern Baptists. My mother had told me all about what shed experienced with God and how I needed to give my heart to Jesus so I could spend eternity with him in heaven and not frying in hell. I was an intellectually stubborn and precocious child, so I didnt just kneel down with her and pray the first time she told me about what was going on with her and Daddy and Jesus. If something similar was going to happen to me, it was going to happen in my own sweet time. A few months into our familys new spiritual adventure, after hearing many lectures from Mom and sitting through any number of sermons at the Baptist church—each ending with an altar call and an invitation to make Jesus the Lord of my life—I got up from bed late one Sunday night and went downstairs to the den where my mother was watching television. I couldnt sleep, which was unusual for me as a child. I was a champion snoozer. In hindsight I realize something must have been troubling my spirit.Mom went into the kitchen for a cup of tea and left me alone with the television, which she had tuned to a church service. I dont remember exactly what the preacher said in his impassioned, sweaty sermon, but I do recall three things crystal clearly: The preacher was Jimmy Swaggart; he gave an altar call, inviting the folks in the congregation in front of him and at home in TV land to pray a simple prayer asking Jesus to come into their hearts; and that I prayed that prayer then and there, alone in the den in front of the idiot box. Seriously. That is precisely how I got “saved.” Alone. Watching Jimmy Swaggart on late-night TV. I also spent a painful vacation with my family one summer at Jim and Tammy Faye Bakkers Heritage USA Christian theme park in South Carolina. But thats a whole other book…

My nun, which is how I think of her, was the most profound witness for Gods love Ive ever encountered in this world. She was a magnet for lost souls, a petite fortress of strength and unconditional love. What this sprightly, silly, lovely woman did from the obscurity of a faded convent in Rust Belt Chicago was to fulfill in a passionate, tireless way the supreme commandment of Jesus gospel every day of her life.

Why grace? Because some days, its the only thing we have in common. Because its the one thing Im certain is real. Because its the reason Im here. Because its the oxygen of religious life, or so says a musician friend of mine, who tells me, “Without it, religion will surely suffocate you.” Because so many of us are gasping for air and grasping for God, but fleeing from a kind of religious experience that has little to do with anything sacred or gracious.

Grace to me is a little bit of extra help when youre feeling stuck or doomed or, probably, hopefully, out of good ideas on how to save yourself, and how to salvage the situation or the friendship or the whatever it is,” Anne Lamott once told me. “I wish it was accompanied by harp music so you could know thats what was happening, but for me its that extra pause or that extra breath or that extra minutes patience against all odds.” On that first trip to Ireland, grace—the kick-in-the-pants, clarifying, cosmic-pause-button kind of grace—didnt just have a harp. It had an entire soundtrack...

This is where Jeans stubbornness and, perhaps, Gods stubborn grace came into play. “My definition of grace would be multifaceted, but part of it would certainly be Gods passion for brokenness. He does, he really does love brokenness,” Jean told me. “Grace doesnt obsess with ourselves. It obsesses with people and with brokenness. This is a hard place to live, but God is bigger than hard places to live.

God can and does use anything God chooses to get our attention. Whos to say the hawk wasnt sent as an agent of grace to catch my wandering attention and quiet what Buddhists might call my “monkey mind,” which is more often than not swinging wildly from branch to branch on intellectual and emotional trees. On the way back down the hiking trail after my encounter with the hawk in Big Sky, I stopped thinking and started looking and listening. Thats when I realized winter was turning into spring before me. Change was happening. Creation, and perhaps the Creator, was speaking. I just needed to be outside to hear the voice.

Some theologians argue that one kind of grace is better than another, and that some people think theyre experiencing “divine” grace when its actually just “common.”To me, thats like bickering about what color Gods eyes are. (Theyre hazel, in case you were wondering.)

Were so worried about the legal details of crossing doctrinal ts and dotting sociopolitical is that we miss the big picture. The love picture. The one thing Jesus was really clear about: LOVE. If we could just get that one thing down, I believe the details would take care of themselves.

In her inestimable audacity, Julia was the catalyst in my life for something beautiful. I hadnt anticipated her—hadnt even wanted her, truthfully—but there she was. A little something extra that made all the difference in the world.

Trying to explain or define grace is like catching the wind in a cardboard box or describing the color green.

Such arguments remind me of a scene from Woody Allens movie Manhattan, where a group of people is talking about sex at a cocktail party and one woman says that her doctor told her she had been having the wrong kind of orgasm. Woody Allens character responds by saying, “Did you have the wrong kind? Really? Ive never had the wrong kind. Never, ever. My worst one was right on the money.” Grace works the same way. It is what it is and its always right on the money. You can call it what you like, categorize it, vivisect it, qualify, quantify, or dismiss it, and none of it will make grace anything other than precisely what grace is: audacious, unwarranted, and unlimited.