Embraced by Grace by Margot Van Sluytman – Feminism and Religion

I have Come Full Circle. March 27th is the 48th anniversary of the murder of my father Theodore Van Sluytman in Scarborough, Ontario, Canada. An Easter Monday. My entire life from that time the age of 16 to this time now the age of 64 was, is, and will always be a connection to how word with a capital W and words with a lowercase w, infuse, inspire, and affect my life. I might even say infect my life.

After being contacted by one of my father’s three murderers, almost 30 years after he put the bullet in my father’s heart, we did share healing. All seemed well in the crucible of tying up loose ends as it were. Ten years later, however, he, made choices that were deeply unaligned to that meeting.

When he and I met, it was powerful. It was profound. Terrifying too. And liberating. His choices 10 years after that meeting, though they shattered me for a time, leaving me with feelings of smallness, stupidity, and inadequacy based on the fact that in choosing to meet him major rifts in my family occurred. Few supported my choice to meet him. However, I grew to understand that we are the poetry that we wish to read, to be, and to see in the world. That we are human. I thought about my feelings of smallness, stupidity, and inadequacy. Thought long and hard. Many times. In early dawning days. Sitting in the gloaming. Late into the night.

I slowly began to embody the fact that we are process. Not simply product. And because we walk and live within the crucible of Gaia’s very delighting and Sophia: Wisdom’s glorious sibling, our capacity to spiral into possibility, even as we spin downward into pain, ache, and anguish, is a paradox which propels us into new language of what it means to be. What it means to become. What it means to listen and to hear. To whisper, to whimper, and to scream our words, our silences, our peace and peril, our grace and our gratitude directly into the awaiting embrace of Grace.

Not only is there no binary in terms of how to be, how to become, how to form, reform, inform, and transform. It is a vast terrain such as closure. Both are ways in which space opened up in the intellect of our hearts, the hearts of our intellect, and in our psyches and our souls. Space to acknowledge that every moment of every day is another moment to step into the call and answer of what life really is: stages. Stages which are an eternity of phases.

Recently becoming friends with my sage neighbour Rosemary, well into her ninth decade, whose birthdate is the same as my father, I have been renewed. Catapulted into a future that is now. Swimming, spiralling, celebrating, and singing the acknowledgement that being process, being the poetry, expands infinite possibility of self-love. Lovingly embraced by Grace. Celebrated too.

Self-love locates us in the liminal from which we can move back and forth. Up. Down. Sideways. Into and through past, present, and future. Into an articulation of knowing that we matter no matter who we are, what has been done to us, what we have done. A simple understanding situated on the poignant premise that because I matter you matter.

In this the month of poetry, April, I move ever deeper into the acknowledgement that no amount of betrayal no amount of anger, anguish, from others to me or from me to others, decimates, denies or destroys love. And endless possibility. To survive and to thrive and to plant little seeds where we most feel the need for sprouting. Watching the sprouting and growth in all its stages.

The Life You Save Might Be Your Own, by Paul Ellie, besides being an enriching read, is a title that for me is a title extraordinaire. In eight words, it spotlights self-love by articulating that to cherish each of our lives: matters. The life you save may well be your own. A blessing.  A gift.

And questions follow. How is that “saved” life lived out? How do I know what it is I must do? How do I know what choices to make? How do I know how to live with choices that cannot be un-made?

In leaning into Socratic Methodology, Dialogical Inquiry, more questions then flow naturally, such as: What is it that you want? Who is it that you want to be in this now in this moment? Do anger and rage and violence and brutality alone speak of possibility? Might I feel those feelings as easily and as trusting as I feel gladness, joy, hope? What is this life asking of me? Now. As I look down at my feet to understand where it is that life wishes me to be. Now. In reflecting upon choices made my one of my father’s three murderers to step upon another “stage”, many years ago after I trusted him reaching out to me, I have grown to understand that in self-love and in knowing that the life I save might be my own, a life I do wish to save, gratitude and grace wriggled their ways directly back into my days. My dawns. In the gloaming.

Sweet as dew-drenched early morning Summer grass. Pungent to the heart as birdsong in Spring. Elation spirals. And spirals still. For the gift of time, daily, expresses an infinity of stages. When one curtain falls, another, and others await to rise. In expectancy and trust with earnest surrender in silent sleeping stillness, the embrace of Grace speaks in a language available to all.

Divining Grace
In fever dreams
Silence vibrates
Light infiltrates
Initiating transformation
Becoming resilient
Forgoing boredom.
How I long for our
Reframing of reciprocity.
Pilgrims light-gaited.
Fingers point in prayer
With our devotionals
Divining Grace.
© Margot Van Sluytman