whole

A series of apparently unrelated events, taking place over the course of the last seven years, conspired to change my life on Thursday.

Seven years ago (perhaps eight) I wrote a story that centered around the hymn "Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing." I wrote it as an extemporaneous application piece for a summer creative writing program at the college that my sister later attended. The only prerequisite was that the story contain a truly cheesy sentence that went something like "her voice washed over me like clear blue water." After the time was up and all the applicants had turned in their pieces and left, I approached the moderators and asked if I could be mailed a copy of my story. I left them my address. They looked at me funny, a little irritated, but I got my story. I didn't get into the program.

My senior year in high school, I took Publishing Seminar, a class that produced my high school's competetive yearbook. That spring, once the yearbook was complete, some ambitious Pub compatriots, including myself, conspired to revive our high school's extinct litmag. Stacy and Christie and Molly slaved over the designs and layouts, and I developed a selection system for all submitted pieces. I also worked hard on my story about the hymn (oh, and yes, it's a crappy story, with a couple of good narrative seeds), and it was unanimously accepted.

So the hymn was running through my mind a lot that spring, as we printed submission fliers to stick into all the carpeted walls. It was running through my mind when my grandfather died of lung exhaustion from pneumonia at the end of March. It was running through my mind when a classmate died from a car accident less than a day later. It was running through my mind as we devoted an entire section of the litmag to commemorative pieces from her classmates, teachers and friends.

And then I shut it off, like I shut off the rest of the trauma, so that I could continue with my life. College was coming up. I had things I had to do.

Eighteen months later an indie pop/folk songwriter and musician I wouldn't hear about for five years began to rethink his hatred of the Christmas season. In December of 2001, Sufjan Stevens began, as a discipline to "make himself appreciate Christmas more," to create his own renditions of traditional songs and carols, and to write originals, as a private gift to his family and friends. This project continued over the next four and a half years.

Meanwhile, that same December, my sister was at her most ill. My family felt fragile. I was frightened and sad. Over the next five years, I witnessed the goodness of God in the circumstantial orchestration of my life. My sister stabilized. My family relationships improved. I graduated college and moved to South Bend. I found all manner of blessings in the jobs I landed. (Oh yes, jobs. I've had a lot of them in the past three years. Yay the rootless twenties.) In the friends I met. In the people who looked out for me as if I were their own family. I stopped attending church, but I kept the faith. I lived the way I knew I ought. I acknowledged God's obvious hand in my life.

But I didn't feel his presence. I used to, when I was little. All the time. Something completely inarticulable -- just a deep awareness of him surrounding me and filling me. It faded as I grew older, of course, and particularly during a difficult youth group experience that left me convinced God would rather not have made me because of how awful I was. I was sad for a long time. But still there were moments of that remembered connection, at retreats in particular, when God was there, when I felt him all through my being, and knew that he loved me.

The moments grew fewer and farther between. They seemed to vanish altogether. But I didn't notice, or I made myself not notice, until this summer. When the absence of connection threw me into a tailspin that almost cost my faith, except that I refused to give it up. I believed even when I didn't feel like I believed.

Then on November 21st, Sufjan Stevens, to whose music I had been introduced in the spring, and whose music I have come increasingly to love, for its genius and its strong, vivid, heartwrenchingly gorgeous undercurrents of faith, released his Songs for Christmas. Seven days later the mailman dropped it in the cleaned-out litterbox that serves as a catchall under the tiny rusted mailbox on my porch. That night I opened it and looked all through it, at all five albums, and rejoiced in the anticipation of hearing what he had to say and write and sing about the titles.

I read down through the track list on the back of the box. My eye stopped on "Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing." I had forgotten that hymn.

So when I came to it, Track 3 on Album II, I almost closed my eyes while driving the twenty-five minute commute to work. Simple. Choral. Tender, reverent, loving. Gorgeous connector chords between the verses. Lots of unembellished banjo and piano. And sung in the version I had always known and preferred, with the lyrics I especially loved.

When Album II ran out, I cycled it back to Track 3. I put it on repeat. I couldn't stop listening to it. It ran through my head while I made copies at work. It ran through my head while I forced myself to be polite to mean clients. It ran through my head while I knitted on my lunchbreak, alone in the upstairs office. It ran through my head while I cried, for the first time in six and a half years, for my grandfather.

That was Wednesday. Thursday I didn't listen to anything else. I harmonized with it all the way to work. Then, on the way home, as the last shreds of daylight faded from the prewinter sky, I felt some force compelling me to stop singing along. To listen, and be silent. So I did.

And started to cry. I wept the whole way home.

Because I felt God. I felt God beyond all need to grasp at faith, I felt God beyond all need to articulate to myself that he loved me. I didn't need to tell myself anything. God was there, surrounding me, inside me, all through me, and nothing else mattered. Not my stressful week, my single state, the trials of the past year(s). Everything was just God.

Once I was able to start thinking, I started thinking how his love was absolutely present, with his presence. I felt like I'd passed a long, arduous test. And I realized how much I'd missed that deep connection.

And thought about the timing of the events that were laid to bring me to that space in time.

Suddenly a lot of things are different. I have been able to be more understanding of the people who irritate me throughout the day. I've been able to step outside of myself. To stop worrying about the future and to stop being afraid. And to process various things that I haven't dealt with yet.

I feel like something in me that was broken a long time ago is beginning to heal. I know peace.

I don't know what it means, or what's up ahead, and I don't really need to. My longings to know God are being satisfied. I'm happy, and joyful, about the present.

Sufjan Stevens was the catalyst. And I'm immeasurably grateful.

Come, Thou fount of every blessing,
Tune my heart to sing Thy grace!
Streams of mercy, never ceasing
Call for songs of loudest praise.
Teach me some melodious sonnet
Sung by flaming tongues above!
Praise the mount! I'm fixed upon it,
Mount of Thy unchanging love.

Here I raise mine Ebenezer;
Hither by Thy help I've come.
And I hope, by Thy good pleasure,
Safely to arrive at home.
Jesus sought me when a stranger
Wand'ring from the fold of God.
He to rescue me from danger
Interposed His precious blood.

Oh, to grace how great a debtor
Daily I'm constrained to be!
Let that grace now like a fetter
Bind my wand'ring heart to Thee.
Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it --
Prone to leave the God I love!
Here's my heart -- oh, take and seal it
Seal it for Thy courts above.