Where God Finds Us

Prompt: Ask yourself what you see in the face of everyday people. What do you see when you speak to a stranger in a grocery store? Do you see the person within, or do you see wrinkles, someone who is old and dilapidated because of a long, tiring life? Write something about a particular person who you respect due to their inner spirit, rather than their appearance.

Response: It’s perilously easy to make snap judgments. This person’s a jock, that person’s a geek, the other person is an over-achiever, he’s white, she’s black, he’s Asian. Categorizing others appeals to our sense of order and efficiency. 

But then we only skim the surface.
 

The summer when I was 20, a friend and I rented an upstairs apartment in downtown Kalamazoo from a crabby old lady. Our landlady always looked pinched and her grey roots belied her suspiciously dark-brown hair. She also wore a brace on her leg and walked awkwardly because of it. Perhaps she had had polio in her youth. We didn’t know. We never asked.

Looking back, she was probably not much older than I am now. And no doubt she was crabby because she had two young women upstairs who stayed up too late, had too many friends over, and played their music too loudly.

So we had her pegged: Crabby. Old. Lady.

For some reason I can no longer remember, I was sitting with our landlady in her first-floor digs one afternoon. I also don’t remember how we got on the subject of sailing. But abruptly, she was transformed: Her expression softened, her face glowed, she looked 30 years younger, and her voice was nearly rapturous as she talked about sailing. I was stunned.

Then I thought about her brace-encased leg and her difficulty walking. Sailing must have given her a chance to soar, to feel wind and sun on her face, to move forward with no barriers, to finally feel graceful and free.

I’m not conventionally religious, but I remember thinking, this is where we find glimmers of God, in these true and unguarded moments. I chanced upon an atom, a spark of divinity in our landlady. It’s a spark that still warms me more than 40 years later when I recall that conversation. I wish she had known that.

Since then, I have looked for that spark in family, friends, students, colleagues, neighbors, complete strangers, people who are Black, White, Hispanic, Asian, Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Atheist, liberal and conservative. I don’t find it as often as I’d like to, but I know the spark is there, lurking somewhere beneath the surface. I just need to find that true, unguarded moment when a tiny piece of God peers out at me.

-- Frances FitzGerald