Ordinary Grace

I was filled with dismay when I was told this was our book club selection for February. A mystery! Oh dear. I'm not a person who is a fan of mysteries.

The person who told me this was a mystery was wrong (in a way) and I was wrong; this is a mystery, yes, but it's much more than a mystery, and its strength lies in the parts, I think, that are not a mystery. Ordinary Grace is the story of Frank, a thirteen-year-old boy, during the summer of 1961.

The prologue is an excellent foretaste of what is to come. I'll abridge and share here:

“All the dying that summer began with the death of a child, a boy with golden hair and thick glasses, killed on the railroad tracks outside New Bremen, Minnesota....It was a summer in which death, in visitation, assumed many forms. Accident. Nature. Suicide. Murder. You might think I remember that summer as tragic and I do but not completely so. My father used to quote the Greek playwright Aeschylus. ‘He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain, which cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart, until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.' In the end maybe that's what the summer was about....I...didn't understand such things then. I've come four decades since but I'm not sure that even now I fully understand. I still spend a lot of time thinking about the events of that summer. About the terrible pain of wisdom. The awful grace of God.”

How can you resist that? Murder. Suicide. Death by accident and nature. And, over all of these, the terrible grace of God.