A Gratitude Season Message from Josephine Arader
October is Grace’s Gratitude Season! We are reflecting on the blessings in our lives and how Grace counts among them, as our Gratitude Team (formerly the Stewardship Committee) asks us to consider our giving to Grace for next year. Interested in the nuts and bolts (and more inspiration?) Check out our Gratitude Giving Campaign Flip Book! You can make your pledge for 2027 anytime online at www.grace-episcopal.org/giving/
When I was asked to speak about what Grace means to our family, I realized that the simplest way to say it is this: Grace Church has become our family’s chosen spiritual home.
We first came to Grace in the fall of 2022, during a period of transition for our family. We were moving our children into the public school system, and we wanted them to continue to have the kind of gentle, joyful spiritual formation they had known through Catechesis of the Good Shepherd. So, really, we came for the children. It was the Atrium, and especially the warmth of Maria Phelps, that first brought us through the doors.
What I did not expect was that Grace would meet something in me, too.
I grew up in Episcopal schools and have very positive memories of church when I was young. But, like many people, I drifted away as an adult. I never stopped searching spiritually, however. In fact, that search has been present in me for as long as I can remember.
At first, when the children were in Atrium, I would sometimes sit in church almost because I was already here. And then I couldn’t help but start listening. Amy would preach, and something in her words would reach me very deeply. Sunday after Sunday, I would find myself sitting in these pews crying. Not because I was sad. Because, I felt seen. I felt held. I felt something in me opening.
It felt less like I was discovering something new and more like I was remembering something I had always known. That distinction has become very important to me.
My spiritual life is rooted in a sense that the Divine is not distant from us. That there is something sacred within us and around us, something we can become more aware of when we become quiet enough to listen. And sometimes life makes us forget. We get caught up in our responsibilities, our fears, our identities, our schedules, our ambitions, all the things we think we are supposed to be.
For me, a spiritual life is partly about remembering. Remembering what is deepest in us. Remembering our connection to one another. Remembering that we are not separate from the Divine. Grace Church has become one of the primary places that helps me remember.
This summer, I had an experience that brought that into even sharper focus for me. We were in France, and I visited the cave at Sainte-Baume associated with Mary Magdalene. I had known before I went that it would be meaningful to me, but I was not prepared for how deeply it would affect me.
I cried. I felt held. And I had this extraordinarily vivid sense of being shown how much of my life can be governed by the ties that bind me: fear, expectation, identity, the need to please, all the things that can close me off from who I most deeply am. And in that experience, I felt something very gentle inviting me to open my heart.
It didn’t feel like someone giving me a new set of beliefs. It felt like being reminded. Trust what you already know. Come back to what is real. Open your heart.
That experience helped me understand more clearly why Grace Church matters to me. I have big questions. Really big ones.
There are parts of Christian doctrine that I struggle with. There are parts of the Bible that I struggle with. There are words in the Nicene Creed that I cannot say with the same understanding or certainty as the person standing next to me. My understanding of Jesus may also be different from someone else’s.
For me, Jesus reveals what a human life can look like when it is profoundly united with the Divine: radically loving, compassionate, forgiving, free from fear, awake to the sacred in other people. And I believe that capacity for relationship with the Divine is something we are all invited into.
So there are many Sundays when I come here with questions. But something remarkable about Grace is that I do not feel that my questions disqualify me from being here. Quite the opposite.
“All are welcome” has become deeply meaningful to me. Because welcome, to me, does not mean that everyone arrives at the same answer. It means there is room. Room for my husband to have his own spiritual life. Room for me to have mine. Room for each of our children to grow into their own understanding of the Divine. Room for certainty. Room for uncertainty. Room for belief. Room for questions. Room for the fullness of who we each are.
And yet Grace also reminds me that having our own path does not mean that we have to walk it alone. That is another reason this place has become so important to us.
We need one another. We need practices that call us back. We need places where we stop. We need music and prayer and silence and Eucharist. We need people who know us. We need people who notice when we are here and notice when we are not. We need people who help raise our children. We need people who sit beside us in the pews.
A while ago, when we were newer to Grace, my husband was away and I came to church alone. And I remember looking around and realizing that I wasn’t really alone at all. I was surrounded by familiar faces. People who knew me. People who knew our family. There was kindness, affection, quiet support. And I left that morning feeling incredibly grateful that this place had woven itself into our lives.
Our children have their experience of Grace. My husband has his. I have mine. None of those experiences has to be identical for Grace to be our spiritual home. In fact, I think that is part of what I treasure most about it. We are each given the space to seek, to question, to listen, and to experience the Divine in our own way, while being held within something larger than ourselves.
And I think that is where stewardship begins for me. It is easy to think of stewardship as maintaining a building, paying salaries, funding programs, keeping the lights on. Of course those things matter. But what we are really sustaining is something much harder to quantify.
We are sustaining a place where people can come and remember. A place where a child can encounter wonder in the Atrium. A place where someone who has been away from church for years can sit quietly in a pew and unexpectedly feel something inside them begin to open. A place where a person can bring enormous questions and still belong. A place where we are reminded that spiritual life is deeply personal, but it is not solitary. A place where we can encounter the Divine in one another.
That is what Grace has given our family. There is something profoundly real here. I can’t reduce it to doctrine. I can’t completely explain it. But I know it when I experience it. And our family has experienced it here.
When Amy says, “All are welcome, won’t you come?” I hear something much deeper than an invitation to attend church or come up for communion. I hear an invitation to bring your whole self. Your faith. Your doubt. Your questions. Your wounds. Your joy. Your searching. Your children. Your story. And to discover that there is room for all of it here.
That is why Grace is our chosen spiritual home. And that is why we are so grateful to be part of it.
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