Inescapable Grace

I wrote the reflection for today's readings for Give Us This Day. I was drawn as much to the collect as I was to the images in the psalm and gospel:

May your grace, O Lord, we pray, 
at all times go before us and follow after
and make us always determined
to carry out good works.
Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son,
who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God, for ever and ever. Amen.

The full quote from Teilhard de Chardin is: "By means of all created things, without exception, the divine assails us, penetrates us, and molds us. We imagine it as distant and inaccessible, whereas in fact, we live steeped in its burning layers."

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Despite all my years of scientific training, I have a hard time seeing the stars whirling above my head at night not as little twinkling jewels set into a firmament, but rather as enormous, unimaginably fiery suns, their warmth bathing planets millions of miles away. They are so distant, so inaccessible, can I truly believe such a thing possible?

I confess to having the same trouble with grace. I can’t quite grasp the enormity or the power of God’s grace. All too often I imagine it as distant. Inaccessible. Or at least it seems improbable that my sinful self should be able to draw upon that divine warmth. But grace, pointed out Jesuit paleontologist and theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, SJ, is inescapable: We live steeped in its burning layers. Every way we turn, in everything we touch and that touches us, God’s grace assails us, penetrates us, molds us.

The psalmist sings of the earth, full of the kindness of the Lord—full of grace. The sparrows outside my window chirping irrepressibly at dawn, the wind sweeping down the hill, the warm splashes of color streaming through the stained-glass windows of my parish church—always and ever touching and touched by the divine. As am I.

The Collect, too, reminds us that at every moment grace goes before us, grace trails after us, grace propels us outside ourselves to work for the Gospel. Christ above us, Christ beside us, Christ underneath our feet. Every hair on our heads counted, every breath vouchsafed. As improbable as it seems, God is with us. Now and always, inescapable.

Michelle Francl-Donnay

Michelle Francl-Donnay is a wife and mother, a retired professor of chemistry, and an adjunct scholar atthe Vatican Observatory. 

[CREDIT] From the October 2026 issue of Give Us This Day, www.giveusthisday.org (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2026). Used with permission.

Alarmed

We only took carry-on suitcases for the week in Paris, where the weather was expected to be delightfully warm, and left the wooly sweaters and turtlenecks and extra-toasty PJs packed up in the large bags at Crash & Company's in Scotland.  I confessed to Crash's Companion that I had packed my Parisian PJs! Little did I suspect that I would get to model the outfit for more than Math Man.

It happened to be the tail end of fashion week when we arrived in Paris, but I was not walking any runways. Instead, on Sunday morning, just after 7 am, the fire alarm went off in our lovely hotel. I grabbed room key, glasses, and phone, slipped on my jacket and the black flats I'd left by the door when we'd come home the night before and proceeded down the stairs in my Parisian PJs. This is not my first fire alarm. It's not even my first fire alarm in a hotel. 

The staff are at the bottom of the stairs, reassuring us that their alarm system is very sensitive and that probably someone was just smoking in a room, urging us toward the lobby. More people began to arrive. There were people dressed for the day, suitcases ready to roll. Their taxi came, and they left. There was a couple in bathrobes over nightgowns, wishing aloud they had a drink. 

The alarm turned out to have been triggered by a hair dryer. The couple in their robes now wished for champagne, which the staff sent up. We went back upstairs. I had no desire for champagne, just a bit more sleep after a long day and late night. As we went past the room next to us, the door cracked open and a woman peeked out. "What was that?" "The fire alarm, set off by a hair dryer." "Ah!" What I wanted to say was, "How did you ignore that? It was loud enough to be painful." Also, "Why didn't you evacuate??"

We crawled back in bed, ears ringing, until it was time to get up for Mass.

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Working in a science building you get used to hearing the alarms go off. Sometimes (three times in my career) there really is a fire. I learned as a grad student to always take your keys, I didn't and we were out of the building for 8 hours after an explosion in a lab left a faculty member burned and _moved_ the wall several inches. Without my keys I couldn’t get into my apartment!

Four times I've been ousted by fire alarms in the middle of the night, once from a hotel during a conference and three nights in a row from the dorms while at a Gordon Research Conference. The latter were false alarms (and we attendees were quite grumpy by night three).

Then there was this alarming experience while on retreat. 

Photos is of a fiery evening sky in Paris, taken from a boat on the Seine.

A trip to the past

 

Math Man and I have been on the road recently, mostly to see family living on the other side of the Atlantic, celebrating a new-ish addition to Norwegian Niece's family and the legal joining of Crash and his significant other. And Paris, I got to go to Paris. 

As lovely as it has all been (and there were very few bobbles and many delightful adventures), it is very nice to be home. What did I miss most, aside from my own bed? A clothes dryer. When an unanticipated Scottish rainshower leaves you a bit damp, you can't just toss things in the dryer, you must hang them on the drying rack and hope they will dry in time for you to pack them later that day!

One delightful adventure in the forest:

We left modern Norway behind and turned into the forest. Two kilometers uphill we came to a small 19th century cabin set into a small knoll. Elgsrud was originally a smallholding — a farm — settled in 1860. (Elgs means "moose" in Norwegian and rud means "clearing.") The one-story building housed two families, with perhaps 7 kids all told. The photo shows almost the entirety of the interior of the house. This would have been very tight quarters. The ceiling is low, there is an open hearth in the corner and a ladder leading up to an attic space near the door. This last is a modern addition. When the cabin was originally built more than a foot and a half of soil was up there to act as insulation.The land surrounding the cabin is not flat, but falls off steeply to a small glacial lake below. There are not any flat open areas such as what you might expect for a classic farm. This is a remote spot now and would have been even more so in 1860.

We had come to have dinner with two Norwegian friends, joining two more of their friends, one of whom would paint for us the history of the place while we ate a candlelight dinner mostly foraged from the surrounding forest. We began over a creamy wild mushroom soup, enjoyed goat burgers, an incredible lingonberry rye porridge with coffee (in Norway no meal is complete without coffee). 

The farm was sold around 1900 and used for hunting and recreation. In World War II, the Norwegian resistance hero Max Manus hid here while recovering from an illness or injuries. His friend carried him there on his back. Manus was a trained and highly successful saboteur, part of the Oslo Gang, responsible for sinking Nazi ships in Oslo harbor among other feats. Since WW II the cabin has been used by the Scout and by high school classes. Today it is managed as a historical and cultural site.

Just above the cabin is an area where a huge collection of buried flints were found. The site is roughly 11,000 years old and is the earliest known human settlement in Norway. At the time the area was at sea level, but has risen as the glaciers retreated. Both expert flint arrowheads were found along with chips that suggested novices were learning the craft. A flint knife was unearthed, which our historian got to hold, he said it fit his hand in the same way his own hunting knife did.

It was an extraordinary experience to have shared the meal and to hear the stories of the space. 

You say tom-ay-to

... and I say to-mah-to...so goes the song my mother used to sing. For some reason, tea and salt are back in the news again in the UK tabloids.  There doesn't appear to be any contemporary hook for the piece, though tomatoes do come up: Use less salt in a cup of tea than you would on a tomato, advised a Reddit user back when the controversy was fresh. I would say, probably a lot less!

An eye for the extraordinary

Annie Dillard died yesterday. I was looking for Bird by Bird on my shelves yesterday (by Anne Lamott). I know it is here — because there is no longer anywhere else — but I kept bumping into Dillard. The Writing Life. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. That weasel essay. I gave it up for the day.

Today I tried again. Book by book. But no Bird by Bird. Instead I pulled Dillard's The Writing Life off the shelf. Its bristling with sticky notes, notes from past Michelle to present Michelle, I suppose. Or a note from the universe to remember Annie Dillard's gifts to me.

I gave the reading at the undergraduate commencement this spring. Traditionally the choice of reading is left to the person giving the reading. And of course, it should be short. The students I had taught in the first year writing seminar were graduating and I wanted something that might reach back to that class (titled  “Women who see through walls” and reading women poets, mystics and scientists — and some people who crossed those lines). I decided no wild life from Mary Oliver . “Antidotes to Fear of Death” by the late Becky Elson (an astrophyscist and poet) felt a little too dark for this event. Annie Dillard’s weasel essay called to me, but also felt a bit violent..stalking your calling? But Dillard? Yes, Dillard! I used a piece from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek written when she was young (though not quite as young as the graduates.) There is some stalking, but no blood.

"For the scientists, mathematicians, social scientists, humanists, poets, writers, for all of you who have peered through the walls of the universe, dug under them, clambered over them, taken them apart, and made something new…stone by stone. From Annie Dillard, “The Waters of Separation” in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek:

“The gaps are the thing. The gaps are the spirit's one home, the altitudes and latitudes so dazzlingly spare and clean that the spirit can discover itself for the first time…unbound. The gaps are the clefts in the rock…they are the fissures between mountains and cells the wind lances through, the icy narrowing fjords splitting the cliffs of mystery. Go up into the gaps. If you can find them; they shift and vanish, too. Stalk the gaps. Squeak into a gap in the soil, turn and unlock—more than a maple— a universe. This is how you spend this afternoon, and tomorrow morning, and tomorrow afternoon. Spend the afternoon. You can't take it with you.” 

(Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Harpers, 1974, p. 269)