This award-winning essay was published this month in BYU Studies Quarterly volume 58 number 3.
By Robbie Taggart
One day when I was a snarling baffled holy teenager, four
friends
and I found a lonely-looking couch on the side of the road.
It had
a sign on it that said, “Free.” Our minds immediately began
to scroll
through the brilliant possibilities presented by such a
couch, such a gift.
Someone thought we could hike it to our favorite camping
spot up the
mountain and sit upon it amid the trees and weeds and clouds
and birdsong and rejoice in the incongruity of it all. But the thought of
mountain snails and mildew sharing our couch led us in different
directions. We thought of hiking it up to the top of some cliff and hurling
it off like an enormous brown baby bird that hasn’t yet learned the art
of flight. Someone wisely interjected that we might perhaps unwittingly
hit some unsuspecting hiker and spend the rest of our adolescence
behind bars. Which was remarkable wisdom if you stop to consider that
there wasn’t a fully developed prefrontal cortex among us. Finally,
someone suggested driving it down by the lake, slicing it up with knives,
dousing it
in gasoline and setting it on fire. Of course, the sense and
beauty of this
idea descended on all of us in unison, like a shared
revelation. Burning a
couch and taking a baseball bat to a toilet were two dreams
that had long
been high on my bucket list, and here was a golden
opportunity shining
before our very faces. We borrowed my mother’s minivan,
emptied it of
the back seats, loaded the couch, and drove down toward the
marshy
land near the lake.
We sought a spot away from public eyes. We found a perfect
little
stand of cottonwood trees, dry with summer thirst. We took
our knives
to the couch with gusto. We slashed and laughed, wild with
the joy of it.
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We jumped and howled and threw pieces of couch stuffing into
the air. It
was like a scene from Lord of the Flies. Then we drenched
the erstwhile
couch in gasoline, lit a match, and stepped back smiling.
The flames and
smoke immediately ascended like the pillar that guided the
Israelites
through the wilderness. The couch crackled like some ancient
burnt
offering. One friend had the sagacious forethought to bring
a fire
extinguisher from home. When the flames were almost twenty
feet high and licking the trees, my friend rushed forward with the
extinguisher. He
pressed down the lever and expected a spray. Instead,
disappointment
dripped out—a few meager droplets. Someone had broken the
seal, and
the extinguisher had no pressure. The couch sizzled and
blazed in the
dry summer heat, and I began to fear the trees would catch.
A school bus drove by on the road that was just visible
through the
trees. A few minutes later, it drove by again, this time
more slowly. We
began to scramble, looking for a way to put out the fire. We
grabbed a
towel from the van. We whipped at the flames, but this just
served to fan
them higher. We tripped over weedy plants ripe with burs,
scooping up
mud and flinging it at the couch. We dipped the towel in the
little water
we could find and tried to wring it out over the blaze. The
fire grew hotter
and angrier and higher and wilder. I began to feel the
despair of
powerlessness. Then we heard the sirens. My heart sank,
imagining the angryface of the police officer as he cuffed me and threw me into
the back of his car like some petty criminal. I pictured my father’s
frustration at finding his
delinquent son on his doorstep accompanied by the police.
We waited in scared silence. The flames raged on. The sirens
got
closer and louder. We winced. But it wasn’t a police car
that hove into
view. It was a fire engine—a single small red truck from the
small local
town. A burly fireman came trampling through the trees with
an
enormous fire
extinguisher in his arms. He walked past us without speaking.
For two minutes, he silently stood, spraying the couch, the
trees, and the
surrounding weeds with fire retardant until all that was
left was a black,
smoldering frame with some burnt springs sitting in a
scorched field.
The air hung heavy with smoke. The firefighter turned to
look me full in
the face and said, “So. What’s going on here?” “I, uh,” I
stammered, “we
were just being idiots.” He smiled broadly and said, “Well,
sometimes
being an idiot catches up to you.” And then he walked away.
He got in
his truck and drove off. We stood for a moment waiting for
the fist to fall,
for the police sirens, for the handcuffs and the
condemnation. But they
never came. We looked at each other for a moment, stunned.
Then we
jumped in the van and drove away at exactly the speed limit,
my friends
lying flat in the back, laughing and astonished.
Burning the Couch V 101
When I was younger, I thought of God as an austere figure
waiting
to catch me messing up, a god who never laughed. I imagined
him as
angry and eager to punish. I no longer picture him that way.
My God
sings and laughs and blesses and gives and forgives seventy
times seven times and then some. Perhaps the reality that wickedness
never was happiness is not a threat. It is simply an eternal truth.
Sometimes we
light our lives on fire. Sometimes being an idiot catches up
to you. We
scramble and worry. We get burned and scratched, and we lose
hope.
Then God shows up, like that firefighter that day by the
lake, ready
to help and wearing a smile. Into our desperation and
anguish, grace
arrives to put out the flames and then hands our lives back
to us,
somehow restored and shining, aflame with a new holy light
that does not
consume but only warms and illuminates. Grace is a gift,
unmerited
and always surprising.
•
I sense that grace arrives not only for our foolishness, but
for our
brokenness as well. Fires rage that we never started.
Sometimes the world feels so broken, and my heart is broken, and I don’t see how God’s
heart is not broken, except that he is God and even when his heart is
broken, he knows it will not always be broken, because he heals all
things and wipes away all tears from all eyes, personally and one by one, and
yes, I believe that. But in the meantime, we live in the face of heartache
and hurt, of meanness and menace. The world burns around us, and we stand
powerless.
For these reasons, we
need grace.
One time a friend of mine called me, shaken and raging. He
told me
that his daughter had been raped by a boy who had been a
friend of the
family. I went over to his house to mourn with him, and he
fell into my
arms, sobbing. He said he had a fifty-cent solution, and he
shook in rage
and grief. He told me he was going to put a bullet in the
boy. Then,
without warning, he asked me for a blessing. He wanted to
hear the words of God. I laid my hands on his head and waited. What do you say
at such a time? Why do daughters get raped? Why do friends shake in
our arms? How does such darkness exist in a world that has shown
itself to me so often in so much splendor? How does one offer any real
comfort, any real hope when you can’t fix it, can’t take it back, can’t
change the world?
Into that moment, the voice of God came. Grace came. Peace
came. Not
a cheap peace, but the peace that passes understanding. A
grace-given
gift. After the blessing, we cried together and we ached and
we hoped.
And that hope tasted like grace. Grace can transfigure
bitterness into a
something shining with the subtle sweetness of hope.
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•
Here is another grace story. My friend Brandon was born to
drug
addicted parents. His mom was fourteen. His dad was fifteen.
He had
an older brother. You can do the math. By the time Brandon
was three,
he was smoking marijuana. By five, he was doing cocaine. He
said that
when he went to school, the other kids would make fun of him
because
he didn’t have any underwear and he was dirty and hungry and
smelled
like cigarettes and drugs. He would eat maybe once a day, at
the local
food shelter or at the school. His parents were dealing to
fuel their
addictions. One day
in first grade, he told his dad that he wasn’t feeling well and didn’t want to go to school. His father, an enormous,
burly, bearded man, punched my friend in his sweet six-year-old face,
breaking his nose and making him bleed and vomit. Then he told him to go
to school. The little boy went. What else could he do?
As a small boy, Brandon watched one day as eight police
officers
attacked his father, trying to arrest him. His dad sent
three of them to the
hospital before they finally subdued him with tasers,
batons, and a beanbag round. One officer
led Brandon away to another room so that he
would not witness the brawl. He told me that by second grade
he was so
tired of life that he began to consider suicide. He wondered
if he would
always hurt, always be lonely, always be unloved. He felt
worthless. No
one cared about him. By second grade, he was stealing and
doing heavy
drugs, and his second-grade teacher pulled him aside and
asked what
was happening. Brandon refused to speak. His father had
threatened to
seriously hurt him if he ever told about home, and Brandon
believed his
dad. This teacher told him she wasn’t going to let him leave
the room
until he told her what was going on. She told him that
everything would
be all right. She told him she cared about him and wanted to
help him.
For the first time in his life, he felt a faint glow of
hope.
I love that second-grade teacher. I wonder if she knows what
her
career meant. If all it meant is that Brandon is okay, it is
enough. Every
morning that she woke up and got herself out of bed and
walked into
that school to wrangle the wild, holy, beautiful children before
her was
worth the effort. Sometimes grace is disguised as a
second-grade teacher with her own problems and her own heartache, a teacher who
is probably worried and weary over a thousand things, but who reaches
out inlove to a small, broken boy.
Brandon got taken into foster care, and he began to believe
that life
could change. He had more teachers who encouraged him,
especially in
his artwork. He became a sterling scholar in art with a 2.3
GPA. He has
Burning the Couch V 103
become a teacher and an artist. He teaches ceramics and
makes pots
with his feet and does one-handed pull-ups and wins
rock-climbing
championships and changes lives. And his students love him
because he
loves them and he has a catching laugh and a lot of joy. And
he knows
that love matters and love saves us. That love, even human
love, is one
of the faces of grace.
As a teenager, once his life had been reclaimed by
astonishing grace
and he had been adopted into a real family, he saw his mom
one day on
the side of the road. He said her face was melting away from
meth abuse.
The friends he was with made some offhand comment about this
ragged
and shabby woman, and he told them it was his mother. He
stopped
to pick her up, and after a painful conversation, he dropped
her off in
government custody, hoping against hope for an outpouring of
grace
for his mom.
After not seeing his father for years, Brandon went to the
mental
hospital where his dad was staying. He had destroyed his
mind with
drugs. “He was like a three-year-old,” Brandon says. After a
few minutes
of helping his dad remember who he was, his father brought
him a worn
t-shirt and a small bag of beans. “I’ve been saving these
for you,” he said,
“for five years. I wanted to give them to you for Christmas.”
Brandon said
that his heart cracked and he felt grace heal his hatred for
this man who
had destroyed his childhood.
There are many flavors of grace. Its light shines
everywhere, on every
anguish and in every heart.
•
Bruce R. McConkie understood the ubiquity of grace. He
wrote, “All things that exist are manifestations of the grace of God.”1
Everything is grace. Every single thing. This world is riddled with grace, shot
through with God’s mercy and love and light. A child’s eyes staring back
at you in the mostly-darkness of the morning. Leaves and leaflessness.
Clouds and clear skies. Hope and light and joy and forgiveness and peace and
strength. The air we breathe and the lungs that drink the air. These are
all gifts of grace. Grace stands at the door and knocks, leans in the doorway
and smiles, sits at the dinner table after the meal has been finished, pushes
back the chair and roars with laughter. Grace makes the meal. Grace is the
meal. The requirement for the reception of grace is ultimately simply
the acceptance
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of grace. It is always already there, like a gift waiting to
be opened. We cannot earn it, but we might
put ourselves in the pathways of grace.
Acknowledgment of brokenness and need, hunger and thirst,
the realization that our lives are on fire and we need help—these open the
floodgates of grace.
The requirement is open eyes and an open heart. It is open
arms and an
embrace. To see grace is to experience grace.
I am reminded that one day the air will begin to shimmer and
shake
and hum with a music that is not of this world. And a light
will come from
the east, growing in intensity and brightness, causing the
air to shake,
to undulate and roll, to swell and to sing, causing the
grass to reach and to sing and the trees to shiver with music. And I will feel
myself becoming
lighter, sorrow and heaviness melting away like snow in
spring, will feel
the joy I have always known myself capable of, will look
around to see
others, to find ourselves soaring through the air. To meet
the Lord in the
clouds, the scripture says. A new song. We will come singing
a new song.
A song beyond words but created with human voices. And the
voices of
others, of angels and gods. I will know the words or the
nonwords, the
motions of the mouth and the movement of lungs, even though
I have
never heard it, yet I know somehow that I have heard it,
have known it.
I was born from this song, brought forth from this light.
And the Lord will
wipe away all tears from off all eyes. There will be no more
sorrow and no
more death. I will know as I am known. I will rise. The
earth will become
new. Grace will triumph. All things will be new. All things.
All things.
One of my favorite scriptural passages is found in Zephaniah
3:17:
“The Lord thy God in the midst of thee is mighty; he will
save, he will
rejoice over thee with joy; he will rest in his love, he
will joy over thee
with singing.” I love the image of God resting from the
anguish of watching his children hurt, sighing in gratitude when his grace has
finally
accomplished its full work. God will rejoice over redeemed
Creation
with joy, his relief will burst forth as music, and he will
sing. What will
that song sound like? What is the sound of grace? When
sirens turn to
symphonies, when the only cries are rapture, when the fire
only sanctifies
and heals, when God
opens his mouth to sing, I want to be there.
1. Bruce R. McConkie, Mormon Doctrine, 2d ed. (Salt Lake
City: Bookcraft, 1966), 338.
This essay by Robbie Taggart won first place in the 2019
Richard H. Cracroft Personal Essay Contest sponsored by BYU Studies.
