My name is Padrig Otuma and there's a variety of phrases that rub me up the wrong way.

Liminality is one of them and the term grace that you hear in some religion.

And I don't like it when I get an email that starts off with just a gentle reminder

because I don't believe the gentle.

And one of the things, as I've

looked at these things that can get under my skin a bit, one of the things that's occurred to me

is that my dislike of them should actually be a motivation to think, how can I pay attention

to this? Because something's grabbing my attention and it's grabbing it through my slight irritation.

And this, I think, can be a motivation into reconsidering what a term might mean,

not by me changing the way other people use it, but by me changing the way I read it.

Grace, by Orlando Ricardo Menes We cannot buy it in bulk at Trader Joe's,

swap it for gold or hoard shares of Grace, incorporated,

to hedge against bad luck.

We acquire it without contract promissory notes or IOUs, neither codicels nor fine print. We gather grace safe from litigation or severance,

and though we might breach the strictures of creed, it cannot be forfeited or suspended.

Rather, grace is asymmetric, parabolic, skewed to love, imminent and absolute, but also unpredictable

as quantum particles, both here and there, both full and empty.

So it might arrive inopportunely and thus slip under hope, upsetting the earnest prayer, teasing our faith,

like some rain bands, copious cumuli, that appear astray, unbidden, in stagnant skies

to drench at last the drought-scourged earth.

Music The The This poem by Orlando Ricardo Menis is a kind of a praise poem to grace.

It's an attempt to say that, you know,

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