Kate Braestrup > Quotes

“Ah. I smiled. I'm not really here to keep you from freaking out. I'm here to be with you while you freak out, or grieve or laugh or suffer or sing. It is a ministry of presence. It is showing up with a loving heart.”
― Kate Braestrup, Here If You Need Me

“But then, a grateful heart beats in a world of miracles. If I could only speak one prayer for you, my children, it would be that your hearts would not only beat but grow ever greater in gratitude, that your lives, however long they prove to be and no matter how they end, continue to bring you miracles in abundance.”
― Kate Braestrup, Here If You Need Me

“It is possible that God is the way Annie Payne used to lean her old head against my shoulder...Drew's arms holding me...Ron Dunham walking out of the woods hand in hand with a child lost, then found. It is possible that God is my neighbor with her pan of brownies standing on my doorstep. It is entirely possible, that is, that the God I serve and worship with all my body, all my mind, all my soul, and all my spirit is love...It's enough. It's all the God I need.”
― Kate Braestrup, Here If You Need Me

“I can't make those two realities -- what I've lost and what I've found -- fit together in some tidy pattern of divine causality. I just have to hold them on the one hand and on the other, just like that.”
― Kate Braestrup, Here If You Need Me

“Then light your candles to the living. Say your prayers for the living. Leave the stones where they are, but take your heart with you. Your heart is not a stone. True love demands that, like a bride with her bouquet, you toss your fragile glass heart into the waiting crowd of living hands and trust that they will catch it.”
― Kate Braestrup, Here If You Need Me

“A marriage, willy-nilly, requires you to trust that your spouse will tell your story truthfully and lovingly when you are no longer around to tell it yourself.”
― Kate Braestrup, Here If You Need Me

“God is love, John’s Gospel tells us. That’s a whole theology in three words. The practical application of that theology—God is love—is nearly as simple. Be as loving as you can, as often as you can, for as many people as you can, for as long as you live. Why should you do this? Because.”
― Kate Braestrup, Marriage and Other Acts of Charity: A Memoir

“A few minutes later, the doorbell rang again. This time, I answered it. It was my neighbor, an elderly woman I had exchanged no more than a dozen words with in the ten years I’d lived in Thomaston. She had pot holders on her hands, which held a pan of brownies still hot from the oven, and tears were rolling down her cheeks. “I just heard,” she said.
That pan of brownies was, it later turned out, the leading edge of a tsunami of food that came to my children and me, a wave that did not recede for many months after Drew’s death. I didn’t know that my family and I would be fed three meals a day for weeks and weeks. I did not anticipate that neighborhood men would come to drywall the playroom, build bookshelves, mow the lawn, get the oil changed in my car. I did not know that my house would be cleaned and the laundry done, that I would have embraces and listening ears, that I would not be abandoned to do the labor of mourning alone. All I knew was that my neighbor was standing on the front stoop with her brownies and her tears: she was the Good News.”
― Kate Braestrup

“Mrs. Levesque will put me to use as witness, as crutch, as Kleenex, as proxy for Jean-Pierre -- a temporary substitute for all the neighbors, church folk, friends, and family members who will soon come bursting through her door to share her grief. I am a transitional love object, an objet d'amour; I am Rab-Rab, Blankie, Jesus, Mama. What a strange privilege it is to be so used.”
― Kate Braestrup, Here If You Need Me

“All loves have much in common, and any one will offer a useful, if not painless, education in the limitations and possibilities of being human. If you give your committed love to a person, an idea, or a cause, even should that person, idea, or cause be taken from you, or proven false, you will be a better lover—of anyone, of anything—for the experience. Because I am as religious person, I see this in characteristically grandiose, religious terms: The point of being human is to get better (and better) at caritas, at agape, at love.”
― Kate Braestrup, Marriage and Other Acts of Charity: A Memoir

“May the hungry be well fed. May the well fed hunger for justice. Amen.”
― Kate Braestrup, Beginner's Grace: Bringing Prayer to Life

“It doesn't matter how educated, moneyed, or smart you are: when your child's footprints end at the river's edge, when the one you love has gone into the woods with a bleak outlook and a loaded gun, when the chaplain is walking toward you with the bad news in her mouth, then only the cliches are true, and you will repeat them, unashamed. Your life, too, will swing suddenly and cruelly in a new direction with breathtaking speed, and if you are really wise - and it's surprising and wondrous, Brother, how many people have this wisdom in then - you will know enough to look around for love. It will be there, standing right on the hinge, holding out its arms to you, If you are wise, whoever you are, you will let go, fall against the love, and be held.”
― Kate Braestrup, Here If You Need Me

“These days, cynicism seems uncomfortably close to despair, and I no longer believe that the only alternative to despair is blind denial. Despair isn't realism, it is the apocalypticism of the clever unreligious and just as much an abdication of responsibility. Bad things happen but the world isn't ending. No bang, no whimper, no sudden fix, just this long, slow slog we're all taking together toward the next shining, inevitable miracle.”
― Kate Braestrup, Anchor and Flares: A Memoir of Motherhood, Hope, and Service

“Why are you here?” my seminary professors asked me. “You don’t really believe in God, do you?” My brother wrote. Dear professors, dear brother. It is possible that God is the way Annie Payne used to lean her old head against my shoulder, trusting me as I held her on the bedpan; Drew’s arms holding me in our fertile scent; Ron Dunham walking out of the woods hand in hand with a child lost, then found. It is possible that God is my neighbor with her pan of brownies standing on my doorstep. It is entirely possible, that is, that the God I serve and worship with all my body, all my mind, all my soul, and all my spirit is love (1 John 4: 8). It’s enough. It’s all the God I need.”
― Kate Braestrup, Here If You Need Me: A True Story

“Surprised by joy,” the theologian C. S. Lewis called it, and a cop who is finally snapping the handcuffs around the wrists of a dangerous and elusive perpetrator might know exactly what Lewis meant.”
― Kate Braestrup, Marriage and Other Acts of Charity: A Memoir

“After decades as a Buddhist committed to nonviolence, he had watched police officers running past him in the streets, moving toward and not away from the place of greatest danger. He now understood that his ability to practice nonviolence without risking his life had been predicated on the willingness of the state – in the form of police officers and soldiers – to use violence to protect him, Batchelor recognized that our relationship with violence is considerably more complicated than we might wish.”
― Kate Braestrup

“Trooper Drew Griffith was spiritual, which is to say that he had experiences of the numinous that were both spontaneous and deliberately cultivated. He engaged in a regular, deliberate practice within a chosen faith community in order to nurture his own spiritual development and to translate it into useful, loving social action. Drew was religious.”
― Kate Braestrup, Here If You Need Me: A True Story

“Human beings want to live in community, and so we want ours to be an intimate universe presided over by a Father God who cares for us and whose universe is responsive to us. At the same time, we are drawn out of community and physically experience a harsh and lonely cosmos in whose vastness stars are born and explode, and solar systems come into being and fall apart. Closer to home, continents swim around like bits of eggshell on the molten yolk of our planet, banging into one another, squashing the earth’s crust into mountains that promptly erode into the sea. It is a universe in which our soft bodies can be fried or frozen, parched or drowned or dashed against a stone. Seekers of truth, when confronted by such cosmic indifference, can find it both frightening and liberating. Like the game wardens, I understand what draws New Age hikers, enlightenment hunters, and even the deeply depressed out beyond the comfortable edge of the human-centered world, out to where moose, woodcock, grouse, and mink live without reference to the human, out to where a person does not matter at all. The air will be as warm or as cold, as dry or as damp as the indifferent physics of front meeting front demands. Pray or don’t pray. Ask and ye shall receive what you would have received without asking: succor that comes in time or doesn’t.”
― Kate Braestrup, Here If You Need Me

“It would be heretical, I suppose, to call Jesus fatherless, but might we admit that, as dads go, God was a little remote? Jesus was lucky to have Joseph, described and sanctified as a good man and a stand-up stepdad.”
― Kate Braestrup, Anchor and Flares: A Memoir of Motherhood, Hope, and Service

“It doesn't matter how educated, moneyed, or smart you are: when you child's footprints end at the river's edge, when the one you love has gone into the woods with a bleak outlook and a loaded gun, when the chaplain is walking toward you with the bad news in her mouth, then only the cliches are true, and you will repeat them, unashamed. Your life, too, will swing suddenly and cruelly in a new direction with breathtaking speed, and if you are really wise - and it's surprising and wondrous, Brother, how many people have this wisdom in then - you will know enough to look around for love. It will be there, standing right on the hinge, holding out its arms to you, If you are wise, whoever you are, you will let go, fall against the love, and be held.”
― Kate Braestrup, Here If You Need Me

“Eventually, my heart—my fragile glass heart—would again be offered to the mortal hands of another man guaranteed to break it, one way or another, since that is the lunacy and loveliness of love.”
― Kate Braestrup, Here If You Need Me: A True Story