The gift of the ‘grandmother’

I love Jean Vanier’s practical insights:

A community needs this gift too, especially if their ‘grandmother’ also has a fund of commonsense. We too often tend to dramatise our weariness and anguish. We weep and forget why we are weeping. We identify with the agony of Christ or with the most disadvantaged of the world. An older woman who has experience, who is comfortable with herself, knows that what we really need is a week at the seaside. St. Teresa of Avila advised her sisters who were going through a bad patch to eat a good steak rather than force themselves to pray.

~ Jean Vanier, Community and Growth, p. 255

This is my biological grandmother, Madge Bowes, greeting cousins at my cousin Dustin’s wedding in August 2010. That’s my own mother standing directly behind her.

Grandma is such a treasure. She appears to be leaving us this month. We will miss her terribly when she’s gone.

More at the Bowes Family Blog.