I’ve been reading John Milton’s Epic poem Paradise Lost for my English Lit class. Not sure if you remember this piece of literature from the 1600s but at first, I found it super hard to understand; in fact, I could not understand a single word of it. The final exam was based on this poem and was worth 30% of my grade and this poem is 10 books long, so it did cause a bit of anxiety. Determined to get through, I studied it over a month and literally had to do it word by word, line by line. I began to notice that the word, Grace, was appearing a lot in this poem. After a while, I discovered that when I stepped back, the poem began to open up for me. (Maybe in a way I was giving myself a little bit of grace) As you’ve probably guessed, in this semester, Paradise Lost has become one of my favorites. I absolutely love it. The subject matter has made me think about grace and the many times in my life that I have needed to give it to myself but didn’t. In my own challenging moments grace eventually somehow managed to find me in some way. Grace comes in many forms and it can find us in both light and in times of darkness. I wrote this little poem about how a flower receives grace. “To a flower, grace comes as sunshine and as rain.” Only so that it will grow. A flower never complains when it rains because it knows that it is necessary for it to live.
