Broken into Glory
Rather than annoyances to grumble over, life’s minor inconveniences might be the refiner’s fire by which we are transformed and draw closer to God.
Review by Tessa Carman
There once was a girl who desired to do great things for God—become a martyr who suffers the greatest tortures for Christ, to be “a soldier for the Church” dying “on the field of battle.” Hers was an unremarkable, quiet, middle-class life in many ways, but St. Thérèse of Lisieux committed to let “no little sacrifice pass, no look, no word—profiting by the littlest actions, and doing them out of love.”
I thought often of St. Thérèse when reading Elise Tegegne’s debut, In Praise of Houseflies: Meditations on the Gifts in Everyday Quandaries. As little Thérèse wished to be a martyr, but was content to live her “little” way, so Tegegne notes that she writes within what is also a comparatively comfortable middle-class life, while also endeavoring to profit—that is, to love God better—by every sacrifice.
In one of her epigraphs, Tegegne cites Kathleen Norris’s The Quotidian Mysteries, wherein Norris notes the paradox that it is in “the everyday that we find the possibilities for the greatest transformation.” Like St. Thérèse, then, Tegegne takes such a claim seriously, and she invites her readers into a series of meditations that endeavor to view unremarkable daily annoyances and pet peeves, from greater heartaches like loneliness and leave-taking of loved ones to the smaller “houseflies” such as laundry and line-waiting, through “this redeemed vision”—to look for the grace within, and not despite, small griefs and irritations. Tegegne quotes Simone Weil, one of her book’s guiding spirits: “We must not wish for the disappearance of any of our troubles, but grace to transform them.” Indeed, it is only by love that our troubles are transformed. It is only through Christ’s suffering that our own suffering, however slight or however terrible, is made truly redemptive.
The book’s structure is roughly chronological, with each part focusing on a different season of Tegegne’s life: Part One, “Pilgrimage,” on school and college and her first job, teaching French in Ethiopia (the essays focus on the quandaries of humiliation, loneliness, and saying goodbye); Part Two, “Stasis,” on graduate school and marriage (boredom, cancellations, hunger, waiting); Part Three, “Conception,” on young married life, waiting for and then conceiving a child (unknowing, annoyances, fear, winter); and Part Four, “Motherhood,” on the new contours of life as a young mother (cleaning, sleep deprivation, pain). Her task is not to provide a theodicy, but rather to see what everyday afflictions have to teach us and what opportunities for small transformations they provide. Each essay explores how each quandary manifests in the everyday (I admit that, as a mother of four, I was particularly interested in her chapter on sleep deprivation!) and she delves deeply into each one until the gold of insight is uncovered.
Humiliation breaks us open so that we can be healed: our pride and false illusions can be purged and burned away, allowing room for Christ’s truth to flower.
Her first essay opens strong, with perhaps the thorniest everyday quandary: humiliation. Tegegne begins her exploration by telling of her early failures teaching French to students in Ethiopia, which to someone who is used to doing everything well and perfectly, cut deep. Why is it so hard to face my mediocrity? she wonders. She writes:
Humiliation has a way of turning your bowels inside out, even as you gag with the reality of being espied. One of the true but shameful parts of you is naked in the day. You’re ashamed, not (oftentimes) because of your weakness, but because you got caught in it.
Now somebody knows the secret: you’re not perfect.
Such an opening in the self provides “humiliation’s gift.” It is a gift to “accept my own mediocrity,” she writes, noting that this sense of our own mediocrity is, as Simone Weil put it, a knowledge that is above all “to be desired.” This knowledge is “a bright burning of the dead and dross,” Tegegne reflects, “That from the crushed stubble of my prided fortress, I might rise more whole and more real.” Humiliation breaks us open so that we can be healed: our pride and false illusions can be purged and burned away, allowing room for Christ’s truth to flower. The essay ends with a consideration of the image of a violet. A violet “does not lift its head in haughtiness; its leaves extend upon the ground” and because it is so low, it withstands hurricane winds. To be a violet, Tegegne muses, would mean to be “humiliation-proof”—humble, but not humiliated:
Perhaps if I knew I was low, no one could make me lower. If I was deeply acquainted with my weaknesses and humble and vulnerable about them, it would not be surprising or shameful to be seen in an unflattering light. And if I knew who I was, if I were rooted in my God-named belovedness, then no one could call me unloved. If I were grounded in love, no kale-in-the-teeth or broken zippers or abstruse French pronouns could make me feel unworthy.
Even when crushed under heels, the violets ascend again towards the light.
The violet is a fitting emblem for each of Tegegne’s essays—it is through each affliction, each grace—sleep deprivation, loneliness, infertility—that she finds a way to ascend closer to Christ.
As befitting an appreciator of Weil, Tegegne does not flinch from the thorny thickets of life nor from the knotty parts of Scripture, nor from the dangerousness of God. In her essay on unknowing, “Veiled Faces,” she draws from the prophet Isaiah as she meditates on C.S. Lewis’s novel Till We Have Faces wherein the character Orual “wrestles with the mysterious opacity of the gods: how they hide behind veils and speak in riddles.” And yet, she considers, perhaps darkness is the path to deeper seeing. Tegegne explores this paradox through Isaiah: “And I will lead the blind in a way they do not know, / in paths that they have not known I will guide them.” Tegegne then asks whether “I really only want to know things (the next step, the right purchase, the heart behind the mask) for myself, to strengthen my independence—rather than to know God.” And yet, is God not the greatest thing that we should seek to know? Why, then, does he seem so hidden, she asks:
And yet God seeks to know me.
Not knowing draws me to the floorboards. I grapple for ground, for some kind of rock. God feels nearer here. Perhaps it is divine love that leads me into darkness. Perhaps God craves my nearness and redemption so much that he leads me through paths that press me to himself.
Darkness, then, can be a grace.
Perhaps darkness, then, can be “fertile soil,” in which we can root ourselves further in God.
In a way, each of Tegegne’s meditations is a luminous praise of dying.
Tegegne weaves these essays not only as a master of the craft, but also as a generous, courageous, eternity-steeped soul. Tegegne’s writing is river-like: her sentences glide, cascade, and rush, gleaming with reflected light and slaking the desire to drink in beauty even in the humdrum, the banal. Her words are poetry, her care for words evident. Though occasionally there are notes that sound off-key, and with an occasional veering toward the precious and cliché (e.g., “the refusal to see the universe in others”), at its best her prose sings, giving glory to the texture of the everyday, revealing the honor and beauty to ordinary moments, such as pulling luggage to and from a plane. And in this, I believe, her writing reflects a soul truly in love with the great Lover.
Tegegne’s is a dangerous quest—in the hands of a lesser writer and lesser person, it would not have worked. But she never balks; she gives us truly rich, illuminating meditations on each quandary. Others have written of the transformation that comes from finding the hidden gifts in small annoyances and everyday sufferings. What distinguishes Tegegne’s writing is that she avoids sentimentality, illuminates the ordinary in her prose, and digs into the hardest parts of Scripture —Job, etc.—with steadfast Christological focus. Her meditations are Scripture-soaked, and her practice of meditation is properly ordered: she rightly points out that meditation and observation for its own sake is worth little to nothing. Each of the gifts in each quandary come from God, and such a connection frames each essay and provides its focus, for it is our relation to God that matters most above all things.
During one essay, Tegegne meditates on how holiness means set-apartness. This is if we look at the Latin root of our word for saint: sanctus. But I also thought of Anglo-Saxon root, hálig, holy, which comes from hál, wholeness, haleness. Everyday quandaries are tiny breakings, but this breaking allows Christ to make us whole, if we let it.
To be a saint, then, is to be made whole. But first comes many deaths—the “bright burning” away of the dross. In a way, each of Tegegne’s meditations is a luminous praise of dying. We can, we ought, die in many small ways, and every day we are given so many opportunities—amidst pots and pans, car grease and gasoline—to practice such dying, and thereby, to offer every one of our troubles, the petty and the heart-harrowing, for transformation. As that mystic saying goes, if you die before you die, then you won’t die when you die. But in this dying, we can then be raised up again, to see more clearly the hem of God’s garment—and we’ll be lucky if we’re not blinded by his light.
Tessa Carman writes from Virginia Beach, Virginia.
In Praise of Houseflies: Meditations on the Gifts in Everyday Quandaries was published by Calla Press Publishing on August 19, 2025. Fare Forward appreciates their provision of a copy for our reviewer. You can purchase your own copy from the publisher here.
