On Grace and Trying to Be Good Enough: A Review of Feathered Filigree 

On Grace and Trying to Be Good Enough: A Review of Feathered Filigree 

By Bailey Cornelius, Lead Project Manager

I am, by nature, a transactional human. I often forget and must forcibly remind myself to engage in normal human pleasantries. Case in point: when I taught high school freshmen, I would forget to introduce myself on the first day of school. Instead, I just began class. I made sure they were in the correct room at the correct time, passed out materials, and began roll call.

I value efficiency and completing the task at hand. I tend to time things down to the minute, including travel—I have an uncanny ability to guesstimate the amount of time it will take to get from point A to point B, including traffic, rest stops, and meals. This trait is generally useful in planning and organization, much less so in relationships.

My prayer life ebbs and flows. I do not always make time to sit and talk to God, and when I do talk to him, it is usually because I am asking for something. When I do not receive what I ask for, I find myself moving closer to despair than acceptance or trust. Intellectually, I know that the answer may not look like what I imagined or desired for myself. I know that what I want may not actually bring me into a closer relationship with God. But I am still left wondering what I need to do to prove myself and why I am not good enough.

And when I find myself wrestling with these thoughts, God tends to meet me through ordinary things repeated until I finally pay attention.

The first came through Matthew West’s song “Good.” After learning the lyrics and singing along absentmindedly in the car, two lines suddenly hit me with new intensity one day over the summer. West describes thinking that “grace was a ladder.” For me, that ladder has taken many different forms: searching for the correct prayer, the right behavior, or the necessary amount of faith to get what I want. But it was the phrase “I was wrecked by mercy” that, well, wrecked me.

If God already loves me in both my success and my failure, then I cannot control his love by being good enough. There is no “enough.” There is only God’s goodness.

The second came during a homily for the Twenty-Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time at my parish. The Gospel was the Parable of the Laborers in the Vineyard. The landowner goes out at various times throughout the day to hire workers. At the end of the day, he calls those who worked only one hour to be paid first, and they receive a full day’s wage. Those who worked longer assume they will receive more. When they receive the wage they had agreed to, they grumble against the landowner. He reminds them that he has not treated them unfairly; he has simply chosen to be generous to the others.

The workers were content with the agreement until they saw what someone else received.

The only two words I remember from the homily are “transactional relationship.” Putting myself in the place of the laborers who spent the day working, the wages felt unfair. Putting myself in the place of those who came late, the same wages were an unexpected blessing.

The ladder reappears. I look at who is above me, who is below me, and what each of us has received. Again and again, I pick it back up and resume the fruitless climb.

The third had been developing for months, although its story began more than twenty years ago. As a new convert to Catholicism, I read C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters. Its thirty-one letters were originally published weekly between May 2 and November 28, 1941, in The Guardian, an Anglican periodical in Great Britain. They arrived in readers’ hands during some of the darkest months of World War II. Through the letters of Screwtape, a senior demon advising his inexperienced nephew Wormwood on how to tempt a human soul known only as “the Patient,” Lewis made the ordinarily invisible work of temptation visible.

I don’t remember which particular temptations stayed with me, but I do remember that the letters made me think. Reading them together in a book, however, was different from the way Lewis’ first readers encountered them. A week between letters would have allowed each one to linger before Screwtape’s next piece of advice arrived.

More than twenty years later, I was invited to developmentally edit Anne Marie DeCarolis’ Feathered Filigree, a book inspired by Lewis’ epistolary form but written from the perspective of guardian angels. Where Screwtape advises Wormwood on tempting a human soul, the experienced Featherbelle writes to Theophim as he guards a young woman navigating faith, relationships, suffering, and her own sense of worth.

I found that I sometimes needed space between these letters too. There were places where I stopped thinking like an editor because something in the manuscript made me look at my own life and relationship with God differently.

Several letters reminded me of my younger self and had me wishing I could have read this book back then. One such letter describes the young woman’s discomfort with someone praying for her because it reveals a vulnerability she does not want to admit. Other letters mirrored my own compulsion to measure my lovability through actions or achievements.

But the letters also obliterate the need for the ladder itself. The young woman finds herself unworthy to wear a white garment. Concerned that she does not deserve it and would not be able to keep it clean, she wonders what other colors might hide her wounds. Featherbelle explains that the garment is given to her, not something she must earn through her own goodness. In the next letter, the young woman is reminded that she does not need to fix herself before approaching God.

Another letter uses the image of a stained-glass heart. God does not require an unbroken heart. Instead, he takes the broken pieces and uses grace to hold them together so that his light can shine through.

Like Matthew West’s lyrics, some of these letters wrecked me again. A ladder is meant to be climbed, to help us reach something higher. It measures how far we have climbed and how far we still have to go. A garment, however, is received. The ladder measures my progress, while the white garment gives me a new identity. Each fall from the ladder becomes another failure, but the garment remains a gift even when the person wearing it falls.

Not every letter affected me equally. Some I could read and agree with. Others gave me something to think about from a comfortable distance. A few did not allow me to keep that distance.

I would not read Feathered Filigree straight through like a conventional novel. Although it is an epistolary novel, I found that it worked best when I read it devotionally, in short installments of a letter or two at a time. Some letters will speak directly to a reader and others will not. Another reader may recognize herself in entirely different letters. The value of the book does not depend on every letter affecting every reader equally. Rather, its letters repeatedly return to the assurance that God’s love is not a reward for finally becoming good enough.

I will probably continue to pick up my ladder. I will carry it around, set it up and begin another fruitless climb. But whether I arrive before God broken and weary, bewildered, devout, or only beginning to understand his love, his goodness remains the same. Feathered Filigree offers readers like me a place to stop climbing for a while and consider what it would mean simply to receive God’s love.

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Bailey Cornelius is a writer, Catholic convert and former high school theology teacher with an MA in Theological Studies. She writes about faith, family, and the tensions of ordinary human life. Her work has appeared in Evangelization & Culture, the digital edition of Word on Fire’s magazine. She also writes at Tree, Trough, Table on Substack and lives in Northern Virginia with her husband and two children.