Below is a new post from Ecumen Guest Blogger Jim Klobuchar. Enjoy.

She was the last to speak in a church ceremony we still call confirmation. There were obligatory hymns, families spread gregariously from end to end in the pews, the up-tempo informalities of the church elders presenting the class, and then Pertinent Remarks by the graduates.

The assembled adults craned nervously for every word from the honored scholars, hoping to be enthralled but bravely prepared for something less.

This was the confirmands’ graduation exercise, an ancient rite escorting eight young people into that marvelous and nebulous age that mixes whacky adolescence with an expanding awareness of both the possibilities and the solemnities of life.

It was a reasonable and appealing cross-section of America’s teen society. There was talk of faith and commitment. There were giggles and affirmation, and there were a few frank admissions of doubt about the direction of the spiritual search now supposed to begin in earnest.

My granddaughter concluded the speaking program. She wore a kind of semi-formal dress because this was, well, an occasion; and she needed occasionally to guide her descending hair away from her eyes. She spoke softly, and I regretted missing some of her words because of that.

She was droll and serious by turns, needling her mother’s travel schedule as her state’s only current senator, having fun with her family, telling of her discoveries of another world–and the pain and poverty of that world–on a trip to Guatamala with her schoolmates.

She was Abigail. I remembered the day of her birth, when she almost died of a breathing congestion on the first day. I remembered writing an inscription in a book in which I collected stories of little-known people who lived extraordinary lives, and called it "Heroes Among Us."

"This book is for Abigail," I wrote, "born in 1995 into a world where there is still room for heroes."

And now here she was, not quite an adult, seasoning some of her light-hearted bewilderment with the world with a brief remembrance of her own-of a grandpa who had changed the course of his life and called it "Pursued by Grace."

I didn’t realize she had read it.