Holyday blessings, dear friends! In the Silence may be take time to ponder and be grateful for the amazing graces given to us throughout our lives: of indiviuals known and unknown ... events that may have changed our lives ... wee moments of nature's exquisite beauty ... of mery, faith, forgiveness ... near misses from disaster ... deep love given and received ... illnesses that awakened hidden insights and reserves ... guardian angels ever with us ... and, especially, the loving, companion Presence of the Beloved in our hearts.
To the extent that you are able to acknowledge and accept the grace and guidance that come your way, your life will become more rewarding. Seeing life symbolically means always looking for the larger and deeper meaning in any event. That view transcends the physical plane, and especially at moments of stress and confrontation, allows you to rise above whatever is happening and see it in the context of your entire life.
By the grace You grant me of silence without loneliness, give me the right to plead, to clamor, for all who are imprisoned in a loneliness without silence!
Special grace comes with drama and flair. We are rescued, singled out in a momentous act of boldness. BUT common grace falls upon the just and unjust alike. It strikes us as simply too ... ordinary.
To pray is to be vulnerably open to God's unpredictable grace.
I was caught suddenly by a sweep of reverence, by a sensation that made me want to sink to my knees. For somehow I knew that I had stumbled upon an epiphany, a strange gracing of my darkness... That was the moment the knowledge descended into my heart and I understood. REALLY understood. Crisis, change, all the myriad upheavals that blister the spirit and leave us groping — they aren't voices simply of pain but also of creativity. And if we would only listen, we might hear such times as beckoning us to a season of waiting, to the place of fertile emptiness.
God may bless you with grace, no matter where you are, or what the conditions of your life. But we cannot demand that grace come to us. One of the most beautiful things about grace is that it is unearned. Like anything beautiful, if we chase it we are left only with a sense that we have missed it. Always remember: GRACE HAPPENS.
Grace has come to us in unexpected ways in the midst of life. We have known healing, courage, restored love — salvation. From these blessings of grace we see how to live in resistance to violence; we see how to live in love and in truth without denying bitter realities. We have felt a fire in the heart of things, intimated in moments of surprise, a power which guards, judges, and continually recreates life. We have sensed what Wordsworth called "a presence that disturbs me with joy ... something far more deeply interfused." This presence, felt as mystery and offered as faithfulness to one another, sustains and heals life. It calls for justice.
My human attempt to live the gentle life is my promise of cooperation with the grace of gentility once it touches my lífe. My attempt to grow in gentility may tempt me to forget that its outcome is only provisional, a shadow of thíngs to come — the real thing being the divine gentleness of soul that is a pure gift of the Holy.
Grace is the continuous overflowing of the Divine Essence, which is coming to all.
Peace is love resting in order to be renewed. The renewal takes place in the inner silence. In the desert we see things as they are. We are face to face with reality. The silence we observe externally does then become also the inner silence when the miracles of grace take place. Here we are stripped of the outward garments hiding our true selves. Here we can embrace the awfulness of our human condition and the awesomeness of the offered gift of grace. We are in touch at last with our reality.
After the service was over, I realized in reviewing my life that I no longer had anything to forgive — no grudges, resentments, memories of pain suffered at the hands of others. When I told my director, she said, "Molly, do you realize what a great grace you've been given?" Well, no, I hadn't, not until she said that, and only as I have reflected on it since. It is a great grace. And it's one that I'm not going to poke around in to try to scare up some lost memory or past injury in order to test its reality.
Each person is born with an unencumbered spot, free of expectation and regret, free of ambition and embarrassment, free of fear and worry, an umbilical spot of grace where we were first touched by God. It is this spot of grace that issues Peace. To know this spot of inwardness is to know who we are, not by surface markers of identity, not by where we work or how we like to be addressed, but by feeling our place in relation to the Infinite and by inhabiting it. We each live in the midst of ongoing tension, growing tarnished or covered over only to be worn back to that incorruptible spot of grace at our core.
I know nothing,
except what everyone knows...
if there when Grace dances,
I must dance!
The return to a sense of community where people hold all things as sacred is an affirmation about the grace within human nature. We are meant to grace one another: to be sources of grace and healers of grace. So grace is an abundance, not a scarcity. Grace comes through our art: the art of living, the art of our language, the art of our relationships, the art of our forgiving.
Yahya deeply trusted in God's forgiveness. The preacher from Rayystands amazed and overwhelmed before the mystery of divine love: is it not the greatest miracle of grace that God, the ever rich who needs nothing, should love? How then, should we, who are so much in need of Love, not love God? He sums up his whole feeling in one short prayer: "Forgive me, for I belong to Thee."