Warm greetings, dear Friends! Grace abounds on this sparkling spring day. Rachel Naomi Remen, in her book Kitchen Table Wisdom, writes about the story of a poor man walking along a dusty road one day, wondering whether he would have anything to eat that evening, when suddenly the gods took pity on him and dropped a bag of gold in his path. He was not ready to receive this gift, however, and detoured around it without investigating, thinking himself fortunate to have avoided stumbling over such a large rock in his path. Our lives are full of such a "bags of gold" appearing in our path, but they rarely look like the gifts they are. Sometimes they even appear to be just the opposite, and only looking back do we perceive their value. As we meet in the Silence, let us seek the vision to recognize the many gifts of grace with which we are richly blessed every day.
Experiencing grace involves the expansion of consciousness of self to all of one's surroundings as an unbroken whole, a consciousness of awe from which negative mindstates are absent, from which healing and groundedness result. For these reasons grace has long been deemed "amazing."
You looked with love upon me
And deep within your eyes imprinted grace.
This mercy set me free,
Held in your love’s embrace,
To lift my eyes adoring
to your grace.
This much I have learned: within the sorrow there is grace. When we come close to the things that break us down, we touch those things that also break us open. This is the point of healing: when we have told the story, we can leave the story behind. What remains is hidden wholeness, alive and unbroken.
Probably one of the first strokes of grace in my life is my father's become totally paralyzed when I was eight years old, because it led me to become the kind of person I am now. Sometimes we understand grace only in retrospect. If someone were to ask me what grace is, I would probably respond, "It's all grace."
Grace has been defined as the outward expression of the inward harmony of the soul.
The state of grace is a condition in which all growth is effortless, a transparent, joyful acquiescence that is a general requirement of all existence. Your own body grows naturally and easily from its time of birth, not expecting resistance but taking its miraculous unfolding for granted; using all of itself with great, gracious, creatively aggressive abandon. You were born in a state of grace; it is impossible for you to leave it. You will die in a state of grace . . . You cannot "fall out of" grace, nor can it be taken from you.
We have all of us been told that grace is to be found in the universe. But in our human foolishness and short-sightedness we imagine divine grace to be finite. For this reason we tremble . . . But the moment comes when our eyes are opened and we see and realize that grace is infinite. Grace, my friends, demands nothing from us but that we shall await it with confidence and acknowledge it in gratitude. Grace, friends, makes no conditions and singles out none of us in particular; grace takes us all to its bosom and proclaims general amnesty.
Grace is what happens when openness to chance yields a deeper awareness of the cosmos or one’s place in it . . . when luck leads to spiritual insight . . . Proust called chance experiences "earth experience of grace."
Grace is what happens when openness to chance yields a deeper awareness of the cosmos or one’s place in it . . . when luck leads to spiritual insight . . . Proust called chance experiences "earth experience of grace."
The winds of grace are always blowing.
It is for us to raise our sails.
Grace happens! Grace seldom comes as a profound, single, life-changing event. More often it emerges as a whisper, yet it can carry a person through the next few hours or even days: mornings when I shared bagels and coffee with a friend who listened, offerings of food when I could not begin to plan dinner for the family, phone calls that came at those low moments to lift my spirits and remind me that I was still connected with others, the memorable sermon or anthem that touched my soul in a way I cannot describe. Grace happens!