spring

Instead of looking to other humans for love, we need to align with our own love, because it's not the love of other humans that will make us happy. What will make us happy is the love we feel for every human, the love we feel for God, for all creation. When the love comes from someone else, we can love it and it's nice; but when we feel our own love, it's the best thing that can happen to us. We live in heave, we live in bliss. Open your heart and love unconditionally — not because you want love in return, and not because you want to control someone. That is false love. When you love with no conditions you transcend the dream of fear and become aligned with divine spirit, the love of God, which is love coming from you. That love is LIFE, and just like the sun, it is shining all the time.

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.

Open to the Mystery of life and experience 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.