I walked by a woman lying on her stomach – no blanket – in the grassy park. She was on the phone with a friend or maybe a virtual Bible study type-of-thing. Right as I walked past her she said: “God gives us grace by giving us free will.” Grace. Free will. I picked up the words like marble stones in Mancala, fumbling them in my hand and delicately moving them from wooden bowl to wooden bowl.
What is grace? It’s a question I’ve had in my mind for some time, seeking a clear definition that continues to elude me. This Tuesday afternoon utterance was an invitation to attempt, once more, to try and wrap my head around grace. As is true with most spiritual concepts, I believe metaphor to be the most deft apparatus to try & understand grace.
Perhaps grace is a sunny day after three weeks of gloom. Perhaps grace is a text from someone you love when you need it most. Perhaps grace is blasting Bridgette Mendler’s Hurricane on the way home from a social event and dancing in the car like a lunatic. Maybe it’s remembrance. Maybe it’s the prodigal son or the 100th sheep, sought after and welcomed home no matter how far one has strayed. Reddit says that grace is kindness that is given that is not earned. Maybe grace is Reddit.
Life has ups and downs. I am no longer so naive to think that I can avoid life’s downs through hard work, determination, accumulation, satiation, isolation, or meditation. But perhaps I will someday learn, with God’s grace, to take the downs less seriously. God’s grace, given in this instance, is spiritual progress and increased equanimity. It is not proportional to the time I spend meditating or praying, nor is it correlated with the sincerity of my practices. It is a gift given freely by God and it is contingent simply upon my devotion to Her, my love for Her. And it is given to me because of – not in spite of – my total imperfection.
If I wasn’t imperfect, how could I receive grace? A wretched thing – I am still granted kindness, often when I least expect it. Applied collectively, despite the atrocities mankind has enacted on itself, we are still given another day – another sunrise, a cooling breeze, a distant bird song. And with this new day, we are given the freedom to choose. Today, will we engage in acts of horror or acts of beauty? Will we succumb to evil or grace the world with our compassion & love?
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