Welcoming Grace

"There–but for the grace of God–go I" no longer feels quite accurate to say. If we are all one, there I am starving. There I am in a cage. There I am being a tyrant. There I am as an elephant. There I am in every situation a being appears to be in. (Happily this also implies that I am courageously piloting a rescue helicopter, brilliantly playing cello, and able to do a back flip–yay me!)

As for being the character Emily, in this not so flexible body, I do not believe that this little individual did anything "right" to "earn" a warm place to sleep or a computer to write on. Nor did anyone else do anything "wrong" to "deserve" less. I am not specially blessed by some deity who believes I am more worthy of grace than someone else. Good God, no! Grace is not bestowed upon one but not another! What kind of loving presence would operate like that? Only a crazy one, invented in the image of the ego, by the ego.

I no longer appeal to a deity to take care of me or anyone else as if not asking might result in being forgotten, or as if a significant number of votes were required to sway some deity's decision. As if we were all children competing for one very busy (and distant) parent's attention. A parent with limited resources. I no longer pray like an alien in Toy Story hoping The Claw in the arcade game will Pick Me. "oooOOOOOOooooooooo!"

Grace is not something that only comes quixotically or when called in the right manner. Sometimes it may appear to show up when we pray for it, but that is more about us being willing to be on the lookout, not us succeeding in getting it to pay attention. Grace is everywhere, at all times. Grace never goes away somewhere else, leaving us without it, any more than Love does. We simply forget to open our awareness to its presence. We may be setting conditions as to what forms we are willing to recognize it in. We may be limiting how we allow it to influence our reality.

Sometimes grace is difficult to recognize, such as the grace of not being given what you think you want because, ultimately, it is not what you really needed, after all. There were times in my life when I was so physically and neurologically compromised that I prayed to be released from this body. Other things happened instead, among them some dissolving of the identity who seemed to be suffering. Instead of just feeling better, but basically staying the same, there was more conscious awareness.

Grace is here to support our awakening. If we are willing to entertain that notion, we are more likely to recognize the presence of grace in our lives. Waking up can involve a lot of busting of assumptions. For me, anyway, a lot of busting of what I thought was true and real, in order to find out that it was illusory, or at least only relatively true. This is not easy to go through. It's usually after the fact that I can look back and declare, "What grace, to discover truth instead of having my illusions shored up!"

We don't need to hope and wait for grace to pick our number. Grace is in our lives as we speak. We might ask ourselves, just how much do I really want to be aware of it? If some problem has become a fundamental part of my personal identity, how willing am I to open up to the answer Grace may be offering?