St. Augustine said: “What is grace? I know until you ask me; when you ask me, I do not know.”
Rev. Ken Dagle was diagnosed with HIV in 1989. Living in New York city, many of his friends were also stricken with HIV and were dying. He attributes grace, which he defines as unexpected, underserved good - the reason why he found spirituality, self-awareness, and self-love after his diagnosis. Today, 30 years later, he is the senior minister at a large church in San Francisco. He is married with three wonderful children, and he is well enough to enjoy it all.
Rev. Ken has his ideas about grace, but is there a precise definition?
St. Augustine said: “What is grace? I know until you ask me; when you ask me, I do not know.” If we asked a dozen people their definition of grace, we might uncover a dozen different answers including, “I don’t know.”
Catholic monk and mystic Thomas Merton wrote, “Grace is not a strange, magic substance which is subtly filtered into our souls to act as a kind of spiritual penicillin. Grace is unity, oneness within ourselves, oneness with God.”
In Ephesians 2:8-9 we read: “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God—not the results of works.” And 2 Timothy 1:6 adds: “For this reason I remind you to rekindle the gift of God that is within you.”
We are grace-filled inherently. We only need to remember all that this implies in our daily lives. Grace is a constant and available to us, we simply forget its presence sometimes. By remembering and welcoming grace, we experience grace.
Swami Vivekananda, a Hindu monk living in the 19th century, put it this way:
“God’s grace is always blowing, but you must raise your sail.”
In other words, we must be open, receptive, and welcoming to the activity of grace.
We can experience the activity of grace by serving others. We can send a text or make a call that brings a few moments of joy to someone. We can listen when someone needs to express feelings of grief. We may never know if an act of kindness will have great impact in a person’s life, but it is possible.
Victor Daley, the Australian poet, was cared for in a Catholic hospital as he was dying. He thanked the nurses for all their care. “Don’t thank us,” the nurses said. “Thank the grace of God.” Very perceptively the poet asked, “But aren’t you the grace of God?”
So, I invite you to consider all the wonderful ways you might welcome that ever-present, always accessible, unexpected, underserved good: that what we call grace, today.
I thank you for reading, and be blessed this day.
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