Focusing on Grace

  

June 16

This morning I want to speak a bit about Grace and how it arises and exists.

Last night I was at a good friend’s birthday celebration. Another man I’ve known for many years sat with me for a while and we spoke about life. 

I mentioned that I don’t deserve anything that takes place around me, and he found that peculiar, requiring me to explain it in more detail.

I suspect you may not see this, but every instance of life, absolutely every single moment of it, is a comprehensive and eternal manifestation of God’s Grace. The entire condition of life as it flows into me, and you, is never relative to anything else. The condition of Grace as it flows into being, both my individual being and yours, is an absolute condition, not a relative one.

 This is the fundamental premise underlying Meister Eckhart’s Book of Divine Comfort — and I heartily recommend that you read it. 

Yet I’ll say things a bit differently than he does this morning. 

The point is that all of the created world rests without exception in the fundament of God’s goodness. Even the things that we think of as terribly bad — whether they afflict ourselves or others — have their roots within the foundation of God’s goodness. This will definitely seem confusing to us as awful things happen around us. Yet it is true. This was more or less the point of Meister Eckhart’s discourse on the matter of suffering.

All of the things, in other words, that I encounter in my life, whether I like them or not—no matter what my attitude—are a manifestation of God’s Grace. God’s Grace is given freely out of love throughout eternity, and before the universe is created. 

I don’t deserve God’s Grace; my Being as a creature is flawed. But whether  my own Being is flawed or perfect, I have no right to my life or the persons and things in it. I have no right to anything. God has created both my life, myself, and all of creation as it stands through His infinite Love and generosity. Because He does this in eternity, it is done before creation; and it is done unconditionally. Without the expectation of return.

If I had a good and great sense of God’s goodness and greatness — which ought to be my aim in life — I would know this at all times. It would humble me, and I would see how incredibly fortunate I am to have friends I have, to have the life I have. However every single manifestation of every single instant in life is a full and complete expression of God’s perfection and his indestructible and eternal goodness. If I dwell within that understanding, and filled with a feeling different than the feeling of ordinary life. The first and only impulse I would have would be to give thanks through worship, because finally, now, I would understand how the world is founded on love, flows into being through love, and how that love unconditionally creates all of the conditions that I inhabit.

How could I deserve this? Nothing is guaranteed. I’m a wicked and petty creature within myself, not seeing how Grace wholly forms my Being; and so I begin undeserving. 

Let’s not use the word sin; that comes afterwards, when I choose to ignore God’s goodness and not honor my life and my fellow beings. I begin undeserving; yet my whole life is given in glory. 

Can I see this?

If I don’t see this, I willfully refuse to honor life and its happenings. Instead, I spend my life in dreams thinking that I deserve this and that and the other thing (including God, because in my ongoing delusion I think that even He ought to be under my command.) The worthless parts of me all want to get for themselves and nothing more. They think that life is my own property and belongs to me.

 One might say that we need to cultivate, in this spiritual context, an inner sense of undeserving. I need to sense from within myself, and all of my being, in every moment, that I don’t deserve this life for what is in it. I am not entitled to it. I have no right to it. It has been given to me through God’s grace alone, and I am merely a custodian.

 I have a business card, my personal business card which under my name says supervisor of various engines of creation. People think this is cute; and I suppose it is. Yet it’s not just my cleverness or the accurate description of myself as one who overlooks various creative processes that manifest through me; it is also about being a custodian of life. We all supervise (look over) the various engines of creation that God has wrought both within us and without; and if we have any sense at all of just how extraordinary and magnificent this creation which we oversee is, we have an instinctive wish to honor it in every way possible.

This instinctive wish to honor life lies at the root of mankind’s spiritual potential; and it has atrophied. If we were able to understand this more directly through an actual sensation of life, instead of through philosophies and theories, hypotheses and religions, we would encounter God’s being more directly. Life was always intended to bring us into contact with this Grace; and yet I turn away.

Wishing the best for you on this day,

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.