Grace
At the end of a therapy session, a woman I work with asked me if I could tell her what grace means. The question took me off guard, as my headspace was in the area of scheduling and collecting payment. Floundering a little I said, “Well, from a theological perspective I think grace would be accepting something that we don’t deserve. From an artistic perspective, grace is beauty.” Although she seemed satisfied with my intellectualized answer, I wasn’t. Grace is not a cerebral insight, I reminded myself. I thought about the expressions of grace in my own life: my dogs persistent affection, friends that show up, the children I'm wide-eyed with,the baby geese that are waddling behind their moms every spring, at the lake across from my condo, and my condo, then my country and my safety and freedom. There’s also grace in the smile of an Ethiopian child, who will never know the simple charm of waddling baby geese or the comfort of a condo and a free country. Their skinny bodies sheathed with tattered hand-me-downs: they embody grace.
In the end, grace is vulnerability; an elegance of the heart, I decided.
What is Grace?
What is grace?” I asked God.
And He said,
“All that happens.”
Then He added, when I looked perplexed,
“Could not lovers say that every moment in their Beloved’s arms
was grace?
Existence is my arms,
though I well understand how one can turn
away from
me
until the heart has
wisdom.”
--Saint John of the Cross
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