Since writing that last post I’ve been thinking about grace.  I’m wondering whether grace is something we need in experience, but not in reality.  To explain…

All of us experience the feeling of being bad at some point, mean or self absorbed or vindictive.  Rebellious in an unhealthy way.  Hurtful.  Like the spiritual says of grace, "how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me."  Very few of us feel deserving all the time of kindness or gentleness or love.

And yet…isn’t life a pretty…how can I put it…difficult challenge for all of us?  Don’t we all carry our own loads of suffering, our own satchels of wounds and accompanying fears, histories that are ours, but also the inheritance of all who have gone before us…with their loads and satchels and fears?  So on a level maybe deeper than surfaces sometimes, don’t we all deserve kindness?  We did not ask to be here (so far as I’m aware).  We did not ask to be situated on our plots of history, or to be forced to cope with the nature and nurture and worlds in which we spin.

The dear girl who was homesick on her first night from home, did she need grace for her misery–undeserved kindness–or simply love?  Tenderness and reassurances that she was fine, and she wasn’t trying to hurt or innconvenience anyone, and it’s okay to learn slowly that sleep-overs can be fun?

I’m wondering whether this isn’t true of something far more expansive than innocent little girls, spilling even into hatred and awfulness and meanness of every kind.  Could it be that the worst of us, the worst in us, doesn’t need true grace, which is something undeserved, but rather love, which I think is?  That in fact the absence or unfeltness of such love, at crucial points, and when we most need it, is why we become "wretches" in the first place?

Maybe experiencing grace–what we percieve as undeserved kindness–is a necessary step toward recovering a sense of what’s actually true:  we deserve kindness.  We are, in fact, okay.  Deeply so.  And the more we come to know it, the more our wretchedness transforms.  The more it starts becoming itself a source of love, which, I think, is what all of us deserve in the first place.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 9th, 2006 at 9:56 am and is filed under Healing, Philosophy, Psychology, Religion/Spirituality. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.