Thank you, God
Some people, the darlings of the gods, seem to be born with grace. Others attain a kind of grace through years of dedicated effort. Many of us have transient moments or times of grace, and wish we could have them more frequently. Others try to fake grace to order to impress and manipulate others, and many fall from grace for a multiple of reasons. Grace is the greatest of all gifts but, as the ancient Greeks, said (although I think they were overstating the matter), ‘Those whom the gods love they destroy.’
Grace is said to be a free and often undeserved gift from God, or from one of the many gods that rule the human psyche. We may think of grace as a certain kind of pious spiritual sanctity, but in fact the gods have many gifts to share with us. Even our Christian god is far from miserly. Look at the world he has given us.
Grace is when Heaven comes down to Earth, and the mundane world is infused with the subtle light of the divine. The words ‘angel’ and ‘deva’ (from which the word ‘divinity’ becomes), can be translated as ‘shining beings’. The gods invariably betray their presence by a certain luminosity that sharpens the senses of everyone in the vicinity.
When Ulysses, shipwrecked, naked and begrimed, encountered the princess Nausicaa and her companions at a spring, the goddess Athena came to his rescue. She magically washed and oiled his skin so it glowed. She plumped out his muscles and straighted his spine to make his middle-aged body look so much stronger and younger than it actually was. She added charm and eloquence to his speech, so of course Nausicaa fell in love with him.
Millions of women are beautiful. The evolutionary process naturally selects for any trait that confer an advantage, so it is hardly surprising that the world is full of good looking people. Only a tiny few however are truly blessed by Aphrodite, the goddess of love and lust. What is that indefinable, gold star quality that women like Marilyn Monroe, Brigitte Bardot, Marlene Dietrich and Nicole Kidman have in such abundance?
Some women are men-magnets. Helen of Troy had a face (and a body and a personality) that launched a thousand ships. Such women effortlessly entice men to them like moths to a flame, which can be as much of a curse as a blessing for both them and for the men.
They can also attract the resentment and hostility of other women. It is hardly surprising that Helen died miserably, hung from a tree by her envious sisters. Those women had received the gift of eagle-eyed jealousy from the goddess Hera, the guardian of marital fidelity and the implacable enemy of Aphrodite.
Grace is when a person has a skill or quality or inner beauty, or a particular experience, that goes way beyond the ordinary. We may see it in others as a quality of elegance, poise, power and flow. It is charisma in action, whether it be that of a political figure or a sportsman.
Some people seem to be born with grace. They appear to have some extraordinary talent or potentiality from the start. We could say they had excellent genes and the luck of being born in the right place at the right time. The myths however describe it more poetically.
When a special child is born, the gods and/or wise men and women often come to bestow the particular talents that they can give. Jesus received gifts from the Three Wise Men from the East, although I doubt if Mary had much use for frankincense and myrhh. She probably sold them and bought baby food and nappies. Of course, these gifts were symbolic of deeper spiritual qualities. Similarly, a string of important visitors, human and divine, gave their blessings to the infant Buddha.
In European folklore, this ritual at the cradle of the new-born often has a sting in the tale. The last visitor, some old hag most likely, will leave a slow acting curse or prophecy that shadows the other gifts. The truth is that no talent comes without a price.
Grace is rarely a permanent state, but it does peculiar things with time. It commonly occurs as an enchanted moment that seems to last forever. Then suddenly it vanishes – where did it go? – and clock time resumes its grip on the world. You may like a certain piece of music, but only on rare occasions does it utterly transport you. You may know you love your children or your partner, but how often does total adoration flood your soul? Of course, some people love easily. They are gifted with the capacity for love, be it for people or trees or kangaroos. Others may never really ‘feel’ love at all, but may have other gifts.
Any sportsman or woman knows that regardless of winning or losing, the moments of utter perfection are rare. It can be infuriating playing with a good golfer who grizzles at a shot you would die for. It may be true that the ball went 290 metres but he may still complain that he didn’t hit it sweetly and his rhythm was a little off. Similarly, a musician can feel disappointed with his performance, even though he gets tumultuous applause from an audience. He may know he’d just put in a workmanlike effort and that he wasn’t ‘in the zone’.
Most of us know occasional moments of grace, but can we do anything to get more of them? Grace is usually described as an undeserved gift completely out of the ordinary, so can an ordinary person do anything to induce the extra-ordinary?
The optomistic British monk Pelagius around 400 A.D. said ‘yes’. It was quite possible to earn the grace of God. St Augustine said ‘no’, and had Pelagius declared a heretic. The battle lines have been drawn ever since. Augustine said that salvation is God’s free gift to us undeserving sinners. It would be an intolerable burden if we could only redeem ourselves by our own efforts.
Calvin later took this attitude to its logical extreme. There is no point in trying, he said. God has already chosen the 144,000 people who would be saved. If you were one of the elect, nothing you did would ever disqualify you for Heaven. Everyone else, no matter how good they were, were bound for Hell.
The Buddha, on the other hand, was an equally extreme Pelagian. “I did it all by myself”, he said. “No one helped me and I am greater than all the gods anyway”.
So whatever gift you want, can you achieve it by yourself or would you like some divine assistance? Do you agree with Pelagius or Augustine? Do you want to be like a yogi, working to perfect yourself, or do you just hope for blessings from the universe?
In fact you can enhance any gift through practice. For example, yogis commonly seek out a trance state of absolute serenity. At first, they say, you get the merest glimpses. You repeatedly fall in and out of this state but, in time, some trace of that glory lingers in memory. As you develop an inner template or mental picture, it acts as a roadmap to take you back, and the states will now occur more frequently. Perfect trance is always dependent on all the right circumstances coming together, but if you strengthen the causal factors and dissolve what undermines them, it is much more likely to happen.
We can probably never dwell in a state of permanent grace, any more than a great musician or athlete can always perform at their absolute peak. A saint is never fully awakened. Solomon is never always wise. A living goddess can’t radiate her sexual allure 24 hours a day. We admire these people not so much for their attainment as for their potential. They are so much more likely to attain even a transient perfection than we are.
We often think of grace as having an otherwordly, transcendent quality to it, but that is only one kind of grace. More commonly, grace is immanent. We sense it as being here, in the present and in the body. In fact it is all around us, if only we can recognise it.
Traditionally, the gifts of God include life, the world and the intelligence to enjoy it. Our ‘sin’ is that we can’t appreciate these, whether through misery or discontent or ignorance. Because even the smallest frustration can make us blind to what we’ve got, people used to say grace as a daily ritual to remind themselves. ‘Thank you for this breath. Thank you for this food. Thank you for this moment of reflection and peace.’ Simple as these things are, no one on earth can take any of them for granted.
The word ‘grace’ is closely related to the word ‘gratitude’. We now live in an era of rapacious greed with an ideology of entitlements and rights. It seems strange and old-fashioned to ever say ‘thank you’ for anything. Yet wealth is no guarantee of happiness, and the poor can be remarkably happy. The ability to appreciate and