I keep running into grace, literally, and literately, in things I pick up and read. Or does grace run into me? In either event, there are worse things in life.
Today, Anne Lamott writes on grace in Traveling Mercies and I am not sure anyone explains it better – to the extent grace can be explained. Grace is:
“the force that infuses our lives and keeps letting us off the hook. It is unearned love – love that goes before, that greets us on the way. It’s the help you receive when you have no bright ideas left, when you are empty and desperate and have discovered that your best thinking an most charming charm have failed you. Grace is the light or electricity or juice or breeze that takes you from that isolated place and puts you with others who are as startled and embarrassed and eventually grateful as you are to be there.”
Later, she writes: “I do not at all understand the mystery of grace – only that it meets us where we are but does not leave us where it found us.”
All of this can best be summed up in Lamott’s reference to Auden: “I know nothing, except what everyone knows – if there when Grace dances, I should dance.”
It occurs to me that grace takes us from Thoreau’s “lives of quiet desperation” and “does not leave us where it found us.” It drops us into a room full of similarly (but differently) imperfect people with the music blasting loudly. There, then, we should dance.
It occurs to me... 