Grace is usually peddled as the stuff of cover-ups; the added ingredient that takes all your failures and mistakes and the times when you’ve fallen short, and makes up the difference, hiding them away as if they were never there. Grace makes your parts whole.
In spiritual and non-spiritual communities alike, the idea of unmerited favour is what impermanently fixes your humanity, only by filling up the gaps your imperfect self couldn’t provide in the moment. Bosses to employees, lover to lover, parent to child and child to parents, between friends and partners and family members and teachers and students and work colleagues—grace is given to heal all the ways in which we let each other down.
Grace, grace, undeserved, to us all. But what if I told you that even though an element of all of this is true—grace really is the stuff of connection in an imperfect world—grace is not an agent of disguise that makes up for your failings, that it is given to you as a charitable gift from a divine other as some kind of pension for being human.
Grace is what allows us to glory in our humanity. It doesn’t hide you away but lights you up. It does not demand perfection, but calls to the forefront authenticity, mercy, compassion and courage when all you want to do is give up, go home, quit. Grace says, try again. Grace says, rise in your power. Grace says, dare to fail because the measure of your worth is not in success but in your willingness to be here as you are and to show up in all the wild and holy and imperfect ways that you do in the world to live the only life you will ever have: yours.
There is no measure of your worth, only the fact that you are worthy because you are here.
Grace creates the space to figure things out—what works and what doesn’t—to try different ideas and practices, to bend and flow, evolve and grow. Grace is the life-generating energy of the universe that needs you only to accept its gift, take what you need, and allow yourself to be. So yes, it is the substance of integration and union, bringing it all together, but not as debt relief or a form of compensation for the human condition. It is flow; it is alignment; it is courage; it is compassion.
Grace is the willingness to experience life and love outside the limits of deserving and worthiness. It is the kindness to let yourself be. Grace doesn’t make you enough; grace shows you that who you are, what you have, even here, even in this, is all you need to get you to whatever is next.
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