What
exactly is grace? It is not a single, easily-identifiable quality but a
combination of many, with some elusive prerequisites that make it even more
ineffable. We cannot experience grace when our hearts are anxious or stressed,
as they often are in these troubled times. For grace to suffuse our soul, we must
be at peace with ourselves and with the world around us as is, even if
partially. That, and be open to new ideas and insights, be humble and patient,
and have an instinct for the sacred and the transcendent.
I
speak only for myself when I say that I find grace difficult to come by, either
from others or from me. Yet when I experience it, I know I am having a
transcendent experience. Recently I experienced it when a dear cousin passed
away. I announced his passing to the congregation at my local mosque and sought
their prayers for the departed. The way they opened up to me in sympathy
afterwards, the way they consoled me and shed tears with me, told me that none
of us need be alone, that when we express our vulnerability and seek solace
from our fellow-beings, irrespective of race and religion, we have a chance to
be touched by the Divine. We have a chance to experience grace.
Grace
can originate from the natural world as much as it can from humanity. In fact,
I will go so far as to say that it is easier to summon grace from birdsongs, from
the way the wind ripples the surface of a pond, from the wonder of stars blooming
like flowers in the garden of the night sky, from the way an agave leaf holds drops of rain.
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| Photo by Hasan Z. Rahim |
But
for this to happen, we need to be attuned to the natural world, to its rhythms
and patterns, to its strangeness and, well, to its grace. It will never happen
when we waste our time consumed by the small screen of our devices, when social
media and smartphones, to paraphrase Wordsworth, are too much with us, awake
and asleep, buying and selling, wasting our powers, seeing hardly anything in
Nature that is ours.
So, for a change, take a walk in the woods. Behold the magic of the sprouting tulip or the first appearance of butterflies in your backyard. Stroll along the shore and hear the
song and sigh of wind and water in the waves that break at your feet. Listen to a towhee singing its heart out in the rain!
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| Photo by Hasan Z. Rahim |
As
the year draws to a close, and as the times threaten to become even more
trying, each of us need to find our North Star, to focus on that which
matters in our lives, be it love, friendship, living with less stuff, curbing
cruel desires, revealing the power of humility to the arrogant, filling the despairing
with hope.
In
other words, we need to experience grace in our lives, whether summoned or
unbidden, and know in the depth of our hearts, as the prophets of olden times knew,
that beauty, truth, empathy, humility and unconditional love will set us free.
Allow
me to end with a poem by Wendell Berry that I find myself reciting more
frequently than ever before in a world that seems to have gone awry in a hurry - “The Peace of Wild Things:”
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
