Nidificate

The last week has been a lot, and there have been moments of profound grace.

It's time for me to nidificate for a spell.

May Autumn be beautiful for us all.

Some things

Some things:
I believe that grace is in our daily lives and in our choices if we so choose.
There is grace in integrity, a grace of dignity if we choose to make commitments and live by them.
There is grace in simplicity, a grace of elegance in finding the least that we need and living in that arc between too much and too little, an elegance of enough.
There is a grace to ongoing revelation, a grace of intimacy that comes only when there is an abundance of mystery without secrecy
There is a grace to presence, a grace of identity that happens when we are still enough to witness without ego.
This is how a utilitarian Taoist cyberpunk monk ends up in the silent meeting of the Religious Society of Friends.

Prevenient Grace

The word prevenient means "antecedant to," or (my favorite) "in anticipation of." It comes from the latin, combining venire (to come) with pre (before).

It means something which has happened before the event or act.

In the case of prevenient grace, it means the grace (of god) which existed for you before you were born. So essentially it is the grace (of god) which was put aside for you before you were formed into being.

Frankly it took me forever to get a grasp on this. Then one day it hit me:

Take a dry erase marker and write God's Favorite on a mirror and walk away.

The Message, just the words on the mirror, is the prevenient part, in that it has already happened before anyone is reflected, no matter who walks by.

The grace part is the Meaning of the message. Basically, as I understand grace, it's as though someone went up to God during the void, while He was thinking about spinning the planets out onto the dark velvet of the universe, and said "Hey. You know those folks that you are going to put on the watery blue-green one? Well, they're going to try really hard but get it all wrong and you're going to have to have a kid so that you can send him down to be a sacrifice for them all, but, out of the whole everyone, ever, only this one lady is going to get the Message, and imperfectly at that. Sounds like a lot of work and hassle and sacrifice and loss. Should I cancel the order?"

And God replied, "She is worth all that and more. Make it so."

(And of course you are worth it. And no, you don't deserve it, because it can't be earned or deserved any more than the sunlight that falls on the fields is earned or deserved by the wheat. That's what makes it grace.)

This is the message for each of us, if we will but turn around and look in the mirror instead of turning away and feeling alone when looking at the World.