Sunday
Grace is not something God gives; grace is who God is. Grace is God’s official job description. Grace is what God does to keep alive—forever—all things that God has created in love.
—Richard Rohr
Monday
God’s love gifts us a new covenant that we can actually fulfill, just not perfectly or by ourselves. Only God can fill in all the gaps. Henceforth, there is no such thing as deserving or earning anything. All is grace.
—Richard Rohr
Tuesday
The challenge for us is to open our eyes, ears, hands, minds, and hearts to receive the truth of God’s real, persistent presence, God’s grace. When we open ourselves to it, we are changed by it.
—Serene Jones
Wednesday
“I am ready to be approached by those who do not consult me, ready to be found by those who do not seek me. I say, ‘I am here. I am here!’ to a nation that does not even invoke my name” (Isaiah 65:1). This sounds like so much availability and generosity from God’s side, perhaps too much for us to hope for.
—Richard Rohr
Thursday
God’s grace and mercy throws the whole reward and punishment system out the window. So sometimes I want to yell “noooooo” and reach as fast as I can to get it back. Forgiveness can sting when we don’t feel “worthy” of it.
—Nadia Bolz-Weber
Friday
The prophets—and Jesus—are the ones who have the courage to make God’s way of loving action the source, the goal, the criterion, and the standard for all human morality and behavior. The questions for all of us should eventually be What is God doing? and How does God act?
—Richard Rohr
Week Eleven Practice
Grace in Aging
Journalist Krista Tippett describes an embodied form of grace—the surprising grace of aging. As our minds and bodies slow down, we make space for simple contentment:
To inhabit my body in all its grace and its flaws appears as a gift for the new/mundane bodily territory I’m on in midlife. Aging is the ultimate slow motion loss, inevitable for us all, and yet somehow for me and everyone I know, it’s come as a surprise. You hit a point where it’s no longer so incremental, and no longer amenable to cover up. The original dance between order and chaos takes over our bodies inside and out—even with lots of yoga. As I watched my children move through the primal metamorphosis of adolescence, I made a decision to be fascinated rather than terrified. I’m trying to impose the same discipline on my reaction to myself on this end of aging’s metamorphosis.
There is grief to be had, to be sure, and fear, and lots of simple dismay. But settling into this as best I am able, I experience a wholly unexpected gift of contentment. Contentment is not something I’ve known much in my life and not something I ever really knew I wanted. This, too, is the body’s grace—a gift of physiology, right there alongside my fading hair and skin. At younger ages, our brains are tuned to learn by novelty. At this stage in life, they incline to greater satisfaction in what is routine. Slowing down is accompanied by space for noticing. I am embodied with an awareness that eluded me when my skin was so much more glowy. I become attentive to beauty in ordinary, everyday aspects of my life. There is nothing more delicious than my first cup of tea in the morning; no experience more pleasurable than when my son, now much taller than me, wraps me in a hug; no view I find more breathtaking, over and over again, than the white pine that stands day in and day out behind my backyard.
Reference:
Krista Tippett, Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living (Penguin, 2016), 72–73.
Image credit and inspiration: Geentanjal Khanna, Untitled (detail), 2016, photo, Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. Unearned and unmerited generosity is an element or extension of the divine, revealing itself in our lived experience—spontaneous, unplanned, sometimes messy, as small as a drop of water—requiring open hands to receive it.
