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grace
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To my parents Elizabeth and David, whose discipline and love gave me the eyes to see grace
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PART FOUR: GRACE
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The Definition of Grace 278
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Grace and Mental Illness:
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Resistance to Grace 318
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The Welcoming of Grace 328
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An attempt will be made to answer this set of questions in the final part, on grace. The attempt will not meet with anyone’s complete satisfaction, including my own. I hope, however, what I write will bring some enlightenment.
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The final part will focus on the phenomenon of grace and the role it plays in this process. The concept of grace has been familiar to religion for millennia, but it is foreign to science, including psychology. Nonetheless, I believe that an understanding of the phenomenon of grace is essential to complete understanding of the process of growth in human beings. What follows will, I hope, represent a contribution to the slowly enlarging interface between religion and the science of psychology.
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In thinking about miracles, I believe that our frame of reference has been too dramatic. We have been looking for the burning bush, the parting of the sea, the bellowing voice from heaven. Instead we should be looking at the ordinary day-today events in our lives for evidence of the miraculous, maintaining at the same time a scientific orientation. This is what I shall be doing in the next part as I examine ordinary occurrences in the practice of psychiatry which have led me to an understanding of the extraordinary phenomenon of grace.
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Grace
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Amazing grace! How sweet the sound That saved a wretch like me!
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’Twas grace that taught my heart to fear,
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And grace my fears relieved;
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How precious did that grace appear The hour I first believed!
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’Tis grace hath brought me safe thus far,
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And grace will lead me home.
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The first word associated with grace in this famous early American evangelical hymn is ‘amazing’. Something amazes us when it is not in the ordinary course of things, when it is not predictable by what we know of ‘natural law’. What follows will demonstrate grace to be a common phenomenon and, to a certain extent, a predictable one. But the reality of grace will remain unexplainable within the #< Amazing Grace’, by John Newton (1725-1807).
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home unharmed. By itself this incident does not seem so remarkable; one might simply say I was lucky. But put it together with all the other instances: times I just missed being hit by cars while on foot, on a bicycle or driving; times when I was driving a car and almost struck pedestrians or barely missed bike riders in the dark; times when I jammed on the brakes, coming to a stop no more than an inch or two from another vehicle; times when I narrowly missed skiing into trees, almost fell out of windows; times when a swinging golf club brushed through my hair, and so on. What is this? Do I lead a charmed existence? If readers examine their own lives at this point, I suspect the majority will find in their own personal experiences similar patterns of repeated narrowly averted disasters, a number of accidents that almost happened that is many times greater than the number of accidents that actually did happen. Furthermore, I believe readers will acknowledge that their personal patterns of survival, of accident-resistance, are not the result of any process of conscious decision-making. Could it be that most of us do lead ‘charmed lives’? Could it really be that the line in the song is true: ‘ ’Tis grace hath brought me safe thus far’?
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What we are talking of here in regard to paranormal events with beneficial consequences is the phenomenon of serendipity. Webster’s Dictionary defines serendipity as ‘the gift of finding valuable or agreeable things not sought for’. There are several intriguing features to this definition. One is the terming of serendipity as a gift, thereby implying that some people possess it while others don’t, that some people are lucky and others are not. It is a major thesis of this section that grace, manifested in part by ‘valuable or agreeable things not sought for’, is available to everyone, but that while some take advantage of it, others do not. By letting the beetle in, catching it, and giving it to his patient, Jung was clearly taking advantage of it. Some of the reasons why and ways that people fail to take advantage of grace will be explored later under the subject heading of ‘Resistance to Grace’. But for the moment let me suggest that one of the reasons we fail to take full advantage of grace is that we are not fully aware of its presence - that is, we don’t find valuable things not sought for, because we fail to appreciate the value of the gift when it is given us. In other words, serendipitous events occur to all of us, but frequently we fail to recognise their serendipitous nature; we consider such events quite unremarkable, and consequendy we fail to take full advantage of them.
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This was not a stupendous event. There were no trumpets to announce it. I might well have ignored it. I could have survived without it. Nonetheless, I was touched by grace. The event was both extraordinary and ordinary - extraordinary because it was highly unlikely, ordinary because such highly unlikely beneficial events happen to us all the time, quietly, knocking on the door of our awareness no more dramatically than the beede gendy tapping on the window-pane. Similar sorts of events have happened dozens of times in the months since my colleague’s wife lent me her book. They have always been happening to me. Some of them I recognise. Some of them I may take advantage of without even being aware of their miraculous nature. There is no way I have of knowing how many I have let slip by.
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The Definition of Grace
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Although generally regarded as separate, I have come to believe that their commonality indicates that these phenomena are part of or manifestations of a single phenomenon: a powerful force originating outside of human consciousness which nurtures the spiritual growth of human beings. For hundreds and even thousands of years before the scientific conceptualisation of such things as immune globulins, dream states, and the unconscious, this force has been consistently recognised by the religious, who have applied to it the name of grace. And have sung its praise. ‘Amazing grace, how sweet the sound . . .’
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The Definition of Grace
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What are we to do - we who are properly sceptical and scientific-minded - with this ‘powerful force originating outside of human consciousness which nurtures the spiritual growth of human beings’? We cannot touch this force. We have no decent way to measure it. Yet it exists. It is real. Are we to operate with tunnel vision and ignore it because it does not fit in easily with traditional scientific concepts of natural law? To do so seems perilous. I do not think we can hope to approach a full understanding of the cosmos, of the place of man within the cosmos, and hence the nature of mankind itself, without incorporating the phenomenon of grace into our conceptual framework.
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Yet we cannot even locate this force. We have said only where it is not: residing in human consciousness. Then, where does it reside? Some of the phenomena we have discussed, such as dreams, suggest that grace resides in the unconscious mind of the individual. Other phenomena, such as synchronicity and serendipity, indicate this force to exist beyond the boundaries of the single individual. It is not simply because we are scientists that we have difficulty locating grace. The religious, who, of course, ascribe the origins of grace to God, believing it to be literally God’s love, have through the ages had the same difficulty locating God. There are within theology two lengthy and opposing traditions in this regard: one, the doctrine of Emanance, which holds that grace emanates down from an external God to men; the other, the doctrine of Immanence, which holds that grace immanates out from the God within the centre of man’s being.
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cannot be both. Ships are ships and not shoes. I am I and you are you. The I-entity is my identity and the you-entity is your identity, and we tend to be quite discomfited if our identities become mixed up or confused. As we have previously noted, Hindu and Buddhist thinkers believe our perception of discrete entities to be illusion, or maya, and modem physicists, concerned with relativity, wave-particle phenomena, electro¬ magnetism, etc., are becoming increasingly aware of the limitations of our Conceptual approach in terms of entities. But it is hard to escape from. Our tendency to entity-thinking compels us to want to locate things, even such things as God or grace and even when we know our tendency is interfering with our comprehension of these matters.
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I attempt not to think of the individual as a true entity at all, and insofar as my intellectual limitations compel me to think (or write) in terms of entities, I conceive of the boundaries of the individual as being marked by a most permeable membrane - a fence, if you will, instead of a wall; a fence through which, under which and over which other ‘entities’ may climb, crawl or flow. Just as our conscious mind is continually partially permeable to our unconscious, so is our unconscious permeable to the ‘mind’ without, the ‘mind’ that permeates us yet is not us as entities. More elegantly and adequately descriptive of the situation than the twentieth-century scientific language of permeable membranes is the fourteenth-century (r. 1393) religious language of Dame Julian, an anchoress of Norwich, describing the relationship between grace and the indi¬ vidual entity: ‘For as the body is clad in the cloth, and the flesh in the skin and the bones in the flesh and the heart in the whole, so are we, soul and body, clad in the goodness of God and enclosed. Yea, and more homely; for all these may wear and waste away, but the Goodness of God is ever whole.’*
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* Revelations of Divine Love, Grace Warrack, ed. (New York: British Book Centre, 1923), Chap. VI.
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The Definition of Grace
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Although we have not until now focused upon it as a concept, in one\way or another we have been concerned with evolution throughout this book. Spiritual growth is the evolution of an individual. An individual’s body may undergo the changes of the life cycle, but it does not evolve. New physical patterns are not forged. Decline of physical competence in old age is an inevitability. Within an individual lifetime, however, the human spirit may evolve dramatically. New patterns may be forged. Spiritual compe¬ tence may increase (although it usually does not) until the moment of death in advanced old age. Our lifetime offers us unlimited opportunities for spiritual growth until the end. While the focus of this book is on spiritual evolution, the process of physical evolution is similar to that of the spirit and provides us with a model for the further understanding of the process of spiritual growth and the meaning of grace.
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We are still left, however, with the question asked at the end of the part on love: Where does love come from? Only now it can be enlarged to a perhaps even more basic question: Whence comes the whole force of evolution? And to this we can add our puzzlement about the origins of grace. For love is conscious, but grace is not. Whence comes this ‘powerful force originating outside of human consciousness which nurtures the spiritual growth of human beings’?
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To explain the miracles of grace and evolution we hypothesise the existence of a God who wants us to grow - a God who loves us. To many this hypothesis seems too simple, too easy; too much like fantasy; childlike and naive. But what else do we have? To ignore the data by using tunnel vision is not an answer. We cannot obtain an answer by not asking the questions. Simple though it may be, no one who has observed the data and asked the questions has been able to produce a better hypothesis or even really a hypothesis at all. Until someone does, we are stuck with this
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But we still have not explained how it is that the unconscious possesses all this knowledge which we have not yet consciously learned. Here again the question is so basic that we have no scientific answer. Again we can only hypothesise. And again I know of no hypothesis as satisfac¬ tory as the postulation of a God who is intimately associated with us - so intimately that He is part of us. If you want to know the closest place to look for grace, it is within yourself. If you desire wisdom greater than your own, you can find it inside you. What this suggests is that the interface between God and man is at least in part the interface between our unconscious and our conscious. To put it plainly, our unconscious is God. God within us. We were part of God all the time. God has been with us all along, is now, and always will be.
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then through our conscious decisions be able to influence the world according to His will our lives themselves will become the agents of God’s grace. We ourselves will then have become one form of the grace of God, working on His behalf among mankind, creating love where love did not exist before, pulling our fellow creatures up to our own level of awareness, pushing the plane of human evolution forward.
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Grace and Mental Illness: The Myth of Orestes
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Grace and Mental Illness: The Myth of Orestes
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are ‘out of touch with reality’, and will deem us mentally ill even though we ourselves are most likely convinced of our sanity.* But long before matters have proceeded to this extreme, and we have been served notice of our illness by our fellow citizens, we are served notice by our unconscious of our increasing maladjustment. Such notice is served by our unconscious through a variety of means: bad dreams, anxiety attacks, depressions, and other symptoms. Although our conscious mind has denied reality, our unconscious, which is omniscient, knows the true score and attempts to help us out by stimulating, through symptom formation, our conscious mind to the awareness that something is wrong. In other words, the painful and unwanted symptoms of mental illness are manifestations ot grace. They are the products of a ‘powerful force originating outside of con¬ sciousness which nurtures our spiritual growth’.
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Grace and Mental Illness: The Myth of Orestes
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There are several ways to look at this rather typical case. Betsy’s anxiety attacks were clearly a form of agoraphobia (literally, fear of the marketplace, but usually fear of open spaces), and for her represented a fear of freedom. She had them when she was outside, unhindered by her husband, free to move about and relate with others. Fear of freedom was the essence of her mental illness. Some might say that the anxiety attacks, representing her fear of freedom, were her illness. But I have found it more useful and enlightening to look at things another way. For Betsy’s fear of freedom long predated her anxiety attacks. It was because of this fear that she had left college and had begun the process of constricting her development. In my judgment Betsy was ill at that time, three years before her symptoms began. Yet she was not aware of her illness or of the damage she was doing to herself by her self-constriction. It was her symptoms, these anxiety attacks which she did not want and had not asked for, which she felt had ‘cursed’ her ‘out of the blue’, that made her finally aware of her illness and forced her to set out upon the path of self-correction and growth. I believe that this pattern holds true for most mental illness. The symptoms and the illness are not the same thing. The illness exists long before the symptoms. Rather than being the illness, the symptoms are the beginning of its cure. The fact that they are unwanted makes them all the more a phenomenon of grace - a gift of God, a message from the unconscious, if you will, to initiate selfexamination and repair.
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As is common with grace, most reject this gift and do not heed the message. They do this in a variety of ways, all of which represent an attempt to avoid the responsibility for their illness. They try to ignore the symptoms by pretending that they are not really symptoms, that everyone gets ‘these little attacks from time to time’. They try to work around them by quitting jobs, stopping driving, moving to a new town, avoiding certain activities. They attempt to rid themselves of the symptoms by pain-killers, by little pills they’ve gotten from the doctor or by anesthetising them¬ selves with alcohol and other drugs. Even if they do accept the fact that they have symptoms, they will usually, in many subtle ways, blame the world outside them - uncaring relatives, false friends, greedy corporations, a sick society, and even fate - for their condition. Only those few who accept responsibility for their symptoms, who realise that their symptoms are a manifestation of a disorder in their own soul, heed the message of their unconscious and accept its grace. They accept their own inadequacy and the pain of the work necessary to heal themselves. But to them, as to Betsy and all the others willing to face the pain of psychotherapy, comes great reward. It was of them that Christ spoke in the first of the beatitudes: ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven’.* What I am saying here of the relationship between grace and mental illness is beautifully embodied in the great Greek myth of Orestes and the Furies.t Orestes was a grandson of Atreus, a man who had viciously attempted to prove himself more powerful than the gods. Because of his crime against them, the gods punished Atreus by placing a curse upon all his descendants. As part of the enactment of this curse upon
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Grace and Mental Illness: The Myth of Orestes
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‘bearers of grace’. The hallucinatory Furies, who could be perceived only by Orestes, represent his symptoms, the private hell of mental illness. The transformation of the Furies into the Eumenides is the transformation of mental illness into good fortune, of which we have been speaking. This trans¬ formation occurred by virtue of the fact that Orestes was willing to accept responsibility for his mental illness. While he ultimately sought to be relieved of them, he did not see the Furies as an unjust punishment or perceive himself to be a victim of society or of anything else. Being an inevitable result of the original curse upon the House of Atreus, the Furies also symbolise the fact that mental illness is a family affair, created in one by one’s parents and grandparents as the sins of the father are visited upon the children. But Orestes did not blame his family - his parents or his grandfather - as he well might have. Nor did he blame the gods or ‘fate’. Instead he accepted his condition as one of his own making and undertook the effort to heal it. It was a lengthy process, just as most therapy tends to be lengthy. But as a result he was healed, and through this healing process of his own effort, the very things that had once caused him agony became the same things that brought him wisdom.
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Grace and Mental Illness: The Myth of Orestes
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Those who have faced their mental illness, accepted total responsibility for it, and made the necessary changes in themselves to overcome it, find themselves not only cured and free from the curses of their childhood and ancestry but also find themselves living in a new and different world. What they once perceived as problems they now perceive as opportunities. What were once loathsome barriers are now welcome challenges. Thoughts previously unwanted become helpful insights; feelings previously disowned become sources of energy and guidance. Occurrences that once seemed to be burdens now seem to be gifts, including the very symptoms from which they have recovered. ‘My depression and my anxiety attacks were the best things that ever happened to me’, they will routinely say at the termination of successful therapy. Even if they emerge from therapy without a belief in God, such successful patients still generally do so with a very real sense that they have been touched by grace.
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Resistance to Grace
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Resistance to Grace
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Resistance to Grace
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by the best and most loving therapists, and why some people transcend the most loveless childhoods, with or without the help of psychotherapy, to become themselves loving persons. The reader will also remember I stated then that I doubted that I would be able to answer these questions to anyone’s complete satisfaction. I suggested, however, that some light could be thrown on these questions by con¬ sideration of the concept of grace.
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I have come to believe and have tried to demonstrate that people’s capacity to love, and hence their will to grow, is nurtured not only by the love of their parents during childhood but also throughout their lives by grace, or God’s love. This is a powerful force external to their consciousness which operates through the agency of their own uncon¬ scious as well as through the agency of loving persons other than their parents and through additional ways which we do not understand. It is because of grace that it is possible for people to transcend the traumas of loveless parenting and become themselves loving individuals who have risen far above their parents on the scale of human evolution. Why, then, do only some people spiritually grow and evolve beyond the circumstances of their parentage? I believe that grace is available to everyone, that we are all cloaked in the love of God, no one less nobly than another. The only answer I can give, therefore, is that most of us choose not to heed the call of grace and to reject its assistance. Christ’s assertion ‘Many are called, but few are chosen’ I would translate to mean ‘All of us are called by and to grace, but few of us choose to listen to the call’.
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The question, then, becomes: Why is it that so few of us choose to heed the call of grace? Why do most of us actually resist grace? We spoke earlier of grace providing us with a certain unconscious resistance to illness. How is it, then, that we seem to possess an almost equal resistance to health? The answer to this question has, in fact, already been given. It is our laziness, the original sin of entropy with which we have all been cursed. Just as grace is the ultimate source of
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And so it is with spiritual growth as well as in professional life. For the call to grace is a promotion, a call to a position of higher responsibility and power. To be aware of grace, to personally experience its constant presence, to know one’s nearness to God, is to know and continually experience an inner tranquillity and peace that few possess. On the other hand, this knowledge and awareness brings with it an enormous responsibility. For to experience one’s closeness to God is also to experience the obligation to be God, to be the agent of His power arid love. The call to grace is a call to a life of effortful caring, to a life of service and whatever
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Resistance to Grace
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So with the peace of grace come agonising responsi¬ bilities, duties, obligations. It is not remarkable that so many well-qualified sergeants have no desire to assume the mande of an officer. And it is no wonder that patients in psychotherapy have little taste for the power that accompanies genuine mental health. A young woman who had been in therapy with me for a year for a pervasive depression, and who had come to learn a good deal about the psychopathology of her relatives, was exultant one day about a family situation that she had handled with wisdom, equanimity and facility. ‘I really felt good about it,’ she said. ‘I wish I could feel that way more often.’ I told her that she
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Resistance to Grace
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If the, realisation of one’s power and freedom is experi¬ enced as a call to grace, as it often is, then the response will also be, ‘O Lord, I fear I am not worthy of your trust in me’. This fearfulness is, of course, itself an integral part of one’s diligence and love, and therefore useful in the selfgovernance that prevents the abuse of power. For this reason it is not to be cast aside; but it should not be so monumental as to prevent a person from heeding the call to grace and assuming the power of which he or she is capable. Some who have been called to grace may wresde for years with their fearfulness before they are able to transcend it so as to accept their own godliness. When this fearfulness and sense of unworthiness is so great as to consistently prevent the assumption of power, it is a neurotic problem, and dealing with it may be a central issue or even the central issue in one’s psychotherapy.
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But for most people the fear that they might abuse the power is not the central issue in their resistance to grace. It is not the ‘Do what you want’ part of Saint Augustine’s maxim that causes them indigestion but the ‘Be diligent’ part. Most of us are like children or young adolescents; we believe that the freedom and power of adulthood is our due, but we have little taste for adult responsibility and self-discipline. Much as we feel oppressed by our parents - or by society or fate - we actually seem to need to have powers above us to blame for our condition. To rise to a position of such power that we have no one to blame except ourselves is a fearful state of affairs. As has already been mentioned, were it not for God’s presence with us in that exalted position, we would be
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We have spoken in various ways about how difficult it is to grow up. A very few march unambivalendy and un¬ hesitatingly intti adulthood, ever eager for new and greater responsibilities. Most drag their feet and in fact never become more than partial adults, always shrinking from the demands of total adulthood. So it is with spiritual growth, which is inseparable from the process of psychological maturation. For the call to grace in its ultimate form is a summons to be one with God, to assume peership with God. Hence it is a call to total adulthood. We are accustomed to imagining'the experience of conversion or sudden call to grace as an ‘Oh, joy!’ phenomenon. In my experience, more often than not it is, at least partially, an ‘Oh, shit’ phenomenon. At the moment we finally listen to the call we may say, ‘Oh, thank you, Lord’; or we may say, ‘O Lord, I am not worthy’; or we may say, ‘O Lord, do I have to?’
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So the fact that ‘many are called, but few are chosen’ is easily explainable in view of the difficulties inherent in responding to the call to grace. The question we are left with, then, is not why people fail to accept psychotherapy, or fail to benefit from it even in the best hands, or why humans routinely resist grace; the force of entropy makes it only natural that they should do so. Rather, the question is the opposite: How is it that a few do heed the call that is so difficult? What distinguishes the few from the many? I am unable to answer this question. These people may come from wealthy, cultured backgrounds or from impoverished, superstitious ones. They may have experienced basically loving parenting, but they are as likely to have experienced profound deprivation of parental affection or genuine concern. They may enter psychotherapy because of minor
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Resistance to Grace
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difficulties of adjustment or with overwhelming mental < illness. They may be old or young. They may heed die call to grace suddenly and with apparent ease. Or they may fight and curse against it, only gradually and painfully giving way to it, inch by inch. Consequendy, with experience over the years, I have actually become less rather than more selective in determining with whom I will attempt therapy. I apologise to those I have excluded from therapy as a result of my ignorance. For I have learned that in the earlier stages of the psychotherapeutic process I have absolutely no ability to predict which of my patients will fail to respond to therapy, which will respond with significant but still partial growth, and which will, miraculously, grow all the way to the state of grace. Christ himself spoke of the unpredictability of grace when he said to Nicodemus: ‘Just as you can hear the wind but can’t tell where it comes from or where it will go next, so it is with the Spirit. We do not know on whom He will next bestow His life from heaven.’* Much as we have been able to say about the phenomenon of grace, in the end we are left having to acknowledge its mysterious nature.
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The Welcoming of Grace
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And we are left again facing paradox. Throughout this book I have been writing of spiritual growth as if it were an orderly, predictable process. It has been implied that spiritual growth may be learned as one might learn a field of knowledge through a Ph.D. programme; if you pay your tuition and work hard enough, of course you will succeed and get your degree. I have interpreted Christ’s saying ‘Many are called but few are chosen’ to mean that very few choose to heed the call of grace because of the difficulties involved. By this interpretation I have indicated that whether or not we become blessed by grace is a matter of our choice. Essentially, I have been saying that grace is earned. And I know this to be true.
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At the same time, however, I know that that’s not the way it is at all. We do not come to grace; grace comes to us. Try as we might to obtain grace, it may yet elude us. We may seek it not, yet it will find us. Consciously we may avidly desire the spiritual life but then discover all manner of stumbling blocks in our way. Or we may have seemingly little taste for the spiritual life and yet find ourselves vigorously called to it in spite of ourselves. While on one level we do choose whether or not to heed the call of grace, on another it seems clear that God is the one who does the choosing. The common experience of those who have achieved a state of grace, on whom ‘this new life from heaven’ has been bestowed, is one of amazement at their condition. They do not feel that they have earned it. While they may have a realistic awareness of the particular
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The Welcoming of Grace
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goodness of their nature, they do not ascribe their nature to their own will; rather, they distinctly feel that the goodness of their nature has been created by hands wiser and more skilled than their own. Those who are the closest to grace are the most aware of the mysterious character of the gift they have been given.
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How do we resolve this paradox? We don’t. Perhaps the best that we can say is that while we cannot will ourselves to grace, we can by will open ourselves to its miraculous coming. We can prepare ourselves to be fertile ground, a welcoming place. If we can make ourselves into totally disciplined, wholly loving individuals, then, even though we may be ignorant of theology and give no thought to God, we will have prepared ourselves well for the coming of grace. Conversely, the study of theology is a relatively poor method of preparation and, by itself, completely useless. Nonethe¬ less, I have written this section because I do believe that the awareness of the existence of grace can be of considerable assistance to those who have chosen to travel the difficult path of spiritual growth. For this awareness will facilitate their journey in at least three ways: it will help them to take advantage of grace along the way; it will give them a surer sense of direction; and it will provide encouragement.
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The paradox that we both choose grace and are chosen by grace is the essence of the phenomenon of serendipity. Serendipity was defined as ‘the gift of finding valuable or agreeable things not sought for’. Buddha found enlighten¬ ment only when he stopped seeking for it - when he let it come to him. On the other hand, who can doubt that enlightenment came to him precisely because he had devoted at least sixteen years of his life to seeking it, sixteen years in preparation? He had to both seek for it and not seek for it. The Furies were transformed into the Bearers of Grace also precisely because Orestes both worked to gain the favour of the gods and at the same did not expect the gods to make his way easy for him. It was through this same paradoxical mixture of seeking and not
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seeking that he obtained the gift of serendipity and the blessings of grace.
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The Welcoming of Grace
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So it is with grace. We have already seen that dreams are but one form or way in which the gifts of grace are given to us. The same paradoxical approach should be employed toward all the other forms: sudden insights, premonitions and a whole host of synchronistic, serendipitous events. And to all love. Everyone wants to be loved. But first we must make ourselves lovable. We must prepare ourselves to be loved. We do this by becoming ourselves loving, disciplined human beings. If we seek to be loved - if we expect to be loved - this cannot be accomplished; we will be dependent and grasping, not genuinely loving. But when we nurture ourselves and others without a primary concern of finding reward, then we will have become lovable, and the reward of being loved, which we have not sought, will find us. So it is with human love and so it is with God’s love.
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A major purpose of this section on grace has been to assist those on the journey of spiritual growth to learn the capacity of serendipity. And let us redefine serendipity not as a gift itself but as a learned capacity to recognise and utilise the gifts of grace which are given to us from beyond the realm of our conscious will. With this capacity, we will find that our journey of spiritual growth is guided by the invisible hand and unimaginable wisdom of God with infinitely greater accuracy than that of which our unaided conscious will is capable. So guided, the journey becomes ever faster.
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every inch of the way and have it demonstrated to them that each step will be safe and worth their while. This cannot be done. For the journey of spiritual growth requires courage and initiative and independence of thought and action. While the words of the prophets and the assistance of grace are available, the journey must still be travelled alone. No teacher can carry you there. There are no preset formulas. Rituals are only learning aids, they are not the learning. Eating organic food, saying five Hail Marys before break¬ fast, praying facing east or west, or going to church on Sunday will not take you to your destination. No words can be said, no teaching can be taught that will relieve spiritual travellers from the necessity of picking their own ways, working out with effort and anxiety their own paths through the unique circumstances of their own lives toward the identification of their individual selves with God.
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The Welcoming of Grace
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Yet it is that same science that has in certain ways assisted me to perceive the reality of the phenomenon of grace. I have attempted to transmit that perception. For once we perceive the reality of grace, our understanding of ourselves as meaningless and insignificant is shattered. The fact that there exists beyond ourselves and our conscious will a powerful force that nurtures our growth and evolution is enough to turn our notions of self-insignificance topsy¬ turvy. For the existence of this force (once we perceive it) indicates with incontrovertible certainty that our human spiritual growth is of the utmost importance to something greater than ourselves. This something we call God. The existence of grace is prima facie evidence not only of the reality of God but also of the reality that God’s will is devoted to the growth of the individual human spirit. What once seemed to be a fairy tale turns out to be the reality. We live our lives in the eye of God, and not at the periphery but at the centre of His vision, His concern. It is probable that the universe as we know it is but a single stepping-stone toward the entrance to the Kingdom of God. But we are hardly lost in the universe. To the contrary, the reality of grace indicates humanity to be at the centre of the universe. This time and space exists for us to travel through. When my patients lose sight of their significance and are disheartened by the effort of the work we are doing, I sometimes tell them that the human race is in the midst of making an evolution¬ ary leap. ‘Whether or not we succeed in that leap,’ I say to them, ‘is your personal responsibility.’ And mine. The universe, this stepping-stone, has been laid down to prepare a way for us. But we ourselves must step across it, one by one. Through grace we are helped not to stumble and through grace we know that we are being welcomed. What more can we ask?
