What is ‘grace’?

About Grace by Barbara Helvey Hughes
 
I think about words all the time.  Certain words attract me, and I study them, so maybe one day I can understand their deeper meaning – profound, like bone deep.  
 
The word ‘grace’ came to our contemporary world via Middle English (1125-1175) and derives from the Latin word grātia meaning favor or kindness and IT derives from the Latin grātus which means ‘pleasing’, ‘agreeable’ or ‘grateful’. 
 
‘Grace’ has held many connotations, and incarnations, for me.  My initial understanding of the word meant a kind of beauty found in motion (movement) or form or a pleasing quality like the grace of the swallow’s sweep in flight or the cascade of a weeping willow’s limbs, dripping downward.  I remember a willow by a small creek at my Granddad’s farm in a pasture where the cows grazed, and I loved hiding beneath it’s bushy leaf-laden limbs during hide-n-seek.  I felt concealed inside a secret wonderland.  I believed that willow to be ‘graceful’.  It was.  And I, by simply sheltering beneath it, was graceful by extension.  But, what of ‘grace’ without the ‘ful’?
 
As I grew older so did my word understandings and much of it, because of my Catholic schooling.  ‘Grace’ came to mean a kind of God-bestowed blessing or gift: a gift with ‘miracle’ qualities.  
 
Even though I later learned, in some theological circles, grace is always available ~ it had then, and sometimes now, a kind of ephemeral quality to it, at once magical and Divine.  If it’s always available, why do so many of us lack it?
 
Much later, in college, in fact, when I studied religions of the world, I came to see yet another facet of ‘grace’: always available, but seldom recognizable by humans and, therefore, seldom accepted and used. 
Grace, The Elusive. 
 
Through the long decades of my sobriety I searched for, and sometimes found, ‘grace’.  I prayed “God give me the grace….”  And believed I’d received the Gift, given.  Then, I’d lose it.  I found the more intensely I searched, the less aware of it I became.  The times I begged God for it, grace remained withheld; or so it seemed.  I was doing something wrong.  It became my unsolvable puzzle.  I figured I’d just have to learn to live without it.
 
I was in the middle of writing my first book when a thought wriggled in: what if ‘grace’ IS available all the time and what if we simply have to accept it in order to possess it?  What if we don’t need to pray, plead with God, cajole, make impossible promises?  What if, when we need a bit of grace, we just recognize the need AND the availability and go ahead and take it?!  We accept the Gift of Grace and it enables us to be softer, kinder, more thoughtful, more compassionate, less quarrelsome, less toxic, more Loving: MORE DIVINE, LESS HUMAN.  Suddenly, we possess the ability, the GRACE, to move into and through demanding times, difficult or painful experiences.
WE RISE.
 
When I’m at my best, which isn’t all that often, I do exactly that.  Other times, I suffer until I remember to recognize the bountiful Grace inside my Spirit (energy), I acknowledge that Grace and I ACCEPT it.  Then, I go about the business of allowing it to work through me and my ego.  Things always improve.  That’s what happens when “I release my ego, the part of me that wounds”.  I wrote that simple prayer way back in the late 1980’s and it, to this day, serves me well.  I hope it will serve you well, too.