{"id":633,"date":"2020-07-29T12:21:16","date_gmt":"2020-07-29T12:21:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/hughesgallery.net\/barbarahelveyhughes\/?p=633"},"modified":"2020-08-07T18:42:22","modified_gmt":"2020-08-07T18:42:22","slug":"what-is-grace","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hughesgallery.net\/barbarahelveyhughes\/2020\/07\/29\/what-is-grace\/","title":{"rendered":"What is &#8216;grace&#8217;?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1024\" height=\"553\" src=\"https:\/\/hughesgallery.net\/barbarahelveyhughes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/07\/7-29-2020-Grace-4-1024x553.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-634\" srcset=\"https:\/\/hughesgallery.net\/barbarahelveyhughes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/07\/7-29-2020-Grace-4-1024x553.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/hughesgallery.net\/barbarahelveyhughes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/07\/7-29-2020-Grace-4-300x162.jpg 300w, https:\/\/hughesgallery.net\/barbarahelveyhughes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/07\/7-29-2020-Grace-4-768x415.jpg 768w, https:\/\/hughesgallery.net\/barbarahelveyhughes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/07\/7-29-2020-Grace-4-1536x830.jpg 1536w, https:\/\/hughesgallery.net\/barbarahelveyhughes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/07\/7-29-2020-Grace-4-500x270.jpg 500w, https:\/\/hughesgallery.net\/barbarahelveyhughes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/07\/7-29-2020-Grace-4.jpg 2048w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px\" \/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-audio\"><audio controls src=\"https:\/\/hughesgallery.net\/barbarahelveyhughes\/audio\/About%20Grace.m4a?_t=1596824937\"><\/audio><\/figure>\n\n\n<p class=\"fonts-plugin-block\" style=\"font-weight: normal;font-size: 15px;line-height: 1.4\"><br><strong><em>About Grace<\/em><\/strong> by Barbara Helvey Hughes<br>\u00a0<br>I think about words all the time.\u00a0 Certain words attract me, and I study them, so maybe one day I can understand their deeper meaning \u2013 profound, like bone deep. \u00a0<br>\u00a0<br>The word \u2018grace\u2019 came to our contemporary world via Middle English (1125-1175) and derives from the Latin word <strong><em>gr\u0101tia <\/em><\/strong>meaning favor or kindness and IT derives from the Latin <strong><em>gr\u0101tus<\/em><\/strong> which means \u2018pleasing\u2019, \u2018agreeable\u2019 or \u2018grateful\u2019.\u00a0<br>\u00a0<br>\u2018Grace\u2019 has held many connotations, and incarnations, for me.\u00a0 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\u2019s sweep in flight or the cascade of a weeping willow\u2019s limbs, dripping downward.\u00a0 I remember a willow by a small creek at my Granddad\u2019s farm in a pasture where the cows grazed, and I loved hiding beneath it\u2019s bushy leaf-laden limbs during hide-n-seek.\u00a0 I felt concealed inside a secret wonderland.\u00a0 I believed that willow to be \u2018graceful\u2019.\u00a0 It was.\u00a0 And I, by simply sheltering beneath it, was graceful by extension.\u00a0 But, what of \u2018grace\u2019 without the \u2018ful\u2019?<br>\u00a0<br>As I grew older so did my word understandings and much of it, because of my Catholic schooling.\u00a0 \u2018Grace\u2019 came to mean a kind of God-bestowed blessing or gift: a gift with \u2018miracle\u2019 qualities. \u00a0<br>\u00a0<br>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.\u00a0 If it\u2019s always available, why do so many of us lack it?<br>\u00a0<br>Much later, in college, in fact, when I studied religions of the world, I came to see yet another facet of \u2018grace\u2019: always available, but seldom recognizable by humans and, therefore, seldom accepted and used.\u00a0<br>Grace, The Elusive.\u00a0<br>\u00a0<br>Through the long decades of my sobriety I searched for, and sometimes found, \u2018grace\u2019.\u00a0 I prayed \u201cGod give me the grace\u2026.\u201d\u00a0 And believed I\u2019d received the Gift, given.\u00a0 Then, I\u2019d lose it.\u00a0 I found the more intensely I searched, the less aware of it I became.\u00a0 The times I begged God for it, grace remained withheld; or so it seemed.\u00a0 I was doing something wrong. \u00a0It became my unsolvable puzzle.\u00a0 I figured I\u2019d just have to learn to live without it.<br>\u00a0<br>I was in the middle of writing my first book when a thought wriggled in: what if \u2018grace\u2019 IS available all the time and what if we simply have to accept it in order to possess it?\u00a0 What if we don\u2019t need to pray, plead with God, cajole, make impossible promises?\u00a0 What if, when we need a bit of grace, we just recognize the need AND the availability and go ahead and take it?!\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Suddenly, we possess the ability, the GRACE, to move into and through demanding times, difficult or painful experiences.<br>WE RISE.<br>\u00a0<br>When I\u2019m at my best, which isn\u2019t all that often, I do exactly that.\u00a0 Other times, I suffer until I remember to recognize the bountiful Grace inside my Spirit (energy), I acknowledge that Grace and I ACCEPT it.\u00a0 Then, I go about the business of allowing it to work through me and my ego.\u00a0 Things always improve.\u00a0 That\u2019s what happens when \u201cI release my ego, the part of me that wounds\u201d.\u00a0 I wrote that simple prayer way back in the late 1980\u2019s and it, to this day, serves me well.\u00a0 I hope it will serve you well, too.<br>\u00a0<br>\u00a0<br>\u00a0<br>\u00a0<br>\u00a0<br>\u00a0<br>\u00a0<br>\u00a0<br>\u00a0<br>\u00a0<br>\u00a0<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Grace is full, never lean.  It&#8217;s a Gift.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":635,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-633","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-essays"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hughesgallery.net\/barbarahelveyhughes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/633","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hughesgallery.net\/barbarahelveyhughes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hughesgallery.net\/barbarahelveyhughes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hughesgallery.net\/barbarahelveyhughes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hughesgallery.net\/barbarahelveyhughes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=633"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/hughesgallery.net\/barbarahelveyhughes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/633\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":687,"href":"https:\/\/hughesgallery.net\/barbarahelveyhughes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/633\/revisions\/687"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hughesgallery.net\/barbarahelveyhughes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/635"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hughesgallery.net\/barbarahelveyhughes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=633"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hughesgallery.net\/barbarahelveyhughes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=633"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hughesgallery.net\/barbarahelveyhughes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=633"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}