Essentially, grace is a gift from or a ‘visitation’ from,  a higher  dimensional world. Graced people are temporarily endowed with particular spiritual qualities that only exist at a higher order of being. And of course, so long as these are with us , our darkness or our heaviness goes. Put simply, when freedom,  love, power, vision,  joy, soul force, beauty  or whatever particular aspect of grace touches us, it is natural that  we experience a fullness of being. One could say we are primarily in pain, feel heavy, depressed, uninspired or whatever, as a result of an absence of this spiritual presence in our lives. In other words, much of our suffering is because we do not live more of the time in these graced worlds.

Another name for grace is spiritual help. Just as we can get ‘a little  help from our friends’ in this reality,  so we can also receive  a little help from our ‘friends’ in the higher spiritual realities!  This kind of assistance can take many different forms, depending upon what we need at any time, as well as our level of development (how connected we are to these worlds), and thus  how available we are for grace.  Sometimes, we never experience it because we are never available for it. A life lived predominantly at materialistic , narcissistic, self-centred levels, and where, deep down, we experience ourselves as being woefully deficient , tends to allow little space  for it to enter.

Grace, however,  need not always take the form of sudden help. It can also manifest as an ongoing connection to what I’ll call the higher planes of creativity. When Wordsworth told us that ‘There was a time when meadow, grove and stream, The Earth and every common sight, To me did seem Apparelled  in celestial light,’ he was talking about  a graced state of awareness, that I believe he lived in for a lot of his life, or certainly when he was engaged in his writing. Thus, it may be that at times, we actually operate out of such a state but don’t  necessarily recognise it as grace. At one level, it is about how open our hearts are.  Meister Eckhart told us that ‘God is bound to act, to pour himself into thee as soon as he shall find thee ready.’ Receiving grace,  then, at one level, is about how aligned we are to those domains of being from whence it comes,  and also how much we truly yearn for the sacred in our lives. Most importantly, it can  also be transmitted to us  through  the medium of a genuinally awakened spiritual Master who themselves is able to live out of these higher dimensions of being .

One of the problems many of us have about grace is that we can often feel that we have ‘done something badly wrong’ or have ‘offended God’ if, having accessed this beautiful state, we then begin to observe it start to fade (which it very notably does, say, if we are going through a midlife crisis or a crisis of the Dark Night of the Soul.)

However, to say that this is ‘bad’ or ‘shouldn’t be’, is based on a misunderstanding of the whole spiritual process, for who said that particular states of consciousness should necessarily last! Didn’t the Buddha tell us that the only constant thing about life is that it is always changing and that we shouldn’t try to hang on to our past all the time. Thomas a Kempis’  words hold a key. He told us that ‘Grace is given to us to teach us and  is removed to train us.’ And that  is a profound observation.  Put simply, when we begin on a spiritual path, we  come to realise that life becomes much more mysterious and that  things  always happen for a reason (even if our ‘little minds’ cannot understand them.)  For example, I believe that there are seasons in our lives when we need help, and  seasons when  it is preferable that help be removed so we can struggle on our own. Thus, if grace is a presence that at times assists us along our evolutionary path - gives us a kind of ‘sneak preview’ into a reality that we may be moving towards but  have not yet learned to embody - sometimes a withdrawal of assistance can have the effect of  helping  us make the effort on our own to draw closer to such embodiment. Our test is what we do with this gift.

Thus I don’t believe that we necessarily ‘fall from grace’ anymore than we are born  ‘fallen’, fixated in ‘Original sin’ (one of the pathologies of conventional Christianity.)  We simply move to a different state. I remember a particular time in my own journey where I  was experiencing a lot of spiritual help, making things easier for me , helping me see the world from a wiser and more loving  perspective.  And then, quite suddenly that soul light extinguished itself and no matter how much I prayed and lamented, it  simply wouldn’t return. As I viewed myself objectively, however, I realised  the necessity for this ; I saw how  the light of grace had made it possible for a large chunk of what Carl Jung called our ‘Shadow side’ to emerge. The gift I was receiving then, was my becoming   that much more aware of parts of myself that hitherto I had been ‘in the dark’ about, that is, my many faults and limitations. And this was awakening me to the many areas of my life which needing working at and purifying. And this could not happen if I was only experiencing light and peace. Thus,  I realised that my suffering was  important and that the pain I was experiencing was that of the ‘dross’ inside  me  both being exposed and being burned away, to the end that I might become a little more whole as a human being. And  what could be more ‘grace-full’ than that!  I suggest, then, that one of our challenges is to pray for and meditate on grace, but not be attached to what particular kind of form or forms  it may want  to show up in at any time.