You're right. You have been taught that the world is a marketplace, that goodness is a transaction, that you get what you deserve, and that what you deserve is determined by what you produce. None of this is wholly [music] false.
The marketplace exists. Effort matters. Consequences follow choices.
But beneath the marketplace runs a deeper economy that operates by entirely different rules. And the most [music] important goods of your life are sourced from there. There is an old argument 16 centuries old between two early Christian thinkers.
You do not need to share their religion to learn from their disagreement because the disagreement is not really about religion. It is about you. In the early fifth century, a monk named Pelagius taught that human beings possess full moral freedom and that if we simply tried hard enough, we could live good lives and deserve our salvation.
We were not damaged at the root. We did not need outside [music] help. Effort was sufficient.
Augustine Novippo, a bishop who had spent his early years lost inside his own appetites, [music] found this theory unrecognizable. He knew from his own experience [music] how a will could be divided against itself. He knew the strange way we want what we do not want and avoid what we love.
Effort was not enough. Augustine insisted the will itself needed a kind of help that no act of will could produce. He called this help grace.
[music] bag in the back of an old [singing] red truck. [music] Just enough cash and worn out [music] luck. Pulling out before the sun.
[music] Counting line [singing] in the rear view glass. Hoping this is [music] one I pass. Says your name like a broken prayer.
[music] Felt it crack and disappear. One more mile and I don't care. I [singing] don't care.
Long [music] way home. Long way [music] home. Long way [music] home.
[music] Keep [music] on driving till my heart is whole. [music] Past is done. I've paid the toll.
The church sided with Augustine, but Pelagius never really lost. He moved into your head. He lives there still.
You just optimized your routine, fixed your habits, joined the right program, downloaded the right app. You would finally deserve to be loved, to be at peace, to be okay. Pelagius is the patron saint of self-improvement culture.
He has rebranded successfully and is doing record numbers. But there is a second error, the opposite of Pelagius, equally common and equally fatal. If the Pelagian believes she can earn her way to grace, the entitled believes she is already owed it.
The world should arrange itself in her favor. People should treat her well because she exists. Good things should flow to her because she is who she is.
When the world fails to comply as the world always does, the entitled person responds with rage and grievance. She is owed. She has been cheated.
Someone must pay. Both errors miss the basic structure. The earner thinks grace is a wage.
The entitled thinks grace is a right. Both are trying to fit grace into the categories of exchange and ownership where it does not belong. Grace is [music] gift.
Wages are earned. Rights are claimed. Gifts are neither earned nor claimed.
They are received. This is harder than it sounds. The earner reading this paragraph will already be wondering how to deserve it.
The entitled reader will already be wondering why nobody has given them more of it. Neither has yet considered the third posture, which is the posture of the receiver. Open hands, attentive eye, willingness to be surprised, freedom from the books.
To practice grace, you will need to notice which of these errors lives in you. Most people contain both in different rooms of the same house. The earner shows up at work.
The entitled shows up at home. The earner asks what she must do to be loved. The entitled asks why she is not loved enough.
Both are asking the wrong question because love, like every form of grace, is not a payout to be triggered. It is a reality to be received. The two errors also tend to alternate inside the same person across time.
A childhood of conditional approval often produces an adult earner who learns that love is the prize for performance. But the earner exhausted by the endless performance eventually flips into entitlement. I have been good for so long.
Surely I am owed something now. The flip is not progress. It is the same error wearing a different mask.
The exhausted earner does not become a graceful receiver. She becomes resentful and the resentment poisons whatever arrives. To break this pattern requires recognizing both faces as faces of the same underlying refusal to receive.
A diagnostic. Notice how you respond when something good happens to you that you did not earn. Do you immediately begin manufacturing a story about why you must have earned it?
I worked hard for this. I was due. It was about time.
The story is the earner trying to convert the gift back into a wage because the wage feels safer than the gift. Now notice how you respond when something good happens to someone else who did not appear to earn it. Do you immediately begin manufacturing a story about why they did not deserve it?
She had connections. He got lucky. It should have been me.
That is the entitled crying out from inside you. Both responses are refusals of the basic structure of grace, which is that the good is unearned and that this is true for you and for everyone [music] else. And that is fine because the goodness is not in short supply.
Begin here. Notice this week [music] the moments when you try to earn what should be given. Notice the moments when you demand what cannot be commanded.
Both moments are teaching you something about where grace is blocked in your life. You do not need to fix anything yet. Just see.
Three, keep grace and its counterfeits. Before going further, you must learn to recognize the counterfeits. Grace because it is the most powerful word in the moral vocabulary has been forged at scale.
Mistaking the counterfeit for the original is the shest way to remain stuck. In 1937, a German pastor named Dietrich Bonhoffer published a book called the cost of disciplehip [music] written in the rising shadow of the Third Reich. The church around him was performing a kind of grace [music] that cost nothing.
A grace that absolved without confrontation, that forgave without repentance, that smoothed every conscience and demanded nothing in return. Bonhofer called this cheap grace. It was, he argued, the deadliest enemy of real grace, more dangerous than open opposition, because it wore the same clothes and used the same words while emptying them of meaning.
Cheap grace allowed [music] the Christian Germany of his time to applaud what no honest reading of its tradition could possibly allow. Bonhaofer would die in a Nazi prison [music] camp 8 years later, 2 weeks before the war ended. He had earned the right to [music] make this distinction.
You will encounter cheap grace everywhere. [music] You will meet people who weaponize forgiveness, demanding you forgive them before they have stopped harming you, before they have even acknowledged the harm. You will meet teachers who tell you to just let it go, who confuse grace with passivity, who use the language of acceptance to keep you from naming what is being done to you.
You will meet whole communities organized around a performance of forgiveness that excuses the powerful and silences the wounded. This is not [music] grace. This is grace's mask worn by something that would devour you if it could.
There is also the counterfeit of spiritual bypassing. The phrase was coined by the psychologist John Wellwood in the 1980s to name a pattern he saw in his clients. People who used spiritual concepts [music] and practices to avoid the real psychological work of facing their wounds.
They spoke of forgiveness while their bodies held unprocessed [music] rage. They spoke of peace while their lives were structured around avoidance. The vocabulary of grace [music] in their mouths was a way of not feeling what they would otherwise have to feel.
Real grace does not bypass the wound. It enters it. The cross, the central image of Christian grace is not a path around suffering but through it.
There is the counterfeit of grace as social [music] performance. In the age of public profiles and curated lives, having grace has become a virtue display, a way of seeming above the fray, of broadcasting one's moral elevation, of taking the position of the bigger person while extracting the social credit that comes with the position. Real grace is mostly invisible.
It [music] is done in private, costs the giver, and does not require an audience. When grace [music] begins to be performed for an audience, it has already left the building. There is the counterfeit of forced reconciliation.
To extend grace to someone who has harmed you does not require you to resume the relationship as if nothing had happened. Forgiveness in its real form is the release of the wish for the offender's [music] destruction. It is the choice not to carry the harm around forever.
It does not require and sometimes does not permit the restoration of trust. Anyone who tells you that real grace means returning to a destructive situation, allowing further harm or pretending the wound did not exist is selling you the counterfeit. Bonhofer was clear on this.
Cheap grace is grace without repentance, without truthtelling, without the long work of actual change. Real grace requires those things even as it transcends them. [music] You fall.
Nobody ask where you been. [singing] Say how do I go open the gates for lazy man even real [music] wicked man on top. So I leave I know right before story unfold.
[singing] If tears won't fall I let down flow. Sometimes now be the truth we know. One day I go sit [music and singing] down say I survive.
All of those dark nights I still fight them. When [music and singing] people change and the world on cold stay when nobody show tomorrow no today borrow one small mistake we turn joy to sorrow no house [singing] no egg [music] from bed you still go rise like nothing dead you feel everywhere [music] and still be lost some people smile but I get frost around you still there alone [music and singing] house full of people no me no judge your papa till you be [music] papa you know no life make No passing for ground tomorrow. [music] [singing] I say love without blade.
I say loyalty. [music] Somehow go clap only when you bleed. Somehow I go come only when them need.
So I leave I know some right before story unfold. If tears won't fall, I go let [music and singing] down flow. Sometimes my pain be the truth we know.
One day I go sit down say I survive. [singing] All of those dark nights I still fight them. When people change and [music] don't go now.
Why does this matter for someone learning to have grace? Because the counterfeits are easier. They demand less.
They look more spiritual. They produce a feeling of moral lift without the actual work. You will be tempted often to settle for them.
You will be told sometimes by people you trust that they are the real thing. They are not. The art of having grace begins with the art of telling the difference.
Most people cannot receive. Watch a friend the next time you give them a real compliment. Not flattery but accurate praise [music] for something they have done.
Watch what happens to their face. They will deflect. They will minimize.
[music] They will redirect the compliment to someone else. They will laugh nervously and change the subject. The compliment instead of being received will be battered away like a wasp.
This is not modesty. [music] It is the inability to take in what is offered. And it is everywhere because nearly every culture for slightly different reasons has trained its people not to receive.
American culture worships independence. To need is to fail. East Asian cultures worship humility.
[music] To accept praise is to be arrogant. Many religious cultures teach unworthiness. To receive freely is to forget your place.
The mechanisms differ. The result is the same. [music] A whole population of people who cannot let in what is being given [music] to them.
If you cannot receive a compliment, you cannot receive love. If you cannot receive love, you cannot receive grace because [music] grace is the largest form of love. The bottleneck of grace in most lives is not on the giving [music] end.
It is on the receiving end. The world is full [music] of gifts that the clenched hand cannot hold. The first practice then [music] is to learn to receive.
Begin with the small things. The next time someone compliments you. Do not deflect.
Do not minimize. [music] Say thank you and let the compliment land. Feel it enter your body.
Notice that it does not destroy your humility. Notice that in fact the willingness to accept the compliment is itself a deeper form of humility than the reflex to refuse it. Because the refusal is often secretly a way of insisting on controlling how you are seen.
The next time someone offers you help, accept [music] it, even if you could do it yourself. especially if you could do it yourself. There is a strange spiritual law that says the person who can only give and never receive is not actually generous.
They are using their giving as a defense against the vulnerability of being on the other side. The truly generous person can give and receive with equal ease because both are participations in the same flow. The next time someone gives you a gift, do not immediately calculate what you owe them.
Do not begin planning the equivalent gift you must produce to balance the books. Let the gift be a gift. Let the asymmetry [music] sit.
The discomfort you feel is the muscle of receiverhip cramping from disuse. It will get easier with practice. The deepest form of this practice is to learn to receive yourself.
Most people are at war with themselves. They reject parts of themselves they have decided are unacceptable. They cannot tolerate their own neediness, their own anger, their own ordinariness.
They will never feel grace in the deepest [music] sense until they can extend it inward. until they can meet themselves the way they would meet a friend who came to them in pain. The harshness you direct at yourself every day is a wall that grace cannot [music] get through.
Soften the wall and you will discover that grace was waiting on the other side the whole [music] time. There is a paradox at the center of this practice that is worth naming. To receive well, [music] you must be willing to feel the discomfort of need.
Receiving means admitting that you needed what was given. Most refusals of grace are underneath refusals to feel the need. The compliment exposes that you wanted to be seen.
The help exposes that you could not do it alone. The [music] gift exposes that you did not have enough. The forgiveness exposes that you had done wrong.
These exposures are precisely what the wall is built against. To dismantle the wall is to consent to feel the underlying need, which is to consent to be the kind of creature you actually are, incomplete, dependent, [music] in relation. Most of human striving is the attempt to escape this condition.
Grace is what becomes available when you finally stop trying. The Hindu tradition speaks of propati, the act [music] of complete surrender to divine grace. The purand Buddhist tradition [music] speaks of trust in Amida's vow.
The Christian mystics speak of galassenheight letting go. The vocabulary differs. The act is the same.
To stop holding the world at arms length, to allow what wants to enter to enter. This is the first practice and you can begin it today with the next person who offers you something you would normally refuse. Simone Vile, the French philosopher who died in 1943 at the age of 34, made attention the center of her spiritual teaching.
Absolute unmixed attention is prayer, she wrote. Most prayer in her account was distraction in a religious costume. The mind wandered, the lips moved, the body went through motions, and nothing was actually attended to.
Real prayer and by extension real receptivity to grace required a kind of attention that the modern world is increasingly unable to produce. We live inside the most sophisticated distraction machine in human history. Every screen is engineered to capture and fragment your attention.
The economic value of your distraction is enormous. Entire industries depend on your inability to remain present to one thing for more than a few seconds. The result is a generation of people whose default state is partial absence.
They are nowhere fully. They are everywhere a little. Grace cannot enter a soul that is not present.
This is one of the unyielding laws of the spiritual life. The friend who needs to be heard cannot be heard by someone scrolling. The beauty in the window cannot be seen by eyes that are halfway to the next thing.
The grace that is offered in the conversation, the meal, the moment of quiet slides past the soul that is not there to receive it. Most of the grace available in your life is going unreceived. Not because you are bad, because you are not present.
The practice of attention begins with single tasks. Do one thing at a time. When you are eating, eat.
When you are listening, listen. When you are walking, walk. Do not narrate your life on the way to performing it.
Do not photograph the sunset before you have seen the sunset. This sounds simple. You will find it extraordinarily difficult.
The reflex to fragment your attention is so deep that you will not even notice yourself doing it. The practice is to notice. While suggested specific exercises, she recommended that students working on a difficult problem, say a geometry problem they could not solve, remain with the problem patiently even when they could not advance.
The effort of attention, she wrote, was building something in them, whether or not the problem was solved. The capacity to remain in unresolved difficulty without escape is one of the great spiritual muscles. Most people will not develop it.
Most people faced with discomfort immediately reach for the phone, the food, the drink, the distraction. The muscle atrophies. The capacity for grace atrophies with it.
A second exercise, the practice of waiting. Wait in a line without looking at your phone. Sit with someone in silence.
Spend 10 minutes doing nothing, watching the room. The discomfort that arises is the muscle of attention cramping. Stay with the discomfort.
It will pass. On the other side is a quieter version of yourself that you have not met in a long time, possibly ever. A third, the practice of slowness.
Move through one task each day at half your usual speed. Make tea slowly. Walk slowly to the car.
Read three pages and stop. Speed is the enemy of attention and attention is the condition of grace. This is not a romantic nostalgia for a slower world.
The slower world had its own miseries. The point is that the conditions of the world you live in actively make grace harder and your spiritual practice must therefore include some active resistance. To attend in this culture is a small rebellion.
To be present to one person, one task, one moment is to refuse the entire economy of your distraction. It is a refusal that repeated daily will eventually rebuild the muscle that allows grace to land. [music] It might be necessary to get over it all the way through it and go on.
I would teach her to laugh [music] a lot. Laugh a lot at the at the silliest thing. and be very very serious.
I teach you to love life. I bet you that [music] We [singing] love [music] [music and singing] [music] [singing] the [music] speech. foreign [music] [music] [music] [music] to [music] [singing] [music] [music] Six.
The third practice, open-handed generosity. Once you can receive, you must learn to give. But you must learn to give in a particular way because most giving is not actually generosity.
Most giving is exchange, performance, or obligation in disguise. The French sociologist Marcel Moouse studied gift giving across many cultures and discovered that gifts, far from being simple gestures, were embedded in tight webs of obligation. To give a gift was to bind the receiver to give back.
The whole system, while called gift exchange, operated on a logic not very different from market exchange, only slower and more disguised. The philosopher Jacqu Derrida pushed Moses' insight further. A true gift, he argued, may be impossible.
The moment any gift is recognized as a gift by the giver, by the receiver, by the watching world, it enters an economy of return. The pure gift would have to be a gift that even the giver did not recognize giving and the receiver did not recognize receiving. Anything else is exchange.
There is something to this. Look honestly at your own giving. The gifts at the office holiday party, the presents to family members.
The donations to causes that will be noted on your tax return. Almost all of it is woven through with expectation, comparison, performance, the desire to be seen as a certain kind of person. None of this is wicked.
It is simply not what grace teaches us to call generosity. The generous person is not the person who gives the most. The generous person is the one whose giving is loose.
[music] Their hand opens easily. They do not track what is owed. They do not perform the giving for any audience including themselves.
They give because something in them is full and what is full overflows. This is why generosity cannot be commanded. You cannot will yourself into being generous by tightening your discipline.
The result will be duty giving which is exhausting and breeds resentment. Real generosity grows from a different route. It grows from having received.
The person who has tasted real grace even once has experienced the strangeness of being given something they did not earn. From that experience, the impulse to extend the same to others becomes natural. It is not pursued as a virtue.
It happens because the gift wants to keep moving. Begin with smaller acts that escape the accounting. Give without telling anyone.
Pay for something for someone you will never see again. Spend an hour with someone who cannot repay you with anything but their company. Take the inconvenient route to help a stranger.
These acts are spiritually important not because of their effect on the world which is small but because of their effect on you. They train you to give without tracking and the tracking is the corruption. This is also the answer to derida.
He is right that gifts are usually embedded in exchange. He is wrong that this exhausts the phenomenon. There are moments rarer than we pretend but real when a gift is given and received in something close to its pure form.
The dying parent who blesses the child who will not be repaid. The stranger who saves a life and disappears. The friend who forgives a betrayal that the betrayer cannot fully name.
These exceed the economy. They are real. They are also possible for you in small ways every day.
The grocery cler you treat like a human being when no one is watching. The colleague you do not throw under the bus when it would have been easy. The driver you let in when traffic is bad.
These are the small change of grace and you will spend it constantly if you let yourself. To have grace is to be a steady source of [music] small unttracked gifts. Nothing dramatic, nothing impressive, just the steady leak of more than is required into the lives that pass near you.
Over a lifetime, this becomes [music] who you are. People feel it before they can name it. They will say of you when you are not in the room that there is something about you that is hard to describe.
They will be describing grace. Seven, the fourth practice, forgiveness, especially of yourself. Forgiveness is the hardest of the practices, and it is the one most often counterfeited.
You should approach it carefully. Forgiveness is the release of the wish for the offender's destruction. It is the choice to stop carrying the wound around as an unpaid [music] debt.
It is the willingness to step out of the cycle of reciprocal injury in which the harm done to you generates the harm you would do back which generates the harm done to you again in a [music] loop that left to itself can consume a lifetime or a culture. Forgiveness is not what you have been told in some teaching that it is. It is not forgetting the wound.
If it was a real wound, leaves a mark and the mark is part of your truth. It is not reconciliation. You can forgive someone you will never speak to again.
It is not the restoration of trust. Trust is rebuilt [music] when it is rebuilt at all by the offender's sustained changed behavior, not by your decision to forgive. It is not the denial that something terrible happened.
The terrible thing happened. Forgiveness does not pretend otherwise. What forgiveness is in its real form is the work of releasing yourself from a prison built by the original harm.
The offender does not necessarily benefit. The offender in many cases will never know you have done this work. Forgiveness benefits you.
It frees you. It allows the rest of your life to move forward without the weight of an injury that unprocessed would have shaped every subsequent year. This is why forgiveness must never be rushed.
The cultures and communities that demand instant forgiveness from the wounded are doing violence in the name of peace. The wound must be felt. The harm must be named.
The grief must be moved through. Only then on the soul's own timeline can the release [music] begin. To skip the felt grief in pursuit of premature forgiveness is to produce the counterfeit.
The wound goes underground and does its damage from below. There is also a deeper level which is self forgiveness. This is for most people the harder one.
You have done things you regret. You have hurt people. You have failed in ways that you cannot fully repair.
The natural response is to carry these failures as a permanent verdict on your character. You become your worst moments. The shame settles in and the shame [music] paradoxically does not motivate change.
It motivates avoidance. The person who cannot forgive herself avoids the very situations in which she might do better because they remind her of what she did before. The shame [music] intended to discipline her calcifies her.
Self forgiveness is not the dismissal of what you did. [music] It is not letting yourself off the hook. It is the acknowledgment that what you did is real.
[music] That you take responsibility for it and that you nevertheless will not consign yourself permanently to the category of the unforgivable. You will integrate the failure into the larger story of who you are becoming. You will allow the failure to teach you rather than to define you.
This is grace turned [music] inward and it is the bottleneck of nearly every life that wants to grow. Try this. Name to yourself one thing you have done that you have not forgiven yourself for.
Sit with it. Do not minimize it. Do not exaggerate it either.
Ask yourself what it would mean to take responsibility for what you did and also to stop punishing yourself for being the person who did it. Notice what resistance arises. The resistance is the thing to work with.
Behind the resistance is a part of you that has been waiting for permission to stop carrying the weight. You can give that permission. You are the only one who can.
There is one more thing to say about forgiveness because it is so often misunderstood. The capacity to forgive is not infinite and it does not arrive on a schedule. Some wounds take years.
Some wounds may take a lifetime. Some wounds may not in this life be fully released. And the person who carries them is not failing.
They are doing the slow work that has been given to them in the only timing the soul allows. If you are still working on something that happened 20 years ago, you are not weak. You are honest.
The voices that tell you to be over it by now do not know what they are talking about. The soul does its own work in its own time. Your job is to keep showing up, to keep facing what you can face today, to keep extending to yourself and to others the patience that the work requires.
Forgiveness is not a single decision, but a long practice that may need to be renewed many times. Each renewal is real. Each renewal counts.
And one day, often by surprise, you will realize that something has loosened that you thought would never loosen. And you will know that the long work was not wasted. Eight.
The fifth practice, preparing for pressure. Hemingway defined courage as grace under pressure. And the phrase has stuck because it names something we all recognize.
There is a quality of bearing that some people display when the worst happens and we know watching them that we are seeing something rare. The mother who having received unimaginable news finds the steadiness to comfort the children watching her face. The patient who continues to receive visitors with warmth after the diagnosis.
the friend who in the worst hour of her life somehow makes you feel welcome in her grief. You will face pressure. Not the same pressure as everyone else, but pressure of some kind, illness, loss, betrayal, failure, the death of the people you love, the slow erosion of the life you thought you would have.
The world has not stopped delivering these blows and it will not stop for you. The question is whether when your turn comes you will meet what arrives with something that could be called grace. Here is the hard truth.
You cannot summon grace under pressure in the moment. It is not a switch you flip when needed. [music] It is a deposit built up over many small acts of preparation that becomes available when the call is made.
The person who falls apart under pressure has usually been falling apart in small ways for years. [music] In moments no one was watching. The person who stands steady has usually been standing steady in small ways for years.
In moments no one was watching. The pressure does not create the bearing. It reveals the bearing that was already there.
This is why the daily disciplines matter. Every small practice of attention is a deposit. Every small act of receiving is a deposit.
[music] Every small generosity is a deposit. Every small forgiveness is a deposit. When the great test comes, you do not produce something new.
You spend what you have. If the account is empty, you [music] will collapse. If the account has been quietly building for decades, you will find to your own surprise that something is there.
The Stoic philosophers of antiquity understood this and built their whole practice around it. Epictitus, born a slave, taught his students to rehearse hardship in advance, to imagine before it happened, the loss of those they loved, the failure of their plans, the betrayal of their trust, not morbidly, not to manufacture suffering, to soften the shock when it came. The unprepared soul is shattered by the blow.
The prepared soul has in some sense already absorbed it. Victor Frankle, the Austrian psychiatrist who survived four concentration camps, including Avitz, observed that the prisoners who preserved the deepest part of themselves were those who held on to something beyond their own survival. a wife to live for, a manuscript to finish, a meaning that the camp could not destroy.
He called it the last of the human freedoms, the choice of one's attitude in any given set of circumstances. This choice is not, as it sounds, a heroic [music] act produced fresh in the moment. It is the cumulative result of a lifetime of smaller choices by which a person has built a self that is not at the mercy of external conditions.
Begin practicing now today when something small goes wrong. The spilled coffee, the mist train, the rude exchange. Watch your reaction.
Do you collapse into a small ungenerous version of yourself? or do you remain who you are? The small frustrations [music] are the gym in which the larger steadiness is built.
You will not be ready for the death of someone you love if you cannot handle traffic. Begin where you are. [music] [music] [music] Dark clouds, heavy heart sinking slow.
World feels cold like a fading glow. One step, one breath. Keep [music] it near.
Hold on tight. [music] Through the fear. Don't give up.
Don't let go. Hold the spark. [music and singing] Let it grow through the night.
You find the dawn. Hold [singing and music] on. Hold on.
Keep moving on. [music] You will pray and feel nothing. You will sit in stillness and meet only your own restlessness.
You will [music] extend forgiveness and find no inner peace following. You will try to receive and feel only awkwardness. [singing] This is normal.
The practice is not a deal. You are not transacting with the universe. You are simply preparing the conditions under which grace becomes possible knowing that the possibility once prepared must be allowed its own timing.
through the night. [music] There will be other days when the wind comes from a direction you did not expect. You will have prepared for one form of grace and [music] received another.
You will have prayed for healing and received instead a deeper acceptance of what cannot be healed. You will have hoped for the relationship to be restored [music] and received instead the strength to live without it. Grace when it comes often does not match the order you placed.
The receiver must be willing to take what is given, not only what was wanted. [singing] There will be moments eventually when something arrives that is unmistakable. [music] You will be in a room with another person or alone in a place you did not expect or in the middle of something ordinary and you will be visited by what cannot be planned.
A peace that does not match the circumstances. [music] A love you did not earn. A clarity you were not bright enough to produce.
These moments will be rare, but they will be enough. They are the wind in the sail. They are why you did the work.
The teaching ends [music] here, but the practice does not end. The practice does not end because there is no point at which you have mastered grace. The masters when asked about their mastery will say they are beginning.
They will not be being modest. They will be telling you the truth. Grace is not a credential.
It is a condition that must be entered daily by an act that resembles the first time you ever entered it. There is a story told of a desert father, an early Christian monk who was asked by a younger monk, "Aba, I keep falling. How long must [music] I keep getting up?
" The old monk answered, "Until you die. " The teaching is not a finish line. It is a way of walking that goes all the way to the last day.
You will fall. You will get up. You will fall again.
You will get up again slowly over years. The gap between the falling and the getting up will shrink. You will become without ever quite noticing it, a different person.
Other people will notice before you do. They will say of you that there is something gentler in you now, something steadier. They will not be able to say what it is.
You will not need them to. [music] You will know. Live in this practice long enough and a strange thing will happen.
You will begin to extend to others what you have learned to receive. [music] You will become in your small way a place where grace circulates rather than a place where it stops. People will leave your presence lighter than they arrived.
You will not know that you have done this. You will be too busy being present to notice. But you will become by the slow accumulation of received and extended gifts, a node in the larger flow of grace through the world.
There is one final thing to know. The practice [music] you are beginning is older than any of us. It has been carried in different vocabularies by every generation of human beings who have wondered how to live well.
The teachers who shaped this teaching, Augustine and while Bonhoffer and Frankle, Shinran and Roomie, the desert monks and the bacti poets and the painters who tried to make the invisible visible are not strangers to you. They are part of a long human conversation about what is most important. By taking up the practice, you join the conversation.
The teaching does not belong to a single religion or tradition or place. It belongs to anyone willing to begin. You can begin where you are in the body you have in the situation you find yourself in with the people who are actually in your life.
No special equipment is required. No prior qualification is required. only a willingness to keep showing up to a practice that does not promise anything and that somehow gives everything.
[singing] This is the highest thing a human being can become. Not the most accomplished, not the most powerful, not the most admired, the most graceful in the deepest sense of the word, which means not the most polished, but the most permeable to the gift, and the most willing to pass it on. The wind blows where it will.
You cannot summon it, but you can raise the sail. You can keep raising it every morning in the small acts of attention and receipt and generosity and forgiveness that build over a lifetime into a soul that has become a sail itself. And when the wind comes, and it will come more often than you [music] expect in forms you did not predict, you will be there to be moved by it.
[music] This is how you have grace. by preparing for it, receiving it when it comes, extending it onward, and beginning again tomorrow. The teaching is simple.
The practice is the work of a lifetime. [singing] Begin today with the next small act. The wind will find you.
[singing] Message read stop my [music] train stop don't [singing] stop no more [music] [singing] left me a Cold black skin and a matchbook [music] with your name. Left me a cold black and a match [music] with your name.
