I've been listening to a meditation series by Oprah and Deepak Chopra called "Manifesting Grace through Gratitude." You can be as skeptical as you want about Oprah's genuineness, given her enormous money making prowess, and you can be as cynical as you want about Deepak. And sometimes I'd agree. But I'm enjoying this series.
I still occasionally have grad-school-brain, though, and it bugs me a little that they never really define their terms (or at least, not so far, in the ones I've heard). What exactly do they mean by grace? How do you manifest grace? Why is gratitude the key? They seem to hold these truths to be self-evident, but they're not all that obvious to me.
Since I've spent well over a dozen hours in the car over the past couple of days, I've had plenty of time to think about this. Grace is a word that gets thrown around quite a bit, often without an explanation. It has a non-spiritual connotation ("gracious living") that has something to do with ease, elegance, generosity, and a subtext of financial well-being. If you're living paycheck to paycheck, it's difficult to imagine living graciously.
Just last month, dance critic Sarah Kaufman published a book called The Art of Grace: on Moving Well Through Life. I saw it in a bookstore last night, which added another element to the meaning of grace-- physical grace, the ability to move fluidly and with beauty. I haven't read the book, but on the dust jacket, grace is defined as being "at ease with life."
In her blog post yesterday, Julie talked about gracious living that stems from a sense of abundance, generosity, and kindness. When I googled around a bit, I found a poet named C Joybell C who defines grace as "the ability to give as well as to receive and be thankful," one of those pithy definitions that becomes more profound the more you think about it.
In my evangelical youth, the word "grace" had a very specific theological definition that involved Christians receiving salvation and acceptance from God without having earned it, without being able to deserve it. Google further defines Christian grace as "the unmerited favor of God." God freely lavishes love, forgiveness, and eternal life on his beloved children.
What all these definitions have in common is what they are not: stingy, cramped, mean, miserly, selfish, parsimonious.
I'm staying in a hotel with the kid tonight before we do a college visit tomorrow. We're about to do a late-night food run, so I'm publishing this as is, even though it's not done. I'll finish it up tomorrow, which will also be the LAST DAY of national blogging month.
The Oprah and Deepak series was originally presented last summer in a free 21-day series of guided meditations, but once the series ended, you had to pay for them. I only made it through a couple of them while it was free, but they were intriguing enough that when I got a coupon for 30% off, I got the series. I suspect if you sign up for their emails, you will get coupons, too. Unmerited, freely given. (kidding)
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