Good old Judas, he always gets stuck with the tough part. That's the way I was thinking on Thursday, when I came home from class. Driving home from Washington around noon, Route 50 traffic was pretty light, the sun was dancing in and out of the dark clouds, the wind was blowing - and there I was windows rolled up, listening to NPR pundits trash the welfare system, and thinking about being late to the church, and what was I going to say about grace. I put my blinker on and pulled off into the breakdown lane. While the word grace comes from the Christian tradition, the experience it names is common to virtually all religious and spiritual traditions.
Grace is considered by nearly all theologians to be a gift that is given.
Grace is a blessing, a blessing that is undeserved, unsolicited, and unexpected, a blessing that brings a sense of the divine order into our lives. But we know grace by its fruits, by the blessings of its works. Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. Largely influenced by St. Augustine, Western Christianity sees grace as a private matter, almost entirely to do with individual sin and redemption.