httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NStEOW4NZL4

Dr Stephanie Dowrick writes, ‘It was a reviving experience to prepare this short talk on grace – especially at the end of the year when I am feeling the weight of a busy year-long schedule and am looking forward perhaps more even than usual to the summer break. I wanted to affirm grace here, and affirm our confidence to open to receive its gifts. I also speak about what allows us to become instruments of grace, even when we don’t know it. (Leaving our comfort zone to be particularly kind or thoughtful or appreciative, for example, an experience that may make very little difference to us and a great deal of difference to someone else.) Grace is the sacred in its most dynamic form. Moving through us, and moving us from one state of mind to another. The miracle of grace is that it’s there for all: way beyond “deserving” or “not deserving”. But don’t we often discover it only when our usual props can no longer hold us up? I was particularly inspired this time by Leonard Cohen‘s magnificent ‘Anthem’:

Ring the bells that still can ring

Forget your perfect offering

There is a crack, a crack in everything

That’s how the light gets in…

Oh yes! That is indeed how the light gets in. ‘Open to grace. Be filled with grace.’