grace

BUILDING FAITH IN GRACE

Are prayers heard? Is there a particular place or way or time to pray? Is there someone really listening to our prayers? These questions definately probe our minds at sometime or the other.Here I am sharing lessons I have learnt when I lifted my hands and looked upwards in search of someone, man, woman or a power of love to help me at sinking times.

I for sure am not a saint. God man me human and I erred to make come true the saying : 'to err is human'. I have come to though realise that the level of spiritual maturity is not in how pure we are but in how much we know of our impurity. Our prayers may or may not be answered but they certainly open up the passage of Grace within us. As Leo Tolstoy says: 'The kingdom of  God is within you'.

Just as the first step towards knowledge is the acceptance of ignorance, the first wrung on the spirityal ladder and its culminating terrace of an awareness of God, is the sense of sin. In other words, its not faulty to do wrong but certainly to do wrong and not admit it. A born saint has perhaps less of the joy of God, as a sinner turned saint. Like to buy a latest model expensive mobile gives joy to some but if lost and found again, tickles their every pore. It is strange that rediscovery strikes a deeper chord than discovery. If the rediscovery of physical objects tickles us so much what would the rediscovery of relations be like. What a sign of a joyful relief would it be to hear an , 'I'm o.k.' from someone dear you thought you had lost maybe in an illness or an accident of in one of the everyday happenings of today - a terrorist attack. If such fleshy rediscoveries could create laughter, what a joy would the heavens experience with a rogue turned good. To quote the Bible ; In the same way, I tell you, there is a rejoicing in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents'. Which one of us can today say we are free from sin? In these trying days we are as a people relying more on the grace of our human strength and the decision of our world leaders forgetting that we are blocking the path of a Divine Grace. 'O momentary grace of mortal men, which we more hunt for than the grace of God' -Shakespeare.

The time has come when the world has to empty its hands of revenge and ask for forgiveness of hurt and pain. We are likely to put God on the side path as we move on to correct evils done. Our killers turned the grace of God to their own selfish desires - a supremacy of themselves, their God and their people. The world is now in a legal battle over the spillers of blood. But legality has its dangers. You can know the law by heart without knowing the heart of it.

A sad state humanity has reached building walls of race, colour and religion again blocking grace!

The remedy to save mankind from another war is a thin rope walk of forgiveness. Until then, the wounds of hurt and pain will not heal. Here to allow grace to flow would mean to work on people with love, who do not themselves work with it.

Justice we certainly need today but we need to go to fetch it with a bag of maturity and not with a strainer of fanatism which will strain out ants but failingly swallow a horse. We need to stop focusing on trivialities of blame and direct our gaze to matters of weight.

Imagine if our resting God (who rests in each one of us) were to wake up with all the noise of the bullet echoes and screams of pain, what would he care for? Religious worship or world hunger?, Extra marital affairs or child infanticide?, Pornography or mercy?,the style of worship or the sufferings of violence?

Man's religious affiliations today have reached a competitive level appearing to be an olympics of spiritual calisthenics. Focusing on artificial limbs of rights and wrongs man has lost sight of his spirit. His fanatism has robbed him his freedom to think and has made use of him likke a toy with real guns in its hands. What perhaps may have begun as an honest spiritual game of love to realize God, has with time lost its track in the perversity of the ego.

The world today needs a religion of humanity and not the conscience of different religions. It's high time the show ends with the curtains falling on all religions and rising again to a spiritual understanding.

The sociologists too must search for a differetn defination of this man. His 'social animalness' has transformed him into a brute. He desparately needs to be reminded of himself as a descendant of heaven. Broken physically and emotionally by bullets, he needs a mending of understanding. His splintered self needs to be made whole with a glue of grace. Self-love so fas has pulled man lower than the gravitation force can. The world today is brimming with people starved of grace. The blame -game has to cease and a solution of the love treasure hidden deep in the forests of our minds has to be dug out.

The present senario is likely to plant permission in our minds making us accept a capsule summary of living a day at a time with no certainties of tomorrow. This is a sight I dread to see. Perhaps there are now only a few like me who cherish a vision of a beautiful world blossoming with love 

but it would certainly be an error to underestimate the power of such minority thinking!!!!!