I’m rather surprised at your answer. Why do you find it to be that way?
Look at the woman. She’s a Mom. That is her son. He is all clean and paid for smiling and happy.
How difficult is it to love that baby?
But I may be wrong. Why do you feel that it is easier to love, care for and reach out to that man than for the woman to love her son? at least in that image.
is it from necessity?
I am not a parent (my wife and I cannot have kids) and am not familiar with that experience (call it fear of the unknown) whereas I am more than familiar with your image and so don’t fear that expression.
Doing what comes naturally could be another definition for grace …or being graceful anyway. I love to dance and I’m a great dancer. It comes naturally to me so at times my dancing might seem to be quite graceful.
But there is graceful in action and there is also grace-filled in action. Is there a difference?
Grace can work as a type of courage under fire especially when one might lose their own life.
I like to think of graceful and grace as “almost” identical and so I may not be a graceful dancer but if I am an enthusiastic dancer then my enthusiasm is graceful (not the dancing itself).
I don’t see the two as anywhere near identical. Graceful implies that something can be done with ease and fluidity; grace implies unmerited reception of some gift, which is given without expectation of its return as in There but by the grace of God go I.
As an agnostic, I see my achievements in part from my own genes and DNA, gifts from my ancestors - and also as a result of my very own struggles, motivations and doings (for lack of a better word at the moment.
That’s not to say that all of that stardust that descended from wherever was not full of possibility - obviously it was.
It took two years from the time that God’s grace entered the captain of that slave ship and had his spiritual epiphany - you know, the one who wrote Amazing Grace - to eventually stop his slave trading.
I suppose that finances pawn grace. But I know that human consciousness does not always work in leaps and bounds. I suppose that it is also possible that we do not see the gift which has been given so freely…both to ourselves and others.
Who said "everything?
Anyway, phyllo, it hasn’t actually been established that grace necessarily comes from God (speaking as an agnostic). It might be nothing more than being in the right place at the right time and a highly conscious realization and awareness flows into our “entire” beings as a result of some sense of qualia pervading our higher spirits. Like any epiphany, it might appear to come out of the blue, but I do not intuit that this is the way that epiphanys or transformations come to us. They have been seething and working underground for quite awhile.
If i were ever to “see” a God again, it would be a highly impersonal one so grace for me would be as i described above. More like an interface between mind/emotions being and the workings of the universe.
There are more things in heaven (deep space lol) and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
Hamlet (1.5.167-8), Hamlet to Horatio
And if there is a God and this God sends grace, again, meaning free, for me, it is presupposed that the person receiving the grace also has the freedom to reject it. How can one receive grace and be a puppet at the same time.
Doesn’t one have to see the value of something in order to accept it?
When I give a gift, especially if I do not know if the person will like it, I always keep the receipt and I tell them that naturally they can return that gift if they want to. It was freely given and it can be freely taken back for something else. If I feel that way, why would a God not feel that way?
Well, if there IS a God, that would depend on the individual but I daresay it might also depend on the omniscience (if there be such a quality) of that God and how pragmatic and non-wasteful that God is.
Why waste grace on someone who sees no value in it.Is grace simply for the use of the person him/her -self or for the whole of humanity or at least a small area of it?