Ready for Grace
The quotations below are reproduced from Paul Brunton’s book, The Gift of Grace. Devoting his life to spiritual inquiry, the twentieth-century British theosophist concluded that an infinite power is the source of our existence and our constant guide. Grace and all its inherent properties – support, sustenance, goodness and light – is ceaseless and all-encompassing. It is not conferred to a ‘special’ person and denied to another. Receptivity, though, is our responsibility.
Feel even in the very heat of this world’s activity that your guardian angel is ever with you, that it is not farther away than your own innermost heart. Nurture this unshakeable faith, for it is true. Make it the basis of your conduct, try to ennoble and purify your character incessantly, and turn every failing into a stepping-stone for a further rise. The quest winds through ups and downs, so you must make despair a short-lived thing and hope an unkillable one. Success will not depend on your own personal endeavours alone, although they are indispensable; it is also a matter of grace and this you can get by unremitting prayer addressed to whatever higher power you believe in most, and by the compassion of your guide.
It is true that grace is given, but we ourselves help to make its blessing possible by the opening of self to receive it, the silencing of self to feel it, and the purifying of self to be fit for it.
Remember always that you are present within It and It is ever present within you. So the source of grace is in you too. Silence the ego, be still, and glimpse the fact that grace is the response to devotion that goes deep enough to approach the stillness, is sincere enough to put ego aside. Help is no further off than your own heart.
The grace works from your centre outward, transforming you from within, and therefore its earliest operation is unknown to your everyday mind.
Grace flows in wavelengths from the mind of an illuminated man to sensitive human receivers as if he were a transmitting station. It is by their feeling of affinity with him and faith in him that they are able to tune in to this grace.
It will not be until a late stage that you will wake up to the realization that the real giver of grace, the real helper along this path, the real master is not the incarnated master outside but the Overself inside your own heart. What the living master does for you is only to arouse your sleeping intuition and awaken your latent aspiration, to give you the initial impetus and starting guidance on the new quest, to point out the obstructions to advancement in your individual character and to help you deal with them.
Grace flows from such a man [a mystic] as light flows from the sun; he does not have to give it.