In the weeks which have passed, I have been haunted by the need to deal with the definition of grace. At odd moments, and sometimes in the middle of the night, I have found myself wrestling with the meaning of that word which I have often used casually and without much thought. This morning, I would like to share with you the result of that thinking, not because I am sure I can give a satisfactory definition to the term, but in the hope that at least for a while I can put aside the concept and focus my mind on other matters.

Grace is an old-fashioned term, difficult to define, one that I remember hearing in the churches in which I grew up. Preachers would exhort their audiences to accept God's saving grace. The context of their remarks led me to understand that grace was a thing freely given, without regard to merit or worth, but a thing which required a response in order to be appropriated. What this mysterious something was, I did not know, nor did anyone ever tell. But over time I discovered there were other meanings of the word "grace" which were less mysterious and mystifying.

Grace is an old-fashioned term, difficult to define. Grace was also my grandmother's name. I did not know my grandmother well. My mother, her daughter, died when I was an infant. Relations between my mother's family and my father's family were strained at best. Perhaps it had to do with the fact that my mother had married right out of high school to a man older than she, a widower with a young son, a man from the wrong side of the tracks with few prospects, a man my grandparents may have regarded as not quite good enough for their daughter. Perhaps it had to do with the fact that my mother was immediately pregnant and produced three children in four years. Perhaps it was only that my mother's untimely death, while still in her early twenties, was a grief my grandmother never quite overcame.

Whatever the reason, I was raised by my father's sister and brother-in-law and I have no recollection of my grandmother, Grace, until I was in junior high school. One spring morning when I was, perhaps thirteen, my Aunt and Uncle drove me to Shippensburg. They parked in front of a neat red brick house. I got out of the car and walked up the path, through the flanking pine trees, to the front door. Tentatively, I rang the bell. After a moment the door opened and there stood a tall, thin, white-haired woman with a long face and blue eyes which seemed to reflect some deep, abiding sorrow. It was a face I felt I should recognize. I said to her, "Hello. I'm your grandson--I think."

After a moment of confusion, a slow smile spread over her face and she invited us in. There I met my grandfather, shorter than his wife, with a shock of white hair and a droll smile and twinkling eyes, looking as if he possessed some profound knowledge about the world, a universal secret no words could ever communicate. Our visit was brief, and it was repeated only at infrequent intervals. I cannot say that I ever really knew Grace Watson, or John Watson. I am not certain how many children they had, what he did for a living, or any other details of their lives. When the time came to attend their funerals, it was as if neighbors down the street, whom I knew well enough that we nodded to each other in passing, had died. And their deaths left no great gap in my life, no abiding sense of loss or sorrow.

And then one winter day, years later, after I had married and our children had grown, I walked into my living room. My daughter, who was visiting for the holiday, had fallen asleep over her book. I stooped to take the book from her hand and put a shawl over her when I was suddenly aware that in repose her face had become both strangely different and hauntingly familiar. I stood there with the shawl in my hand and realized that I was looking into the face of Grace Watson--I younger Grace Watson than I had ever known, but my grandmother, Grace, nonetheless.

I put the shawl around my daughter, and walked quietly from the room. On the way, I passed a mirror and caught my own reflection. Only it wasn't my reflection. I had always thought, as I was growing up, that I closely resembled my father. But here, on this late December day, it was a different face looking out at me. It was the face of John Watson, my mother's father. I stared at that face for a long time, trying to understand why I had been suddenly visited by a man and woman I barely knew, a man and woman long dead and in their graves and why I found myself so moved by the thought of them. I felt an involuntary shiver move along my spine, and then, saying nothing to anyone, I went on about the petty tasks of the day and thought no more about it.

Except, as I found myself trying to wrestle this sermon into shape, these memories kept forcing themselves into my mind. I tried to dismiss the experience as one of those word games the mind sometimes plays on itself. But it would not go away. And then, in the middle of the night, it came clear to me that here was a graphic encounter with the reality of grace in human experience. Incarnated within every one of us are gifts which come to us not because we have sought them, or earned them, or deserved them or even understood they were there. Incarnated within us are the lives of others, human and non-human who have preceded us on this planet. We carry in our genes, in the composition of our bodies, in the very shape of our features, in the working of our minds, the nimbleness of our hands, the history of unnumbered generations of living creatures--our parents and our grandparents and their parents all the way back to that single mother who lived on the African savanna millennia ago, and back beyond her to creatures strange and wonderful and awesome, and back beyond them to a clay bed by a tideless shore eons before the continents assumed their present shape, where self-replicating molecules first crossed the bridge to life.

We are the dreams and the struggles, the successes and failures, the hopes and the disappointments, the joy and the pain of all those generations of living things. The skills with which we are blessed are gifts from ancient hands; the minds with which we seek to understand are gifts from ancient encounters with the world; the faces we wear are gifts from women and men whose names we may not even know.

If grace be defined as freely given gifts, then we are all creatures compounded of grace. And if grace is a freely given gift which demands a response, then, too we are creatures of grace, for the gifts which come to us from the past always carry with them with a challenge. We are gifted by those who preceded us, but what we do with the gifts we have inherited is not predetermined. We can use our inheritance or we can waste it; we are free to make of the gifts we are given, the gift we are a blessing or a curse. From the past we are graced with many possibilities; how we respond to this graceful reality will determine our lives and shape the heritage we pass on to an unformed future.

Grace was my grandmother's name. I barely knew her, but her life and the life of my grandfather, John, flow throw me and on into the lives of my children. We live in a state of grace, in which hidden gifts lie waiting to be discovered within us--gifts which range from the twinkle in an eye, to a physical aptitude, to a mental acuity. And in every case, the gifts come to us freely, without any relation to merit, and we are required to respond, to shape those gifts into a blessing or a curse for those who will come after us.

Grace is an old fashioned word, difficult to define. When I was a child, we used it to name the ritual prayer said before each meal. Like most rituals, the power of the prayer was not in what was said, but in the fact that it was said. At every meal my Aunt and my Uncle would bow their heads and one or the other of them would offer thanks for the gift of the food which lay before us on the table. And no one would eat a morsel until the thanks had been given, until the grace had been said.

As a child, I was puzzled by this behavior. The fact is that very little of the food on that table was ever a gift. My Aunt and my Uncle worked hard for everything they had. People of limited resources and limited abilities, they seldom knew abundance. They worked at jobs which offered little financial reward and even less social respect. For the most part, their lives were spent making do with what they had and what they could earn, and struggling to wrestle a modicum of self-respect from a world which treated them as ciphers. And yet, at every meal they stopped to offer thanks for the food which sustained them.

It would be long years before I would understand the wisdom which they could never have put into words, but which they seemed to understand at a level deeper than reason or logic. They seemed to know that though they worked long hours at difficult jobs in order to secure the basis of life for themselves and their family, there is a deeper truth about the nature of existence. Nothing we can do ever suffices to earn the gift of life. Life comes us to freely without regard to merit; and we are sustained in life by gifts we cannot possibly earn. Every moment of our lives is purchased with the death of some living thing. How does one ever earn that ultimate gift? No matter how hard we work for the resources which sustain our existence, finally and ultimately our lives depend upon gifts we cannot earn and cannot deserve, gifts which come to us as bounty from the sustaining and interconnected web of existence. My Aunt and my Uncle seemed to know, in the marrow of their bones, that the only adequate response to life is gratitude. Anything less results in demeaning and devaluing our own existence and the sacrifices upon which that existence rests. Grace is a freely given gift which evokes in us a response. Our very existence is such a gift, and even in the midst of disappointment and sorrow and pain, the only adequate response is a bone-deep gratitude.

Grace is an old-fashioned word, difficult to pin down with a clear definition. When I was a child, I remember the congregation singing, "Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me." I loved the tune. I was touched by the longing and the wistfulness I heard in it. I never identified with being a wretch, or standing in need of salvation, and so I never entered fully into the experience of the song. It is only recently that I have begun to understand a bit of what that song has to teach me.

There is a sense in which all of us always stand in need of salvation. What we need to be saved from is the arrogance, the hubris which tempts us to believe that we can lift ourselves out of the context in which our lives are rooted, that we are what we are and we have what we have because of our own efforts--that we are self-made and shaped and therefore, we owe nothing to anybody. The truth is that we, at every moment of our lives, are indebted to powers and forces and circumstances which have given shape and structure to our existence without any reference to our merit or our efforts. All our achievements and accomplishments float upon a sea of grace. At most we are responsible for what we do with the gifts which come to us unasked and unbidden. We may shape our lives by how we respond, but the fact of our existence and the possibilities of that existence are gifts we neither earn or deserve. And we need constantly to be saved from the arrogance which allows us to forget this fundamental fact of our existence.

To live in a state of grace is to live with a constant sense of the cosmic history which is moving through us, which has shaped our bodies and defined our potential and our limitations. To live in a state of grace is to live with a constant sense of gratitude for all that which, unbidden, unexamined, unasked supports and sustains our existence, to know that without that support none of our efforts would suffice to sustain our lives for one more day. To live in a state of grace is to constantly on guard against the terrible temptation to forget the web of relationships in which we live and move and have our being, always seeking salvation from that temptation. To live in a state of grace is to be determined never to allow ourselves to forget how great is the cloud of witnesses, unknown, and unnameable conspiring to make our existence possible. To live in a state of grace is to know that while our lives have meaning in and of themselves, we also are vehicles by which the living past is conveyed to the waiting future and we, too, are part of the gracious process by which emergent life is nurtured and sustained.

Grace is an old fashioned word, difficult to define, because it is not so much a logical construct as it is a mystical vision of the nature of reality. As someone has said, mysticism never has anything new to teach us. Rather, mysticism recalls us to the ancient knowledge we are ever tempted to forget--the knowledge of our rootedness in the processes of the universe, the knowledge of our indebtedness to that larger process, the knowledge of our responsibility to that larger process. That is what grace is--a recognition of the mystical truth that at its base, all of existence is one thing, and we are all of us expressions of that one thing, that we do not so much live as we are lived, that the ultimate response to the fact of our existence is wonder and awe and thanksgiving.