Dearest Friends,
The next Book Club meeting is tomorrow Friday, July 22nd : 8pm Paris time, 2 pm New York time. Kathryn will be hosting.
This week, our quote is from the answer to a question about grace that was asked at the March 2022 retreat at Mercy Center:
"Grace could be defined as the gravitational pull that infinite being exerts on itself when it has temporarily overlooked itself and seems as a result to have become a temporary finite self…the pull that infinite being exerts on the individual feels from the individual’s point of view as the effort that it makes towards God’s being, towards enlightenment. That’s how it appears from the perspective of the individual. That’s how it appears from King Lear’s point of view. King Lear feels “I make the effort to return to John Smith.” But there is no person called King Lear. There is no question of King Lear making an effort, because King Lear does not exist as such, either to make an effort or not to make an effort. It’s all John Smith. He conceals himself in the form of King Lear, suffers as a result, and the gravitational pull that he exerts on himself, is the return to his true nature of happiness, so what appears to be effort from the point of view of King Lear, is grace from the point of view of John Smith…In other words, grace is operating on us all the time. Every desire that a scientist has to understand, every desire that an artist has for beauty, every desire that a person has for love, or happiness, is in fact the gravitational pull of their true nature, pulling them towards itself. That is the pull of grace that is exerted on the separate self all the time but which the separate self feels as its effort that it makes towards enlightenment…Even the times when you were making an effort that was the pull of grace, and then at a certain stage you gave up that effort and the gravitational pull of your true nature continued to exert itself on you, but it felt effortless from your point of view, so both when you were making an effort, and when you felt that you weren’t making an effort and that you were just being reeled in, both of them are grace."