Practical Grace: Guiding You into Deep and Sacred Love!

We have been exploring the essence of Grace over this past year as we choose the path we are meant to be on to know happiness and peace (re-read December 2008 below and 2009 reflections). It has been an extraordinary year thus far for me in choosing more deeply my True Path and my True Self. Although we can choose our True Self in a moment, it is the choosing of our true heart over and over and over and over again, with every deepening and quickening of our life’s expression that reminds us of the practicality of Divine Love within us. I invite you to slowly and mindfully read this in first person as though it is your experience in this moment, written just for you!

“Today, All that is Sacred and Good and Divine tenderly invites me, calls me into and out from my pain and into the heart of Divine, Sacred, Holy Love. I realize I have been conditioned to expect love to require and demand my energy and that my heart should somehow attend to myself, others and life in ways that cause exhaustion and a complexity of guilt from which I can rarely find freedom. Today, I gently open myself to a new experience. A space in myself is opening up, for just this moment, creating a freedom to surrender more deeply within the Sacred, Holy Love of All; Love Unfathomable.

With all Presence, I breathe and surrender. Even if I’ve felt Divine Love before, today the opening of space seems different somehow. I don’t know how, I just know it’s beyond what I have known before.

I carefully open the door to Divine Love today. I am surprised and delighted, but a little wary because I am not manipulated, coerced, overwhelmed into, nor tricked into entering this realm of Sacred Love and it feels a bit foreign. With new courage, I decide to ‘enter’ this Deep And Whole Love today.

As I tentatively step into this Divine, I am tenderly and compassionately called into becoming my true nature and personal essence. I am gently and wisely and humourously led into the foundations of myself that sustain this Oneness with Sacred Love. The breadth of possibility here is endless and, almost without hesitation, Sacred Love pulls me into a Divine Embrace, showing me the extraordinary purpose of my created incarnation.

I choose today deep openness and courage so to just taste this extraordinary realm of Divine Love. I look around and it truly extends and expands beyond what I can see and feel and touch and know. That in itself fills me with an awe and wonder, for my very existence seems to have a divine purpose that is joy-full.

What am I to do here? Who am I to be, I ask? Surprisingly, these questions take on a different quality than those psychological questions I ask of my life and experience. In this realm of Sacred Love, these questions begin to illume an existential narrative in my heart about my own humanness. It opens me into the awe of my own extraordinary, unique creation about why I am here.

If I choose now to completely embrace this extraordinary, deep and compassionate Divine Love that has no end, rather guidelines and boundaries for holy living, then what does my heart need to do here, want to do here, is compelled to do here in this realm of holy loving? What is so important, good and joyful about being human and being in human relationships? These are questions that spring forth within me and awaken me to a new level of my human, yet sacred narrative that has been dormant in my heart.

And then a profound and inexplicable realization dawns upon me….I am meant to be human, completely and fully incarnated, nothing more, nothing less. I am struck that no matter what stories I might have heard or not heard about Jesus, or Buddha or Lao Tzu or Mohammad and no matter what I think might be real or not real about what people have said about them, the seed good news they all were compelled to share with anyone who was open and willing to hear, was the power and profoundness of the Divine Love experienced within incarnated essence and human life.

I pause and breathe and take in what has been offered here for me. I am called to RECEIVE Divine, Sacred Love in my heart and existence, deeply and completely. I am fully and adoringly embraced.

Here, I am asked in this Free moment to accept and receive holy love. I am asked to refrain from rejecting and hiding from such deep and abiding love for this moment. I breathe again and again and sink into its depth, slowly and yet with many questions. I leave the “surfaceness” of my ego living for just a moment and sink deeper into my Truth, my core. I breathe again and notice that here in the depth I can more aptly sustain this gracious connection with this Sacred Love and feel more calm and quiet in my mind.

And just as quickly I notice my fear of this Divine Love, fear of myself and fear that it is no longer eternal, that it will run out on me; fear that I am outside of the Divine’s loving arms. My breathing becomes most shallow and I hear and see the stories, some for the first time, that I tell myself. These narratives are dark and sombre, are overwhelming and filled with hurt, grief and pain, worry, defensiveness and excuses. I encounter my anger, my hatred for myself and others. I see the ways my own stories create my own inner hell and sickness. I want to run and hide. I want to pretend none of it exists. I want a way to escape these fear-based narratives I’m holding onto for dear life. But the dear life I yearn for never comes here in this fear and then, suddenly, I come into the awareness of how deeply I feel betrayed and inadequate by my own reality..

Courageously, I break into the moment of my own fear and betrayal. I choose Divine Love and the moment I do so, it kindly rushes to surround and enfold me. This Sacred Love tenderly becomes one with me without judgement, without hesitation and my breathing calms and gentles once again. This Holy Love leads me to my Inner Peace in a way I cannot seem to rationalize; I just seemingly need to surrender and yield to its most tender and compassionate power as it leads me back into my heart’s deeper truth and the Heart of the Sacred. I stand here in amazement.

Without knowing exactly how, I know some deep part of me has experienced and has just remembered the interceding power of Grace….a gift of such profound love that it transforms me out of my repressed and hidden despair, although unconscious to me, negatively remained my life’s compass. Til now….

I giggle. I feel mischievously amazed that we are called to be human, completely incarnated. I am divinely loved, in all my humanity. What GRACE! I am invited to experience Grace, to be sensitive to the ‘God/dess moment of love daily, and then to share this deep, deep, abiding love with those we love over and over and over again. As I pause for this moment and reflect upon the extraordinary depth and expansiveness of Divine Love for me, I am awed and humbled.

I finally have discovered here and now, in a rare and perhaps even raw moment just how eternally I am loved–sacredly and graciously. The path is finally clear here in this present moment. I am to KNOW THAT I AM LOVED DEEPLY, so deeply, more deeply than I can even possibly fathom. And in this knowing, I do and do and do and do what I love. I suddenly feel the rush of wondrous joy flow through my veins. I can see the heaven of my peace!”

Blessed be!

©Shirley Lynn Martin