Friday, December 23, 2016

Paul Tillich: Grace

This is a gem, something I have learned and come to embrace as profound wisdom over the years of my healing and awakening. Grace, I believe, is something that can come to permeate each of our lives. The challenge and the paradox is the doorway through which grace enters us. We often, through fear and ignorance, don't see the door and unknowingly keep it closed. That has certainly been my experience. Things shift, however, as we become willing to try and risk something new and to more fully surrender into something larger than ourselves. 

I have discovered that it is indeed often that which we reject and split off from our conscious awareness - our masked and projected fears and shame, the unattended and neglected pain in our hearts, the opportunity to shed old belief systems for new and more deeply loving ones, the invitation to embrace and come to better know ourselves and others, all this and much more - that holds the key to greater understanding, compassion, peace, wisdom, and love than we have ever known before. 

May we all be increasingly blessed with the acceptance of that which we have rejected. May we allow grace and love to grow within ourselves and our lives and what it is that we bring to the world.

Bless us all on our journeys ~ Molly


Photo by Molly

Grace is more than gifts. In grace something is overcome; grace occurs in spite of something; grace occurs in spite of separation and estrangement. Grace is the reunion of life with life, the reconciliation of the self with itself. Grace is the acceptance of that which is rejected.

- Paul Tillich,
The Shaking of the Foundations

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