The pace of grace is a slow horse race
Despite my various efforts each day, to live a life conformed to God’s code of radically inclusive love. I still experience the ravages of my ever-active ego. I am not free entirely from what a famous sober booze hound called Bill Wilson described as the bondage of self.
Sometimes the pestering ego feels like a perpetual game of whack-a-mole. No sooner is it defeated though spiritual surrender in one area of my mind than it pops back up again in another.
What a tiresome but necessary never-ending game this is, because the spiritual life without struggle requires no ongoing surrender, no radical renunciation of the incessant desires of the ego.
A daily dose of spiritual surrender is situation normal for a mystic, because the ego wakes up early and wastes no time finding its rhythm and rhyme.
Constant surrender and ego renunciation have been the daily practice of mystics of whatever type or stripe throughout the ages. Thus, the mystic life in my experience is as much about the struggle as it is about getting up close and personal with choirs of angels.
God-consciousness requires root-and-branch change here on earth. Ultimately, it is about experiencing the extraordinary in the very earthly ordinary. The miraculous blessed beauty in the mundane. It’s not about connecting to some distant realm. It is about keeping it real in the world as we know it. For it is in the world as we know it that the living God gets fully revealed.
Synonymous with God consciousness is an ever-increasing glimpse of the creative presence of the Divine in all life on earth. The ever present sacred in all things. For this to occur, I must reach each day for what the mystic priest Ed Dowling, SJ called “a new pair of glasses.”1
I have learnt, albeit slowly through pain and misadventure, that ongoing change is the sacred secret of getting into the God-space. The required change is more internal rather than external. It is a quintessential inside journey from the head to the heart. For when the heart gets changed, everything changes.
When the ancient Hebrew mystics wrote about change, it was the heart they focused on. Turns out this kind of transformation only occurs in the space of grace. But the recreating pace of grace, though profound and heart bound, is often incremental and painfully slow.
When we misfit mystic people of the heart, enter the space of grace, we must be prepared for a slow horse race. There are no quick fixes in the spiritual life. Heart change takes time and must always align with the sacred pace of God’s unending grace.
It is within our misfit mystic mayhem, comrades, that we discover the radically inclusive creative space of grace, and our souls finally see the miraculous blessed beauty in the mundane. Grace is a slow horse race, but we’ve got to be in it to win it.
– Cormac Stagg, author of The Quest for a Humble Heart
- Chuck C, A New Pair of Glasses (New York: New-Look Publishing Company, 1984), 36. [↩]