Grace? But wouldn’t it be simpler just to call these experiences [of unsought peace and illumination] moments of grace? For that is what they are, aren’t they—times when God suddenly touches our lives with his blessing and renews us from the center of his own bottomless abundance?

Well, yes, that is quite true. Grace and mystical hope are close synonyms, and the outward effects are virtually identical. A person under the sway of grace and a person connected to the flow of mystical hope will display the same qualities of joy, gratitude, and a lightness and fullness of being even in the face of apparent reversal and defeat. Outwardly, they are dead ringers for each other, and even inwardly I believe they resonate with the same experience.

But words also have connotations, and this is why I make the distinction between grace and hope. For over the theological centuries calling an experience “grace”… has come to connote something extraordinary and uncharacteristic: an infusion of divine sustenance into our lives as a special gift from God, given with God’s own timing and discretion. Such a notion is consistent with the traditional theological viewpoint, where it seems that the first priority has always been to affirm the sovereign freedom of God and God’s role as sole initiator. Using the term “grace” tends to lock us back into those traditional categories and allows us to go sailing right by the distinction I really want to highlight.

For in overemphasizing this divine freedom it is all too easy to understate and miss that hope is not intended to be an extraordinary infusion, but an abiding state of being. We lose sight of the invitation—and in fact, our responsibility, as stewards of creation—to develop a conscious and permanent connection to this wellspring. We miss the call to become a vessel, to become a chalice into which this divine energy can pour; a lamp through which it can shine.

But what if we are intended to become this vessel, this body of hope? What if, in fact, this effervescent, “lightness-of-being” energy is the fuel that drives our human life toward its divine fulfillment? What if our insistence on treating it as a rare and exceptional phenomenon is a way of ducking the invitation that was permanently extended [John 4:1-42] at the Samarian well that blazing midday?

Cynthia Bourgeault, Mystical Hope, p.16

I have often stumbled over this word grace myself. There is so undeniable a sense of givenness about so much of the inner life that it is hard to evade the expression. We may practice faithfully for weeks, years, and yet illumination comes unsought, unexpected, often at what on the face of it might seem to be the most unpropitious of times. We may be overwhelmed with loss, with grief and regret, and suddenly the sky will open and we are flooded with peace and acceptance like a shaft of unimaginable sunlight.

What is happening here? Of course it is tempting on the one hand to turn to theories of the bicameral mind, or of the collective unconscious, or on the other to conventional theological formulations of “[s]aving grace [as] the free and unmerited operation of God’s person and presence… initiat[ing] the spiritual life of God’s people” (The Gospel Coalition). But neither extreme seems even to begin to reflect the wonderful lightness of being, the openness and clarity, the sheer sense of gift that comes so unexpectedly, so seemingly undeservedly. There is a profound mystery here, in the true sense of the term.

You may have noticed that [these] experiences have one thing in common: they all catapult us out of ego-centered consciousness. Those who come back from a near-death experience bring with them a visceral remembrance of how vivid and abundant life is when the sense of separateness has dropped away. Those who fall profoundly in love experience a dying into the other that melts every shred of their own identity, self-definition, caution, and boundaries, until finally there is no “I” anymore—only “you.” Those who meditate go down to the same place, but by a back staircase deep within their own being.

Ibid. p.47

One thing that all Bourgeault’s examples have in common with my own is this inherent quality of wordlessness. Of course in order to know something conceptually we must use words, if only to ourselves, and so these experiences of grace are clouded over with unknowing. And yet it is only in surrendering to not knowing that we can receive them – which may be why they are so often received in extremis. “Ego-centered consciousness” is mediated by thought, and thought by words; defeat words, and thought drops away from itself. What is left is silence.

I think this wordless silence is itself the back staircase; and there is an argument to be made that all forms of contemplative practice – and, phenomenologically, such things as near death experiences – are no more, at the very bottom, than means of silence. The heart yearns for silence, especially in the depths of its passions; at the end of all things there is silence, and it is out of silence that all things come to be. Silence is the utter want of naming, of distinctions; it is no thing, but it is given to us as our only home at the end of all we know.