The word grace has so many meanings, depending on the speaker’s intent. Grace can be flowing movement; a prayer of gratitude; or a blessing. It can also be an act of kindness, mercy, or compassion. We talk about dancers or skaters moving with ethereal grace. Many people bow their heads and give thanks by saying grace before meals. Spiritually, grace is associated with an infinite divine love that envelops all humans regardless of their beliefs. The iconic song “Amazing Grace” describes a man “lost” and then “found” through God’s grace. The juxtaposition of human and spirit seems to run through all these meanings. For me, grace has come to mean flowing with life’s blessings and experiencing connection to a greater Presence in the multiverse we inhabit. Grace is always with me, and my awareness of it grows with the expansion of my consciousness.

The Presence I speak of some call God/dess or the Divine. Raised outside of all religious traditions, I have found my way to spiritual connection through various teachers and my own experiences, often in nature. In fact, the closest analogy I can think of to the shining radiance of Spirit is the sun. The sun’s light is powerful and ever-present, whether or not we can physically perceive it. Clouds, weather, or the turning of the Earth may obscure our view of it at times, but it is always there. When the skies clear, or the day dawns, and that light hits us full force, we are energetically and emotionally uplifted. Yet we are not able to gaze at it directly or run the risk of blindness. Our physical bodies cannot visually take in the full force of the sun’s light. The same is true of the Divine. Physically, we are not yet equipped to receive all of that heavenly radiance without blowing out our circuits. This is changing, faster and faster now, however.

At this amazing time of transformation on planet Earth, we are evolving and expanding so that we will eventually be able to continuously perceive/receive the Divine in its full expression of light and love. In the meantime, we are experiencing what I call glimpses of God—flashes, bursts, increasing increments of open-hearted joy, peace, and love. Moments of grace. When we evolve to the point of fully embodying spirit in our human bodies, there will no longer be a separation between inner and outer; all will be the oneness of divine consciousness, of which we are each an integral part. In truth, the only separation that ever existed was in our own limited physical ability to see the entire panoramic view. As the doors of perception open wider and wider, the light of conscious awareness floods our being with infinite grace, and we see as we are seen. God’s vision of us and the world becomes our own.

That is how my own life seems to be evolving anyway. I am experiencing Spirit/Presence in rushes of electric energy and euphoric expansion that repeatedly fill me to the brim with light and warmth, like the sun. The Divine is acclimating me bit by bit to the power of its infinite love. These experiences flow and then ebb but always recur, each time with greater expansiveness and deeper immersion. Is this en-light-enment? Possibly. Not the historically known, sudden individual awakening, but a new kind of gradual collective awakening that we are all experiencing in our own ways, each of us influencing the greater whole. Great spiritual masters through the ages have pointed the way to this time, when all of humanity would embody what they embodied. I never quite knew what that meant until now. That is why we are here, to live this. These are infinitely grace-full times. What a gift to be alive now and experience it all!