From an email from a client who was profoundly abused as a child:
You talked on Monday about "being accident prone" in terms of having grace come into our lives. I was trying to relate that concept to [my partner], but I realized I hadn't quite 'gotten' the import of your observation. I was trying to say that you meant that we need to create a circumstance in our lives where we are "more accident prone to manifesting a state of grace" motivated by love and mental health. Or something like that. Could you explain that in more detail? It's such a different perspective on being 'accident prone' that I found it quite intriguing.
It was in the context of enlightenment that I first heard the notion of being accident prone as an expression of grace. We can’t create our own enlightenment. Enlightenment is by definition something that happens to us. Nevertheless, there are things we can do to make it more likely that we will experience enlightenment. There are things we can do to make ourselves prone to the accident of enlightenment, or for that matter, to the accident of any sort of grace.
The question then is, “what can we do that makes us prone to the accident of grace?” Let me suggest that there are a series of steps that take us into and through a developmental process that opens us to grace.
1. There is a Power greater than I.
The first step is to recognize that much of what we experience is created by forces utterly beyond our control. This is readily and terrifyingly apparent from a very early age. We can do some things to alter our experience and even to create certain experiences but there are limits to what we can do.
2. I am a creation of this Power.
Indeed, everything is a creation of this Power. But I am a created being and thus one of the manifestations of this Power. I owe my very existence to the Will of the Power.
3. I am precious.
Because the Power that creates all things created me, I have been chosen into existence and thus am loved.
There are a few more steps in this sequence which leads to our awareness that we are actually not separate from this Power but, for the purposes of this question, this is far enough along the developmental line. The full apprehension that we are God’s beloved and that God causes good things to shower upon us at all times is the core of what it means to live in grace. But things can get in the way of that awareness.
Some don’t acknowledge a “power greater than themselves.” They tend to behave in ways that are sociopathic and stubbornly addicted. While you have struggled with addiction, it was not for this reason. You have never had any doubt that there was a power greater than yourself. You just knew that Power to be one that delighted in tormenting you. To the degree that this Power noticed you at all, it was to pin you to the mounting board and pull your wings off.
As for knowing you are a part of Creation, you have a deep spiritual awareness that includes this knowledge. Your difficulty is being able to know yourself as loved. Most of us have this awareness mediated to us through a relationship with parents who love us. For whatever reason, your parents were not able to extend love to you. In an attempt to make sense of the absence of love—which you intuitively knew was an aspect of your birthright—you decided that the reason you were not loved was because there was something very wrong with you. This is a fairly common choice for children who are abused.
You could have made a worse choice. Deciding that the source of power is either puny or punitive leads to sociopathy. If there is no God or God is evil then I can do whatever I want or I can ally with the source of evil. In either case the only choice that makes sense is to satisfy my immediate wishes with no regard for others.
That is not the choice you made. You decided that bad things happen because you are bad. That made you desperate to be good and it gave you a sense of futility. It seems that no matter how many caring things you do for others you can’t seem to be good enough to make up for being so bad.
In spite of all of the evidence that you are bad and that the Power that creates the universe has contempt for you, you have found the ability to love yourself. You have tamed your use of drugs to medicate yourself into oblivion; you have acted to provide for your own educational and physical needs; you have mightily resisted urges to harm yourself. You have acted toward yourself in love. You have thus brought yourself more and more into alignment with the true Will of the Power.
As you have brought your behavior into alignment with the Will of God for you by loving you, you have opened yourself up to a deeper and deeper awareness of the power of that love. When you met your partner you could have easily missed the opportunities for love that rest in that relationship. But by loving yourself you made yourself prone to the accident that is her love for you.
We become prone to the accident that is grace by treating all of Creation to the blessing that is our love for it. That blessing starts by loving ourselves.
