The Light and the Dark

Inseparably Interwoven

Surprised by Grace

Brother David Steindl-Rast, a Benedictine Catholic monk, tells a story in his book Gratefulness, the Heart of Prayer that has stayed with me ever since I first read it long ago. Brother David grew up in Nazi-occupied Austria where air raids were a daily occurrence, and as he puts it, “an air raid can be an eye-opener.” He tells this story of one such air raid:

One time, I remember, the bombs started falling as soon as the warning sirens went off. I was in the street. Unable to find an air raid shelter quickly, I rushed into a church only a few steps away. To shield myself from shattered glass and falling debris, I crawled under a pew and hid my face in my hands. But as bombs exploded outside and the ground shook under me, I felt sure that the vaulted ceiling would cave in any moment and bury me alive. Well, my time had not yet come. A steady tone of the siren announced that the danger was over. And there I was, stretching my back, dusting off my clothes, and stepping out into a glorious May morning. I was alive. Surprise! The buildings I had seen less than an hour ago were now smoking mounds of rubble. But that there was anything at all struck me as an overwhelming surprise. My eyes fell on a few feet of lawn in the midst of all this destruction. It was as if a friend had offered me an emerald in the hollow of his hand. Never before or after have I seen grass so surprisingly green.

—Brother David Steindl-Rast, O.S.B.

I suspect we’ve all had experiences like that, albeit not usually as dramatic. I had one this evening. It was blazing hot, I’d been indoors all day, I had gone off coffee yet again a few days earlier and was at the tail end of withdrawal, and as the sun started going down, I found myself in a rather melancholy, unsettled place, gnawing on one of my fingers and scrolling around both in my mind and on my iPad for a fix and not finding one. Then suddenly, I woke up to the simplicity of being right here now, exactly where I was, with no answers, no solutions, no problem. A great peace came over me.

I went out for an evening walk. The air was still very hot, but bearable. That rich golden light that comes just before sundown was bathing the tops of the trees, the leaves were alive with that light, everything was dancing, and I knew in my heart that God is here and all is well. And by God, I mean presence-awareness, unconditional love, the unfathomable intelligence doing and being everything, the ungraspable groundless ground of being. And I remembered Brother David’s story. And I wanted to share it.

Because I know that many people right now are feeling some mixture of despair and hopelessness, fear and anxiety, outrage and helplessness. And I thought of Brother David coming out of that church and seeing that everything that had been there so solidly a moment before—all the buildings he knew—was now utterly gone. And then noticing the glorious May morning and seeing the patch of grass, the emerald jewel, and knowing that he was alive and feeling overwhelming surprise and joy and gratitude. A moment of grace in the midst of utter terror and destruction. A lesson in both impermanence and that which endures. We can’t pin down exactly what it is that endures and touches our heart and shines so unmistakably in a glorious May morning and a patch of grass that has miraculously survived a bombing, but we know it deeply.

Coming home from my walk, I stopped to get my mail, and there was a beautiful card from a dear friend, with the drawing of a butterfly and a caterpillar on it and a heart-opening, uplifting message that she had written to me that brought tears to my eyes, tears of joy and gratitude. How amazingly woven together we all are, this one being showing up in these infinitely varied disguises, encouraging each other, uplifting each other… and yes, sometimes hurting each other.

And then later that evening, I came upon these words from Amoda Ma in a recent Substack Note of hers:

The still point is always here—beneath the surface noise, beneath the movement of thought, beneath the tides of emotion. It does not need to be created or attained. It simply waits, quietly, faithfully, as the ever-present ground of being.

But it cannot be known through effort, or grasped through the workings of the mind. It is not a place we arrive at by doing more, understanding more, or fixing ourselves. Rather, it reveals itself when we stop reaching and allow ourselves to fall inward—gently, honestly, and without resistance.

This falling is a kind of surrender. Not a giving up, but a letting go. A letting go of the need to know, the need to control, the need to become. It is here, in the undoing, that something deeper begins to open.

In the silence that follows, a great simplicity is uncovered. The boundaries that once seemed so solid—between self and other, inner and outer, sacred and ordinary—begin to dissolve. And in their place, a quiet recognition arises: all things are one. Life is whole. And despite all appearances, all is well.

—Amoda Ma

I remember once hearing Francis Lucille say that “everything is grace when we see it as grace.” And it’s true. It’s a shift from feeling separate and oppressed by some seemingly outside force (an emotion, a physical pain, world events, personal events, whatever it might be), to suddenly stopping the desperate attempt to get away or find a fix and instead letting go, opening, so there is no more separation, no more “it” and no more “me,” just this unfathomable undivided aliveness of being, just as it is, doing what it does, and suddenly, the darkness opens into the light. The Nazi occupation, the bombing, the desolation is still there, but something has shifted, the focus is on the emerald, the blessing in the midst of darkness, the gratitude for being here at all.

Over his long life, Brother David has brought that emerald, that light, that gift he was given, into the world and given it freely. It radiates from his whole being and from the pages of his books and all the lives he touches.

How does that shift happen? It happens by grace. We hear about it perhaps. We remember it, because we all know it. We long for it. We search for it. Or we stumble upon it unexpectedly as Brother David did. He spent a lifetime cultivating it, nurturing it, undoubtedly losing it and finding it again. As he said of faith, “Faith is radical trust—trust in life and trust in God.” And he added, “Going forward in faith is not a train ride [where we just need to board, and then it will bring us to our destination]; it’s more like walking on water.”

On prayer, he said: “Praying means opening our heart to the Great Mystery—to life, to God. This open confrontation changes us personally and thereby changes the conditions of everything else, as well. The smallest change we make in the great network of the world influences the whole… In the end, the Mystery is the Unknowable. And if something is unknowable, then it cannot be put into words. We may experience it by letting it take hold of us, but we cannot ourselves take hold of it.”

I want so much to bring love into this world and not more darkness, and sometimes I fail so miserably. We all do at times. It comes with being human. Blundering along. But somehow, that too is part of the dance, the grit that creates the pearl. It all belongs. It all goes together. It can’t be pulled apart. The Nazi occupation, the bombing, the utter destruction, the horror of it all—and the glorious May morning, the emerald, the surprise, the gratitude, the awakening, the deepening, and the many years (this one bottomless moment) of walking on water here and now. It’s all grace when seen as grace.

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Love to all…