(paraphrased from class)

Grace is less a gift than a beautiful work of art.  It’s like a concert, a dance, a painting.  It’s offered to you, wordlessly, without need from you; you can’t give anything back to make it more than what it is.  

And yet you want to — you give yourself to it, without even knowing.  You’re drawn into it.  You feel yourself moving with the music, the colors, the performers.  You become a part of it, and it moves in you.

The experience of grace is the experience of art.

(van Gogh’s “Starry Night Over the Rhone”; “White Swan” ballerina stock photo; Alison’s shot of Paul Meany, lead singer of Mutemath.)