Resting in Grace

A passage from the book

Introduction: A Note on the Essentials

This book is written for the exhausted seeker.

This is for the person who has become tired, not of God, but of the machinery built around God: the striving, the fear, the spiritual self-improvement, the careful performance of being acceptable, the private suspicion that peace is always one more practice, one more insight, one more purification away.

Some of us have carried that machinery through many traditions. We learned new words, new forms of prayer, new ways of sitting, breathing, watching, surrendering, and interpreting experience. We crossed mountains and entered sanctuaries. We sat with sages and listened to saints. Sometimes a door opened. Sometimes the new path quietly became another way to postpone rest.

[…]

So the language here stays close to the nerve. Awareness. Grace. Surrender. Return. The words are simple because the movement is direct. The peace for which the soul is starving is not hidden behind complexity. It is nearer than breath, older than thought, and more intimate than the self we keep defending.