IX — The Importance of Consciously Expecting Grace
Usually this highest consciousness, this Comforter, becomes ours only if intellectually we expect it to be ours.
Our prayers are answered customarily at the level of our mental expectation. It is wise to accept consciously the ascended Lord. “Once in a blue moon,” we may experience unconsciously a great “letting go and letting God,” a tremendous soul desire for the Best which lifts the level of our expectation without our conscious understanding of what has taken place, so that the Best, the Christ Jesus realization, the Comforter, comes to us without our intellectual anticipation of it. Then, really, although we do not recognize with our reasoning faculty that we are doing so, we are asking for the Comforter. We are asking for this because, even if with our mind we have not comprehended what the Best is, to ask for the Best is to pray for inner awareness of Jesus’ ascended consciousness, the Best that now exists.
However, it is better to know consciously what is God’s perfect Will and Power “in Jesus’ Name.” If our “letting go” has not been complete enough to make us receptive unconsciously to the Highest, still we shall be wise enough through our conscious comprehension not to be satisfied with anything less than the Highest—Grace.
Moreover, even if in the silence we do get a quite wonderful realization of “prayer answered now, perfectly,” our intellect, or reasoning faculty, if unascended itself, may apprehend the possibility only of “crucifixion” or resignation to an outcome that really is not the miracle of love. Thus, after the silence, it may translate the general feeling of “peace,” and “all is well,” into conscious expectation of particular results that are not for our highest good.
In this case, our unascended, unenlightened intellect has betrayed us into being merely “reconciled” to not receiving what, in our heart, we want and know intuitively is divinely designed for us.
Later, comprehending what has happened, we may, like Mary Austen, (Author of Everyman’s Genius) be “hopping mad” at the outcome of not getting, or filled with grief and self-condemnation at our intellect’s betrayal—which does not induce further Christ Jesus realization.
It is better to comprehend intellectually the true meaning of the “peace on earth and mercy mild, God and sinners reconciled,” of which the herald angels sang:—man made one with perfectly satisfying good, manifest now. Then we shall not be content with going through the suffering of a “crucifixion” in order to receive the tangible answer to our prayer, nor to being resigned to doing without the fulfillment. We shall ask to receive the Christ Jesus realization of “all suffering o’er” and forgotten, and of all desired accomplishment reached now in perfect ways, under Grace. Knowing the Best that now can be had, we shall ask for it, and keep on asking, until we are actually, factually, under the action of the ascended Lord, Law; until the Comforter’s “voice” rings clarionly within and we know: This, the ascended Lord, is “my Lord, and my God.” For, if we will be satisfied with less than the miracle; if, in expectation, we put ourselves under the action of the Lord, Law, still to be “crucified,” straight to a “crucifixion” go we; to rise beyond it, perhaps, and even sometime to forget it— but not now.
The glory for us is that “in His Name” it can be now.
Through the Grace of the ascended Lord in us we may escape the long, hard way of law-goading and enter instead the path of love-guiding. Happy are we if we do this, if we ask to be shown by love, not taught by law, for then we shall not sometime cry:
“O lord, have you not taught me how?
O lord, have you not finished now?
God, light a Lamp unto my feet!
The law is such a long, dark street.”
The Lamp already has been lighted and, if sincerely we seek its light, we shall see it:
“O Love, your Light is something bright,
It makes me see that black is White.
O Love, your Light is something true,
It shows to me that all are You.
O Love, your Grace is something wide,
And in its splendor all abide.”
Yes, sincerely seeking, we shall find—eventually; but, through Grace, it can be now. Jesus, in one-with-the-Father realization endorsed completely St. Paul’s proclamation, “Now is the acceptable time, ... now is the day of salvation.” Jesus said: “Say not ye, there are yet four months and then cometh the harvest? Behold, I say unto you, lift up your eyes and look on the fields, that they are white already unto harvest.”
© 1947, Crichton Russ Boatwright
