A Cup Of Grace...Revisted...

“The LORD is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit.”
~ Psalm 34:18 TNIV

I have been reading Dallas Willard’s, The Divine Conspiracy and this afternoon I came across a couple of interesting things that he wrote in light of this blog “A Cup of Grace” and especially the original inspiration for the blog. Almost a year ago now, while on a short-term Youth Works mission trip to inner city St. Louis I was struck by what I have borrowed from Brennan Manning – the notion of the "divine milieu." Manning wrote, “Living by the gospel of grace leads us into what Teilhard de Chardin called the divine milieu – A God filled, Christ-soaked universe. A world charged with the grandeur of God. How do we live in the presence of the living God? In wonder, amazed by the traces of God all around us.” In a similar way Willard commented on the world in which we live in this way, “Jesus’ good news about the kingdom can be an effective guide for our lives only if we share his view of the world in which we live. To his eyes this is a God – bathed and God – permeated world.”

Each morning while on the missions trip I would wake up early and make a pot of coffee and in a quiet corner of the old run down Baptist church that we were all staying in I would sip my first coffee of the day and there was grace in it and it brought some peace and clarity before I would read and pray. It was in those early morning moments that the idea of “a cup of grace” first came to my mind – the grace was tangible. This was, I believe, a result of the experiences in, or an awaking to, or an increased awareness of the “divine milieu “or “a world charged with the grandeur of God” and in that cup of coffee or at least in the space that the time drinking it provided each morning there was grace.

In connection with those mornings in St. Louis I found these words that Willard wrote interesting:

“The novelist Vladimir Nabokov writes of a moment of awakening in one of his characters who, watching an old woman of the streets drink a cup of coffee given to her,

...became aware of the world’s tenderness, the profound beneficence of all that surrounded me, the blissful bond between me and all of creation; and I realized that joy…breathed around me everywhere, in the spreading street sounds, in the hem of a comically lifted skirt, in the metallic yet tender drone of the wind, in the autumn clouds bloated with rain. I realized that the world does not represent a struggle at all, or a predacious sequence of chance events, but shimmering bliss, beneficent trepidation, a gift bestowed on us an unappreciated."

(Quoted in Dallas Willard’s, Divine Conspiracy, p. 62 from Vladimir Nabokov, from his story “Beneficence,” as quoted in Books and Culture, November/December 1995, p. 26.)