The real damage is done by those millions who want to “survive.” The honest men who just want to be left in peace. Those who don’t want their little lives disturbed by anything bigger than themselves. Those with no sides and no causes. Those who won’t take measure of their own strength, for fear of antagonizing their own weakness. Those who don’t like to make waves — or enemies. Those for whom freedom, honor, truth, and principles are only literature. Those who live small, mate small, die small. It’s the reductionist approach to life: if you keep it small, you’ll keep it under control. If you don’t make any noise, the bogeyman won’t find you. But it’s all an illusion, because they die too, those people who roll up their spirits into tiny little balls so as to be safe. Safe?! From what? Life is always on the edge of death; narrow streets lead to the same place as wide avenues, and a little candle burns itself out just like a flaming torch does. I choose my own way to burn.

–Sophie Scholl

What is “grace?”
Grace

1. Seemingly effortless beauty or charm of movement, form, or proportion.
2. A characteristic or quality pleasing for its charm or refinement.
3. A sense of fitness or propriety.
4. A disposition to be generous or helpful; goodwill. Mercy; clemency.
5. A favor rendered by one who need not do so; indulgence.
6. A temporary immunity or exemption; a reprieve.
7. Graces Greek & Roman Mythology. Three sister goddesses, known in Greek mythology as Aglaia, Euphrosyne, and Thalia, who dispense charm and beauty.
8. Divine love and protection bestowed freely on people. The state of being protected or sanctified by the favor of God. An excellence or power granted by God.
9. A short prayer of blessing or thanksgiving said before or after a meal.
10. Grace Used with His, Her, or Your as a title and form of address for a duke, duchess, or archbishop.
11. Music. An appoggiatura, trill, or other musical ornanment in the music of 16th and 17th century England.

There are days when I wonder why I take up space and consume resources. What good do I possibly do? I feel that no matter what effort I expend, it’s not enough. Sometimes I think too much about this, becoming absorbed with my ego. What I need at these times is a reminder that I matter, but not in the egocentric way. Rather, I need reminding that every day, the smallest action on my part has an impact, for good or ill, whether or not I know it. It is helpful at these times to recall as many situations as I can in which I participated with Creation toward a greater good. We are instruments of grace in this world, whether we demonstrate it with a kind deed, make a welcoming atmosphere for someone, forgive a wrong, or extend compassion in heart and action toward another.

The moment of grace comes to us in the dynamics of any situation we walk into. It is an opportunity that God sews into the fabric of a routine situation. It is a chance to do something creative, something helpful, something healing, something that makes one unmarked spot in the world better off for our having been there. We catch it if we are people of discernment.

–Lewis B. Smedes, A Pretty Good Person

Describe an incident (or more than one) when you were in the right place at the right time and the world was a better place because of what you did.

–taken from 100 Ways to Keep Your Soul Alive: Living Deeply and Fully Every Day

“Woman is the promise that cannot be kept,” said the poet Paul Claudel.
But does she know that? She — her sexuality, her voice and eyes and skin and hair — is the promise that we men make to ourselves hour after hour every day, every day of our lives. If she is not the secret of the universe, then there is none. To us she appears in the clandestine and burning center of the mind as the form we most deeply desire and must create or die. There she is — dressed, or half-dressed, in her mysterious clothes, hair a little mussed, lips just moist enough; and from going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it — the real earth, and not just the enchanted fragment of it that blazes in the longing mind to furnish her setting — she becomes a hidden archetype to the beholder rendered godlike by her presence: his possession and promise, soulless and soulful at the same time, receding, flashing up with terrible certainty at the most inopportune times that she then makes opportune. Behind her are real women, giving to the ideal the substance it requires from the lived world, and serving to make more powerful and imperious those all-powerful creatures of the depths of our being, the slaves of our needs who enslave us. We have seen her in actual beds, and seen her satisfactions taking place hiddenly, deep in the body, from outward signs so powerful and intimate that we know, with awe and gratitude, that we could never attain anything of like consequence, or even approach it. We leave her sleeping, and retire to the center of the mind, where she has taken a new dimension, another hairdo, another set of magic lingerie. We love her there in another one of her endless changes, and wonder when she will come true again, taking on the mortal and identifying flesh without which all ideals die, as a real woman, perhaps not yet encountered, unhooks her bra with the strange motion that only women have ever mastered, smiling with infinite complicity.”

–James Dickey

[via whiskey river]