This whole week, I’ve been reflecting on this idea of grace. The grace of the families who lost loved ones. The grace that Reverend Pinckney would preach about in his sermons. The grace described in one of my favorite hymnals -- the one we all know: Amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me. I once was lost, but now I’m found; was blind but now I see. According to the Christian tradition, grace is not earned. Grace is not merited. It’s not something we deserve. Rather, grace is the free and benevolent favor of God as manifested in the salvation of sinners and the bestowal of blessings.

Of course love is never earned. It is a grace we give one another. Anything we need to earn is only approval.

It is unearned love — the love that goes before, that greets us on the way. It's the help you receive when you have no bright ideas left, when you are empty and desperate and have discovered that your best thinking and most charming charm have failed you. Grace is the light or electricity or juice or breeze that takes you from that isolated place and puts you with others who are as startled and embarrassed and eventually grateful as you are to be there.

As a nation, out of this terrible tragedy, God has visited grace upon us, for he has allowed us to see where we’ve been blind. He has given us the chance, where we’ve been lost, to find our best selves. We may not have earned it, this grace, with our rancor and complacency, and short-sightedness and fear of each other -- but we got it all the same. He gave it to us anyway. He’s once more given us grace. But it is up to us now to make the most of it, to receive it with gratitude, and to prove ourselves worthy of this gift.

Some call it luck, coincidence, fate, or God’s hand. I call it grace: the acknowledgment that there’s more in this world than just ourselves, and that perhaps a higher power gives us both the privilege of this life as well as the gifts of insight and guidance when we’re open to them. It’s amazing how, when you take care of the first two steps, God or the universe or grace — whatever you like to call it — tends to step in and support what you’re doing. Things flow to you when you do your part first. We’ve all experienced the phenomenon of serendipity. Something happens that defies explanation, so we call it a coincidence. We miss a train and meet the person we end up marrying. We fill in for a friend, and it leads us to the job of our dreams. We didn’t figure it out in advance, didn’t earn it — it just happened. To me, that’s grace. And the more you acknowledge and appreciate the grace that’s already in your life, the more you experience the gifts that are beyond what you’ve created.

Life is given to us, we earn it by giving it.

There's no way to earn it or deserve it or bring it about any more than you can deserve the taste of raspberries and cream or earn good looks or bring about your own birth.

How we fall into grace. You can't work or earn your way into it. You just fall. It lies below, it lies beyond. It comes to you, unbidden.

I didn't earn it. I wear it for those Marines who lost their lives protecting mine.

Although grace comes from above, that is not to say that everyone has the ability to accept to it.

Grace is something you can never get but only be given.

The grace of God is to God himself as sunlight is to the sun — a means and a way leading us to the latter. It therefore shines within us in a simple, one-fold way and makes us deiform, that is, like God. This likeness constantly sinks away, dying in God and becoming and remaining one with him, for charity makes us become one with God and causes us to remain living in union with him.

The word grace evidently implies that there is no antecedent merit. And in this way the apostle to the Romans appears to argue, when he says, 'And if by grace, then is it no more of works: otherwise grace is no more grace. Now to him that worketh is the reward not reckoned of grace, but of debt.' All this is perfectly intelligible, even in the conduct of liberal and magnificent human characters. They frequently bestow their gifts from a pure spirit of liberality, without the smallest previous claim on the score of merit. And shall not God, whose perfections are infinite, do more than this?

God gives his grace freely, in the strictest sense of the word, and without merit on the part of man. For if God did not bestow his grace in this perfectly gratuitous manner, but on account of some subordinate contingent uncertain cause, he could not possibly foresee how he should bestow his free gifts.