The key experience we have of grace, though all too often not understood in the right way, is that of waking up. Consciousness comes into us. One moment we are asleep and the next we are awake. “Whereas I was blind, now I see,” said St. Paul. True waking up is quite spontaneous. We can never be said to deserve it. When people try to help other by giving them shocks to wake them up, something irreplaceably precious is destroyed. Working on people from outside in this way produces a dependency that robs them of the channel of grace. All that we can do in connection with waking up is not to interfere. It should be allowed to occur in us. … When it goes, it goes. Attempts to hang on to the context of the experience distort and make it difficult for the action to do its work in us.

 

The higher state allows new possibilities. At the moment of waking up we have the power of choice. The moment before we had no power of choice. It is right and it is needed to exercise this power. This is quite different from trying to do something about the state itself -which is not our business.[1]

 

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[1] J.G. Bennett, The Sevenfold Work (Daglingworth: Coombe Springs Press, 1979) pp.109-110.

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