ISSUE OF GRACE

When we look back on our lives and see all the uncanny experiences, the seeming coincidences, and apparent intervention, direction, and protection, we are left wondering whether there isn't a personal God after all.  Vedanta calls such intervention divine grace, without saying whether the source of the grace, God, is personal or impersonal.

Swami Prabhavananda asks, though, how can there be grace from a God that is impersonal?  Such a God would be like an automaton, a mechanism, an abstraction.  To begin with, what is God?  The scriptures tell us that He is consciousness itself.  Such consciousness, infinite consciousness, cannot be a mechanism, an abstraction.  Those who have realized God hold that He is personal, but not in an anthropomorphic way; He is also impersonal, but not an abstraction.  In the end, He is beyond both personal and impersonal, Prabhavananda says, adding that Sri Ramakrishna used to say:  "Never finitize the infinite."

What is interesting about grace is that it occurs outside the Law of Karma, which is entirely impersonal.