Do Buddhist Marketers Talk About Grace?

I met a new friend and fellow marketer yesterday. I presumed he was Buddhist, but he dropped the word grace into our conversation one too many times.

"Do Buddhists talk about grace?"

"I'm not Buddhist."

Oh, of course. I recalled: "The bodhisattva goes completely beyond convention."

BTW, this is the third consecutive uninitiated conversation about grace I'd had in the last three days.

At some point in our marketing discussion he brought up the Celestine Prophecy, which is out in movie-form in the theaters right now. One of its themes is that "guiding thoughts are the thoughts that just come to us, that give us a feeling of inspiration."

The book spent over three years on the New York Times bestsellers list and was the number one international bestseller of 1996 (number two in 1995).

"It was poorly written," he remarked. Yet the message was ripe in timing, he continues. The book is an accessible non-theological intro to grace which oft times appears to look like synchronicity, serendipity, coincidence, everyday miracles, inexplicably breath-taking moments, lightning inspiration, flashes of insight, luck and raw "magic".

I nodded, "Yeah, it wasn't a great book, but the universe said: "This will do."

"After the manuscript was roundly rejected by everyone, he finally self-published, and, with the help of his wife and business partner Salle, he literally hit the road, peddling copies to bookstores all over the South (the Redfields are native Alabamans). As if by magic, the book started taking off in a big way. Everyone who read it was telling everyone they knew to read it too. The Redfields sold 100,000 copies before Warner Brothers picked it up and launched it to international acclaim." - "The Celestine Prophecy: The Movie", review in The Psychic Reader, April 2006

A friend this past Sunday (whom is not aware of recent non-events) remarked: "Well, it certainly appears as if the universe is cooperating with you."

It only appears that externally that I am in control. As Anthony de Mello says, enlightenment is the "absolute cooperation with the inevitable."

I noticed that so much energy can needlessly be expended machinating the waves to our liking, when we can simply surf the beatific ones that keep cresting over and over for us yet we've been blind to. (What if you held the question out as possibility that maybe the universe is cooperating with you, even now in the midst of whatever? What might you notice this minute?)

"Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away." - unknown

Bonus: My own two cents on grace:

Grace is the free and unmerited beneficence of a God which is all and nothing and totally beyond comprehension. It is the natural law of the cosmos - well outside the gravitational pull of man-made laws of sin and/or karma - which is ever-available in each and every and every moment. The metaphor of gravity can be extended: The lightness of Being that comes by accepting grace each moment is akin to the weightlessness and bouyancy and peace of outer space.

It is so wholly unconditional and infinitely patient that it allows you to hit the snooze button as many times as you wish, yet your remembrance of its embrace eventually wakes you up gently and in your own time.

p.s. Now I understand why Jack Kerouac returned to his Catholic roots in his final years.