Chapter 27: Grace, Not Achievement
"It is most important to realize that prayer is always God-given; otherwise we may confuse the gift of grace with some achievement of our own." Theophan the Recluse
Here is the most important thing about this movement: you did not accomplish it.
The shift from effortful to effortless prayer is not a personal achievement. It is not a promotion. You did not pass a test, earn a certificate, or cross a finish line. You received a gift. And the gift was wrapped inside something that looked, for a long time, like your own effort.
Ananta holds this balance with the precision of a jeweler setting a stone: "Nobody can ever say, 'I know how to pray,' because it is only that tiny bit in the method and 99% in Grace."
A tiny bit in the method. Ninety-nine percent in Grace.
Sit with that ratio. All the effort of the first four movements, the chanting, the mental repetition, the pushing the Name into the heart, the returning when you drifted, all of it amounts to one percent of the equation. One percent. The rest, the ninety-nine percent, was always coming from somewhere else. Coming from the One whose Name you were saying. Coming from the very Grace that placed the longing in your heart before you ever picked up the mala.
The Match and the Fire
And yet the one percent matters.
Ananta does not dismiss effort. He does not say: since it is all Grace, why bother? He says instead that the relationship is cooperative: "Prayer is work, a cooperative work of ourselves and God. The letting go part we have to do; His work in our hearts He has to do. We cannot do it without God, and God will not do it without us."
We cannot do it without God. God will not do it without us. Both sentences are necessary. Remove either one and the teaching collapses.
Without God, your effort produces nothing. You can chant a million repetitions with perfect technique and iron discipline, and if Grace does not move, the heart remains closed. Not because God is withholding, but because the heart's opening is, by nature, a divine act. You cannot pry it open from the outside any more than you can force a flower to bloom by pulling on its petals.
But without your effort, Grace has no surface to land on. The match must be struck. The mouth must open. The Name must be spoken, however haltingly, however mechanically, however dead it feels on the tongue. Without the match, there is no flame.
Ananta uses the image of cooking and eating. All the practice, the inquiry, the chanting, the reading, the discipline of sitting, all of this is the cooking. Real work. Necessary work. You cannot eat food that has not been prepared. But you must also eat. You must sit, be empty, and let God nourish you. Practice without receptivity is like cooking a feast you never taste.
"If you never eat the food, God must be tasted fresh." The cooking is the one percent. The eating is the ninety-nine. The cooking is what you do. The eating is what happens to you.
Tariki: The Other Power
Perhaps no tradition in the history of human spirituality has stated this teaching more radically than the Pure Land Buddhism of Shinran.
Shinran was a thirteenth-century Japanese teacher, neither monk nor layman by his own declaration, who studied under Honen and developed the most uncompromising doctrine of other-power, tariki, that any spiritual tradition has ever produced. His central teaching: enlightenment cannot be realized through self-power, jiriki, whether by moral cultivation, meditation, ritual practice, or any effort of the individual will. It can come only through the other-power of Amida Buddha's compassionate Vow.
The nembutsu, "Namu Amida Butsu," is not, in Shinran's teaching, a meritorious deed. It is not a practice that accumulates credit toward liberation. It is "an expression of joyful gratitude for the assurance of rebirth in the Pure Land, which has already been granted by Amida's inconceivable wisdom and compassion." The frequency or number of recitations is irrelevant. The effort of the practitioner is negated. Trust is placed entirely in the power of the Vow.
And then Shinran says something so radical that it shocked even his own students: "Even the good person attains birth in the Pure Land, how much more so the evil person."
The logic is devastating. If liberation depended on personal virtue, then yes, the good person would have the advantage. But since liberation depends entirely on Amida's compassion, the evil person who knows their own helplessness is actually closer to the truth than the good person who relies on their own merit. The one who has nothing to offer but their brokenness is precisely the one for whom the Vow was made.
This is not an invitation to moral laziness. It is an invitation to the deepest humility. The person who says "I have earned God's favor through my excellent practice" has understood nothing. The person who says "I have nothing to bring but my need" has understood everything.
Ananta echoes this with his own characteristic directness. When he says that prayer is "only that tiny bit in the method and 99% in Grace," he is saying what Shinran says. The tiny bit matters. But it does not produce the result. The result is a gift from the Other Side.
The Four Streams of Grace
The Hindu tradition maps grace with a precision that illuminates how the gift arrives. Four streams of kripa (grace) converge in the life of the practitioner:
Ishvara Kripa: the grace of God. This is the ultimate source, the ocean into which all the other streams empty. God's compassion and blessing, offered not because you deserve it, but because offering is God's nature.
Shastra Kripa: the grace of the scriptures. The blessing that comes through sacred texts that reveal the path. When a single verse of the Gita or the Upanishads or the Psalms strikes your heart like lightning, that is shastra kripa. The words on the page did not change. You did not change. Grace met you through the text.
Guru Kripa: the grace of the teacher. The compassion and blessing of one who has walked the path before you and now turns back to light the way. Ananta speaks of this as the marriage priest who facilitates the wedding between the soul and God. "Without the priest the wedding cannot happen."
Atma Kripa: the grace of the Self. This is perhaps the most subtle. It is the grace that arises from your own sincerity, your own effort, your own inner readiness. Not because your effort produces the result, but because your effort is itself a form of grace. The desire to practice is already a gift. The willingness to sit down, to open your mouth, to say the Name, is not something you manufactured from nothing. It was placed in you by the One who is waiting to hear His own Name spoken through your lips.
So even the one percent, the tiny bit in the method, is itself grace. The match you struck? It was placed in your hand by the same One who will provide the fire.
The Theology of Infused Prayer
The Christian contemplative tradition names this distinction with great care. There is a difference between acquired contemplation and infused contemplation.
Acquired contemplation is what you develop through practice. Through discipline, through faithful sitting, through years of returning to the prayer when the mind wanders, you cultivate a capacity for stillness and attention. This is real. This is valuable. This is the one percent.
Infused contemplation is something else entirely. It is, in the words of John of the Cross, "a secret and peaceful and loving inflow of God, which, if not hampered, fires the soul in the spirit of love." Secret: hidden from the senses and even from the intellect. Peaceful: not achieved through struggle. Loving: its essence is love, not knowledge.
Teresa of Avila distinguished between two kinds of spiritual experience with her characteristic practical wisdom. Contentos, spiritual consolations, "begin in us and end in God." These are the fruit of meditation, of effort, of practice. They are genuine, but they originate in the human side of the equation. Gustos, spiritual delights, "originate in God as freely given, and in which we participate." These cannot be produced by effort. They are pure gift.
The shift from contentos to gustos, from consolation to delight, from acquired to infused, is the shift from the one percent to the ninety-nine. And it is precisely the same shift that Ananta describes when he speaks of the difference between the cooking and the eating.
The Sufi Tawfiq
In the Islamic tradition, this principle bears the name tawfiq: divine enablement. The word comes from a root meaning agreement, harmony, reconciliation. It signifies that the very ability to obey God, to pray, to remember, to turn toward the Beloved, is itself a gift from God. You cannot produce tawfiq through effort. But without effort, tawfiq has no occasion to manifest.
The classical theologian al-Taftazani defines tawfiq as "Allah's creating the act in the servant at the time of his will, along with health and enablement." God creates the act. Not merely permits it. Creates it. And yet the servant wills it. Both are true simultaneously. The paradox is not resolved. It is lived.
Ananta lives inside this paradox without trying to resolve it: "Prayer is work, a cooperative work of ourselves and God. The letting go part we have to do; His work in our hearts He has to do."
The letting go part we have to do. His work in our hearts He has to do.
There is a beautiful symmetry here. Our part is letting go. His part is working in our hearts. We think the hard part is the effort. But the truly hard part is the letting go. Releasing the grip. Ceasing to take credit. Ceasing to measure progress. Ceasing to ask, "Am I there yet?"
The Danger of Accomplishment
Theophan states the danger without ambiguity: "It is most important to realize that prayer is always God-given; otherwise we may confuse the gift of grace with some achievement of our own."
This confusion is more than a philosophical error. It is the seedbed of spiritual pride, which is the most subtle and most dangerous of all the obstacles on the path. The practitioner who believes they have achieved effortless prayer through their own effort has built a throne in the very place where God intended a cushion for the guest.
Ananta is gentle about this, but firm: "Nobody can ever say, 'I know how to pray.'" Nobody. Not the saint. Not the sage. Not the one who has prayed for fifty years without interruption. The moment you say "I know how to pray," you have stepped out of prayer and into the ego's trophy room.
Prayer is not something you know. It is something that knows you. It is something that finds you, holds you, breathes through you. Your only contribution is to stop resisting. And even the stopping, as we have seen, is itself a gift.
Theophan balances the account with a final, decisive statement: "It is not one's own efforts that lead to the goal, because without grace, efforts produce little. Nor does grace without effort bring what is sought. Grace acts in us and for us in our efforts."
Grace acts in us and for us in our efforts. Every effort you make is already held by grace. Every prayer you offer is already being offered through you. There is no moment on this journey when you are alone. The One whose Name you carry has been carrying you all along.
But the path is not without peril. Precisely because the gifts of this movement are so precious, they can be misunderstood, misused, or mistaken for something they are not. The next chapter turns to these dangers: spiritual pride, the dark night, and the temptation to mistake a passing experience for the final destination.
From Ananta's Satsangs
"Nobody can ever say, 'I know how to pray' or 'I know how to inquire, I'm a master at it,' because that would mean that the outcome is in their hands, in their control. All of us have that experience that one day we pray, one time we remember God, and we are in a deep bliss. Another day we pray, and it's just mechanical. We can never know. And to humbly acknowledge that is important because the effectiveness of prayer is Grace."
"Prayer is work, a cooperative work of ourselves and God. The letting go part we have to do; His work in our hearts He has to do. We cannot do it without God, and God will not do it without us. Why? Because He's made us free to either love Him or not. Prayer is both a gift of Grace and a determined response on our part."
"Don't get into all that. God is not to get benefit here. The benefits that come are his gifts, his grace, but they don't become entitlements. What is very reassuring is St. John of the Cross saying that don't think it is a higher prayer if you were able to sit undistracted for the complete hour. He said that it is a higher prayer where you took that step of love of returning back to God in that difficult time of prayer."
-- What is Contemplation? - Thomas Merton - 17th January 2025
"Be a nobody in your eyes. Let God be the only somebody in your life. Then you will see the beauty of his love, his light, his grace. What gets in the way? Only our mind. Only our ideas of what life should be like. Only the next thought. Just let it go."
-- Dive Deep Within, Because There Is No Time to Waste - 15th May 2024