"If you’re a reporter — you, right now — you are going to have 1,000 pieces on the table at the end of this. And you’re going to try to make it into something that sings. And it’s going to be clunky, and it’s not going to work, and there’s going to be something wrong, and you won’t be able to figure out what it is. And you’re going to work, and you’re going to work, and you’re going to work, and then suddenly it’s going to be right. It will go from being the million-sided polygon into a circle. That pop can only occur, in religious terms, in grace, which is to say “gratis,” which is to say for free. You work and you work and you work at something that then happens by itself. Writers feel this all the time, artists feel this all the time, and it’s especially true of political movements. When I was reporting on the Polish workers’ movement in the ’80s, those people had been working on that stuff for 20 years and nothing had happened, and then suddenly it happened. And you ask them why it happened, and they say, “I don’t know.” It would not have happened without all that prior work, but the work didn’t cause it to happen. There was all that work and something more. And that something more is for free. Another way of putting it is it’s preparation for receptivity. If you hadn’t have worked, you wouldn’t be prepared to receive the gift that comes. When I think of grace, I think it’s the thing that happens over and above all the other stuff you did that suddenly makes something shimmer and glow."

Lawrence Weschler, Asked and Answered, T Magazine blog