Grace is the sole property of God. It distinguishes the quality of God's love from human love. But then, how does grace become operative in the world? What is the process? Admittedly, those are large and complicated questions about which volumes have and will be written. . . .
Still, one simple answer, and wondrous, is that God's grace operates in the world quite independently of us. Prayer is one way of attempting to focus on grace, to pay attention to it, to praise it. The French mystic Simone Weil is right in saying, "Perfect attention is prayer." Surely it is true that any attempts to be attentive, however imperfect, are also prayers. Imagination is crucial to paying attention, for attention is far more than observation. Imagination involves penetrating something, or being open to being penetrated by something, in order to sense its meaning, its possibilities, its depths, its "story."
Another simple answer, and equally wondrous, is that praying itself is part of the process by which grace becomes operative in the world. The prayer becomes a participating point of entry and expansion of grace, so that Augustine is also right in saying, "Without God, we cannot; without us, God will not."
— Ted Loder, Guerrillas of Grace