GRACE

Last night I did a study on the topic of "grace". Sometimes we can think that grace is something we can obtain more of, but we cannot. Here is what I discovered about God's loving grace.

When we speak about grace, we have to remember that it is not an "it" but a living relationship. It is not "out there" (to be gotten more of) but "in here," in my being, in my heart-head-body person.

God is love. His business is saving, healing, forgiving, comforting, happily being with us.

Hell is the non-acceptance of this love, grace, healing- a state we place ourselves in by rejecting God's love.

It is easy to see how human beings take advantage of God's love. Pretty soon it is no longer God's generosity, but our "rights." How dare God not do this or that for us? Why doesn't he come running, like a servant, when we press his button? (Actually, he does.)

Because of this uncreaturely assuming of "rights" before God, the Church has always emphasized the graciousness of grace in two ways.

First, the Church insistently reminds us that God acts with total freedom. It is God's choice to make us the special children we are. Second, he has gone further than we think. We cannot (and do not need to) earn God's saving grace. That is why it's called grace. It's free. God willed to share, not just any kind of happiness, but his own. He has made us capable of face-to-face, person-to-person communion with him on his level.

God enters into the very being of those who accept his offer. He possesses us int the most gentle, yet the most generous, of ways. To those who reject him he is still like the all-surrounding atmosphere, trying to get "in" at any possible opening. He will not intrude. He waits, pressing gently all the while.

"Here I stand, knocking at the door. If anyone hears me calling and opens the door, I will enter his house and have supper with him, and he with me." -Revelation 3:20

God Transforms Us
So, what happens to persons who respond to God's offer of himself? We have "sanctifying grace," which "inheres" in us as a permanent gift. It is not a "substance", but a quality. We are raised to the supernatural life: we are adopted children of God, temples of the Holy Spirit, co-heirs with Christ. We are changed in our very being. We are transformed, transfigured, into a new creation. If we persevere to the end, we will see God face-to-face.

Whether we realize it or not, we know how God loves us by the way others love us. (The greatest tragedy is therefore the absence of love.) We open ourselves to God's love through faith. Faith means believing God and believing in God, trusting God with my life. It means that I take God's word for who he is. There is a space of darkness across which God calls me to come in trust.

Realization of the meaning of this relationship is my lifelong task. Sanctifying grace is not a kind of ticket to heaven that I can whip out when I die. Rather I am called to and given a loving relationship with God.

Jesus is the gracious God made visable so that I can see and hear and touch and taste and smell the out-straining love of God. The one Jesus is both gracious God and graced man. What happened to the human Jesus is the sign and promise of what the Father does for us. In Jesus we understand ourselves.

Jesus is the pattern for all of humanity- the Eternal Son joined to one human nature and therefore to all human nature, inseperably, forever. Jesus was the model God used in creating human beings. All of this that has been said above about God's desire to share himself is perfectly realized in the union of divine and human nature in Jesus. And we are Jesus' brothers and sisters. [How cool!]


Jesus- Closed to Sin; Open to Grace

Part of God's eternal vision was the sin of humankind, our turning away from his gentle offer of total life. Jesus is therefore etenally destined to be Savior. He appeared not only as the "firstborn of all creation," but also "the firstborn of the dead."

Jesus shared everything possible with us- except our sinfulness. But he shared other tragic results of sin.

All this evil bore down on Jesus. Unlike sinners, he had not embraced it with his freedom. He was pure, even though suffering the tragedy his brother Adam had brought upon the family.

Jesus was perfectly graced. That is, he was totally open, in his mind and heart and body, to the inflowing of the Father's creative love. He lived the life of God, not just in his eternal divine nature, but in his everyday human acts and in the constant attitude that those actions expressed. As a human being, Jesus was "full of grace and truth."

If we are to understand our graced lives, we must look at Jesus and let him be Lord, that is, the power in our lives.

Because God is Life, all who allow him to possess them become newborn into a way of thinking and loving and acting and being which "images" God's own life.

A graced life is one illumined with the light of God's truth- the Word in Jesus- and empowered by God's own love. A graced life is that of a branch bearing fruit in charity because it is joined to the Vine.

We learn from God how to please God. Beneath and within all the relationships of life, as well as its pain and suffering, there is a consciousness of One present within. All life is graced. Everything that happens is a means of grace. God speaks to us, his beloved, in a million ways, and our loving relationship with him transforms the quality of our lives.



Excerpted from "Catholic Update's Grace: Our Love Relationship with God, by Leonard Foley, O.F.M."