What is Grace?

One of the earliest Christian hymns I learned as a child was the beautifully written “Jesus Loves Me” penned by the Warner sisters.  The words “As He loves me He will stay, close beside me all the way…” inspired a heart of trust in my heavenly Father.

With the passage of time, life changed with the entrance of several heartbreaking events. Belief in the wonder of God’s love because the Bible “tells me so” was thrown into a churning whirlpool.

A parish family lost their little boy after an accidental fall.

I discovered that people were not always kind to my large family of nine.

The crippling loss of my beloved brother James on September 11^th 2001 struck at my faith with a debilitating blow.

The truth that we can suddenly wake up in a hellish world attempting to nullify God’s presence became a visceral reality.

For this reason, the Psalmist proclaims that “God’s love endures forever” (Ps 136).

As the mystery of God’s love is beyond our imagining, it is by the means of grace that we enter its boundlessness.

Along the Christian path, we face tests of faith wounding our capacity to “taste and see” God.  The great theologian Fr. Journet tells us that “to know the depths of God’s love, we should have to be God” He points to ‘grace’ as the sanctifying means to penetrate the mystery of God’s love in experiences of light and shadow.

God works his divine gift of grace in us, without us.

It is our call to encounter the hidden ways the Creator speaks the mystery of his love into the heart.  St. Paul turns our mind to the Holy Spirit which never disappoints our search for God. God’s love is poured out through the Holy Spirit (2 Cor. 5:5). However to possess the indwelling presence of the divine Persons, the human will must first be disposed to the conditions the Holy Spirit requires so that God delivers Himself to the soul.

This is where the human will enters.  We are free to choose the grace led path to see God face to face in Beatitude or turn God’s invitation away. 

He never coerces us to accept his declaration of love.  The freedom to incline our own human will towards heaven is the choice we make every day – God must be first.

Ultimately, it is the pure in heart who will behold God. One can only fathom the encounter.  The apostle John guides us to anticipate a transformation as it happens.

He states “Beloved, now we are children of God, and it has not appeared as yet what we will be. We know that when He appears, we will be like Him, because we will see Him just as He is” (1 Jn 3:2). Attaining the Beatific Vision will be complete when Christ returns.  As children of God we are called to prepare for his coming.  Thus, the relentless training of the will to conform to the image of Christ, by the cleansing acts of grace, effects the transformation of the heart to ultimately reach the Beatific Vision in glory.

It is often easier to abide in the great mystery of God’s love during life’s blissful moments.  Joy can lessen our need to dig deeper into the Source of all love.  Unless we make the choice to “taste and see” God by the Gospel of grace, the buckling storms of life will sweep us out to sea.

Like the compass that keeps the boat from losing its way, grace is God’s divine gift to know that we always stay kept in his love – in the most beautiful and broken moments of our lives.