Grace: Beyond the Buzzword
The word “grace” has found its way into the vocabulary of nearly every institution in today’s society. In both religious and secular communities, grace is a common term. It is used to describe miracles, elegance, beauty. It is frequently used in the same breath with words like strength, patience, fortitude, courage, and even happiness or peace. There are even thousands of women named after the word, and from the perspective of an outsider, “grace” seems to be a very important term. The outsider would indeed be correct in thinking that, but for what reason? What is grace, at its deepest level? Why is grace so important? Grace is not merely a term to describe the mysteries of God, and it’s not a term that we can to apply to anything we please.
In simple terms, grace is God’s help. It is the movement of God within our very hearts. As St. Augustine and many of the saints tell us, we do not have the ability to turn our own hearts towards God. God must do it for us.
To St. Augustine, grace is God’s merciful hand entering our hearts and moving us how He sees fit. It is the movement of God within us; the divine hand that directs us towards what is good and away from what is evil. Without God’s help, without His grace, we would not be able to experience Him or the good. They are really the same thing at the end of the day. Without God’s direction in our hearts, without His grace, we are lost. We are living life blindly, following things that should not be followed and caring about things that should not be cared for. That is why grace is crucial to our spiritual survival. It is truly life-saving.
This life-saving grace is often experienced by many through intense conversions. For some people it happens very early, others on their deathbed, but each time it is initiated by God. I’ve always wondered why God allows some people to spend their entire lives in darkness, while others live in Truth from an early age. It’s a mystery of God we will not know until death, but I think a lot of it has to do with original sin. Our fallen nature closes our hearts to what is good. Our desires are contorted and twisted; our hearts like a jigsaw puzzle we can’t seem to wrap our minds around.
As the Church teaches, the sacrament of baptism saves us from this state of original sinfulness. Baptism is the beginning of our intimate relationship with our Creator. It is our first moment of sanctifying grace. It is a mirror to our past, to our original innocence before the fall of man. Through the sanctifying grace of baptism, God is able to restore the original gift of humanity. Through the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ we are able to experience God in an intimate way.
Actual Grace Vs. Sanctifying Grace
To understand grace, it’s important to remember that there are different kinds of grace. Much of the Church’s doctrine expresses that there are two kinds of grace that affect us differently: actual grace and sanctifying grace. To better understand the differences between them, let’s go back to the sacrament of baptism.
As we discussed earlier, man is not able to direct himself towards goodness without the initial pull of God. There must be an initial spark from God in order to awaken man’s desire for good. St. Augustine refers to this initial grace as “prevenient grace.” This prevenient grace, or initial grace, that God bestows upon us is actual grace. They are the promises of God Himself; they are the fruitful and supernatural effects from receiving the sacraments in real time. Every day, every waking hour of our life, we are in great need of strength in order to resist the evils of the world. God is of course deeply aware of this, and we are called to have a deep trust that He will give us all that we need. That His food and drink will endure through the shadow of the valley of death. This trust is built upon the actual grace that God gives to us. It is through this receiving of actual grace, in real time, that leads us to the fruits of sanctifying grace.
Sanctifying grace is the light that shines through us; it is the vessel that holds our treacherous journey in holiness. It is the ebbs and flows of spiritual warfare; the pains and joys of the Christian life. Our constant battle for love amidst a world of darkness. This is the key difference between these two kinds of grace— habit. St. Thomas Aquinas describes sanctifying grace as a habit of the soul (habitus). It is a stable and interior transformation of our souls. It restores our ability to experience the love of God and heals our broken human nature.
Sanctifying grace is a condition of the soul. It can be lost or restored by our doings, and it is maintained through actual grace— the divine guidance by God in real time. Through the sacrament of baptism, which is initiated by actual grace, God pours His love into us as St. Paul describes in Romans 5:5, “The love of God has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit.” This “pouring” of God’s love into our hearts is the beginning of the soul’s transformation through sanctifying grace. It is through actual grace that we are able to maintain this relation of love and light that is what the Church calls sanctifying grace.
We are Saved Through Grace
When a word becomes overly used, it tends to become more and more commonly misused. In today’s culture it is very easy to think that for something to have value it must be something we can see and understand. It must be somehow materialistic, something we can see in front of us or hold in our hands. In this materialistic society, that kind of mindset is what runs the lives of many people. How tragic this is!
Grace is not a material or something we can see or hold, but grace is also not something abstract or broad. It is something that is invisible, but tangible. Something that the human eye cannot detect, but it metaphysically changes our spiritual makeup. It may be invisible, but it is more real than anything in the material world, and unimaginably more valuable! It affects us more so than the world’s most enhanced drugs, more so than the world’s greatest pleasures and riches. It is only through the eyes of faith that we are able to receive grace. It cannot be by our own doing that we receive grace, but it is solely and entirely a gift from God. Grace is God’s outstretched arms reaching deep into a sea of darkness. His loving gaze in constant search for our hearts.
