We must remain vigilant

"Saint Paul, in his Letter to the Romans, tells us that just as sin came into the world through one man, so righteousness comes into the world through one man; that through one act of disobedience, all sinned, so through one act of obedience, all will become righteous. Now, it is not quite as simple as that. On the one hand, it is true that because Adam sinned, every single person born into the world - except Our Lady, conceived without sin - is conceived with Original Sin. It is not something that we have a choice in; it is something that is passed on. It is something that we receive as an inheritance from our first parents. And so it is truly the case that every single person is born into sin because of the disobedience of one.

Where the difference comes is that the obedience of Christ is enough to more than make up for all sin. But that one has to be a choice. In other words, we have no choice with regard to Original Sin, but we have to make a choice with regard to grace. Grace abounds and it is there to make up for all sin, and even more. But it is not simply automatic. It is not like Original Sin, where everybody who is born has it; rather, it is something that we have to make a choice about.

Therefore, the Lord tells us what that is going to look like for us. When we choose Christ, we have to make some adjustments in our lives. He tells us that we have to be like servants awaiting the master's return from a wedding. We do not know when the Master is going to arrive to call each one of us. We do not know when He is going to come back the second time. It seems pretty evident (if we look at it from our perspective now) that He probably did not come in the first or second watch. So we are probably into the third watch by now. It is getting late and the Lord is delayed in coming, if you will, therefore we have to make sure that we are vigilant on His arrival. We have to make sure that we do not say, "Well, since the Master is delayed in His return, then we can eat and drink and abuse the servants (and do all the other things that He talks about in another Gospel) because we do not know where He is. We do not know when He is coming." We were ready if He would have come at a certain time, but maybe the world is not so ready anymore. We need to be very careful that we maintain that vigilance, that we know we are simply waiting for the Master and we need to be prepared for when He comes.

Once we make the choice to say, "Yes, I want to be part of that righteousness of Christ. I want to accept and to receive the grace that He has won for me," it is not enough just to be able to say that once. Once we say that, then we need to live according to that grace. That means to maintain the virtue, to remain vigilant waiting for the Master to return. That is a daily situation - every moment of every day. For us who believe, for those who have made that choice, now we need to live the choice that we have made.

The grace is there and Saint Paul tells us that the grace is there so that we can reign with Him. If we are going to reign with Him, while we share in that reign even in this life, it is ultimately in the next. And the only way that is going to happen is if we remain vigilant. If the Master finds us doing our duty when He returns, if He finds us ready to open the door immediately when He comes and knocks, then we will be blessed. He tells us that He will put on an apron, seat us at table, and proceed to wait on us. That is, to seat us in the heavenly banquet and to take care of everything.

In the meantime, we are His servants. He has given us a job to do and we are expected to do it. If He seems to delay in coming, we still know exactly what our job is and we need to keep doing it. Then, when the Master arrives, if He finds that we have been doing our work, that we are on duty, that we continue to do the work and He finds us doing what we should when He arrives, blessed will those servants be."

-- From a homily by Fr Robert Altier, ocds (23 October 2001)

** Fr Robert Altier is one of the holiest priest I've ever met. He used to be associate pastor at St Agnes Catholic Church in St Paul, Minnesota. I remember many years ago, if you went to Confession to him, you could expect to wait in line an hour, sometimes more, in the middle of the week. His homilies, never prepared in advanced, were always a spiritual treat for hungry souls. Many, many people have benefited from his sound advice, charitable admonitions, and humility.

The grace of the moment is a very beautiful thing

"The grace of the moment is a very beautiful thing. It comes with each duty, or pleasure, or fresh effort of any kind, and it is exactly proportionate to the purpose for which it is given. We shall often find, for instance, that, at the end of a long piece of work, we suddenly begin to go very much faster and with an ease which is quite new. We could not imagine ourselves beginning any set project at that pace, it would seem fantastic for the start, and still less could we maintain it through all the weary middle. This is quite simply the grace of the end, that unconscious crescendo which carries us to a successful conclusion and is a matter of both supernatural and psychological tension, of pleasure at the achievement of a satisfactory effort - a last spurt so to speak.

So it is for most things in life, and one would love to thing that one might have the grace to die to a Crescendo Fortissimo, as befits one going to meet Eternal Love, and not a Rellentando, as is sometimes the fate, one fears, of those who have habitually wasted their grace during life. It is worth thinking of, perhaps.

We get grace for each fresh thing, fresh turn of events, trial, duty, pleasure, effort; but instead of acting upon it at once, how often we try, by our plans and our home-made rules, and unconscious self-will, to construct, as it were, a reservoir, with pipes all over the place, to hold it. It is never of any avail for, as a matter of fact, we can neither store our actual grace nor postpone it; it is given us now, for the thing we have to do to-day, at this very hour. All we can do, if we do not use it, is to lose it. It is not applicable to anything else, for that other thing, when it comes, will require its own special grace, which again will vary with a precise and delicate variability straight from God. We must quite simply use our grace: that is the only thing to do if we want to live continually at full pitch spiritually. To take the grace of the moment for the moment's work, and - as far as possible, even in the perfectly ordinary Christian life - let the work be primarily the work of God. We have to live, of course, and most of us have to work for our living; but God knows that a great deal better than we do, and He is not likely to make the achievement of the one clash with the achievement of the other.

There is, however, one dishonesty into which it is never permissible to fall under any circumstances: and that is to use God's grace for our own ends. That is a theft which is unworthy of us and which, in the long run, will surely never bring with it anything but pain."

-- Catch Us Those Little Foxes by A Carmelite Nun

The most sublime grace: transformation into God through charity

"Ordinary graces make up the essential factor in the development of the spiritual life right up to its full maturity. Passive purifications and the partial progressive transformations, which mark the development of the soul, are ordinary graces, that is to say, normal and to be expected in the process of sanctification. From this point of view, the most sublime grace, of transformation into God through charity, remains an ordinary grace.

Those graces can be called extraordinary which, strictly speaking, are not necessary, because they do not concern the substance of the soul's progress. You could call them accessories. They are useful helps for its growth, acting sometimes like signposts or messages which bear a mission, or exist at other times in order to encourage the soul in its simple ascent or, again, to bring it acknowledgement in the eyes of the people of God. In the past, attention was focused almost entirely upon this kind of grace, especially when it assumed perceptible mnifestations, that is to say everything which is understood by mystical phenomena, such as visions, locutions, levitations, etc."

-- Thérèse, The Little Child of God's Mercy by Angel de les Gavarres

Grace in the midst of turmoil

"Actual graces are acts of the divine will; it will be enough, therefore, for God, in order to manifest these graces to souls, to make use of the means through which His will is known to us, namely, Divine Providence.

It could be objected that not all that happens within the scope of Providence is an actual grace, at least for the reason that many things are simply the permissive will of God, while grace involves the will of good pleasure. However, the bottom falls out of the objection if we consider that the acceptance of all of Providence is something desired by God as obligatory for us.

This acceptance by us is, then, what God desires of us, and on our part there results a filial obligation. However, God does not impose any obligation upon us without offering us the grace to fulfill it. From this it follows that every event, even though it only be permitted by Divine Providence, is for us a real and objective offer of actual grace. Here, finally, we begin to see the full richness of the bold assertion of St Therese of the Child Jesus: Everything is a grace.

This is also the thought of St Paul: 'And we know that to them that love God all things work together unto good;' and St Thomas, commenting on the words of the Apostle adds the note: 'even sin.' This may seem disconcerting, but even short reflections shows that it is not, if one considers the mysterious wisdom with which God permits us to be cast down that so we may be brought to humility and prayer. In this soil His grace will bring perfection and love to full flower."

-- Everything is a Grace by Fr Anastasius of the Holy Rosary, ocd