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Most Catholics know with certainty that the sacraments
give grace. The problem is that once they have said that, they are not
sure what exactly it means: If I got some grace last Sunday, what was it
and how do I know I got some? I don’t feel that different and life seems
to go on much the way it did before. So if I have grace, how do I know
it?
It’s a real problem. People sometimes feel cheated. They dragged themselves
out of bed on Sunday, cleaned up the half-asleep kids, and missed the start
of the big game on television just to hear some boring sermon. Is this
grace? Shouldn’t I at least feel all warm and fuzzy for a while? But no,
as soon as I get back to the parking lot, some jerk cuts us off, we get
caught in a long line of cars, the kids are complaining because they are
hungry, and I can’t get the game on the radio.
Don’t feel alone. Even theologians have this problem. In a wonderful
article, the German Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner speaks of just this feeling,
leaving out the football game, of course.
We are all familiar with it, this “everyday”. The first point
to be recognized about it is simply that it belongs to the realm of the
profane. When we return from the communion rail we like to join our hands
and maintain an attitude of recollection. Very soon, so it seems, we find
ourselves leaving the sphere of the sacred constituted by the presence
of God to go out into the world, the sphere of the earthly, the sphere
of the everyday, the profane, the unhallowed, into the realm of business,
the world of multitudinous affairs, cares, struggles, in which general
confusion prevails throughout and all words are lost and drowned in the
universal clamor; where everyone pursues his own desires and aims, where
the struggle for life is waged, where there is no common understanding,
where factions are the order of the day, where the most divergent views
are maintained, where there is hunger and care and inward loneliness.
And over and above all these factors which are inherent
in the very nature of the everyday there is also its toilsomeness, the
attitudes characteristic of it of indifference, lovelessness, unvarying
routine, the stresses which it imposes on us, the unrewardingness of it,
the monotony of our voices, the weariness of nerves, our hearts, our spirits,
the experience of being overworked, the experience that the inner resources
of our hearts are exhausted (“The Eucharist and Our Daily Lives,” in Theological
Investigations [New York: Herder and Herder, 1981]: 7:211–266).
Amazing, isn’t it? It sounds like Rahner actually has worked in our offices.
At least he seems to know the people we work with. We’d know it anywhere,
our old friend “the everyday,” which seems so unlike anything that the
sacraments offer or that any of the great Christians lived through. Where
is the grace in all that mess?
As is often the case with Christian language, Christian themselves do
not always know the original meaning of their own language. “Grace” sounds
like it ought to be some “thing.” It ought to come in cartons or pints
or quarts or something. When you participate in a sacrament, you would
get a “fill-up” and feel good. Grace, however, doesn’t actually mean any
“thing” like that. “Grace” is a transliteration of a Latin word, in this
case, gratia. The Latin word gratia originally meant either
a gift or the thanks given for a gift. The word continues to be used in
the latter sense in both Spanish, gracias, and in Italian, grazie.
So when Christians writing in Latin spoke about the “graces” (gratias)
given to Christians by God, they meant anything that God gives us for free
(gratis). It wasn’t any particular thing in itself; rather, it was
anything that we received from God that we didn’t deserve.
The big gift of God, “sanctifying grace,” is salvation. Nobody deserves
to be saved; God loved us and God saved us, and so we get salvation for
free. But we get a lot of other things for free, too: the universe, our
own birth, the world we live in. These are all free gifts from God and
therefore “grace.” If you really think about it, most of life is “graced.”
Not everyone is crazy about the idea of grace, of course. Some people
don’t think that they ever got anything for free. Whatever they got, they
earned or deserved. They don’t owe anybody anything. They are self-made.
Of course this is a lie: at the very least, no one is their own parent;
at most, it takes a tremendous amount of hubris to think you deserve sunsets,
soft summer nights, and decent health. Still other people feel horribly
guilty if they think that they have gotten something for free. When it
comes to grace, this, too, is a mistake. The proper response to grace is
thanks, not guilt. Guilt implies that somehow people ought to deserve grace.
The point of grace is that it’s free, undeserved, and wonderful. Appreciation
and certainly also enjoyment seem more in order. It would be insulting
to God, for instance, to say, “Well, okay, thanks, God, for this great
day, but I’m not going to enjoy it because I don’t deserve it.” What ingratitude.
Of course you don’t deserve it; that’s not the point of a gift.
The one thing that no one, not even the most arrogant, can refuse to
recognize as grace is love. You can’t buy love, you can’t deserve love,
you can’t inherit love. You just get it. One day it happens in the lives
of most people that we realize that our parents love us even though we
just crashed the car, or didn’t come home on time, or married that jerk
they warned us about. Our parents loved us even though we didn’t deserve
it. It is a wonderful moment. Of course, sometimes it is not your parents
who first show you that kind of love: it’s a friend, your spouse, your
child. But it happens, and it changes everything, because by at least that
one person you are loved for who you are, despite all your faults. Such
love is by definition undeserved and free. It is grace and, from a Christian
perspective, it is divine: God is love, and anyone who lives in love lives
in God, and God in her or him (1 Jn 4:16).
Psychologists tell us that unless that wonderful moment happens and
we realize that someone truly loves us, we can never love. We cannot love
until and unless we are loved. Christians, of course, believe that God
loves everyone, but God’s love is experienced through other people: No
one has ever seen God; but as long as we love one another, God will live
in us, and God’s love will be complete in us (1 Jn 4:12). Christians ought
to be the tangible means by which the love of God is experienced.
The love of God that is grace, then, actually exists when the lives
of people are touched. When a hungry person is fed, when a homeless person
is sheltered, when a broken person is healed, when couples commit to each
other in love — each of these is grace, and that is God’s love at work
in the world. Salvation takes place right before people’s eyes. If this
is grace, then how do the sacraments give grace? Insofar as Christian rituals
celebrate an active life of selflessness, they give grace. Insofar as Christian
rituals strengthen the sick, pardon sinners, heal the broken, they give
grace. Insofar as they celebrate and strengthen the Christian commitment
to a life of maturation in selfless love, they give grace. Insofar as they
celebrate and support a loving friendship and caring family life, they
give grace.
But what about Rahner’s point: why don’t the sacraments help us overcome
the everyday, transcend it, take us to another realm where we can always
experience love? Well, according to Rahner, it is precisely the everyday
that is the grace God has given us. The everyday saves us because it is
in the everyday that love takes place. To quote Rahner once more:
This is why we must realize that the first and primary significance
of the Eucharist is not that it provides us with strength for our everyday
lives, that is nourishment to help us by constantly renewing our strength
and so enabling us to endure the “everyday”, though of course, it does
have this function also. But the Eucharist as first and foremost the holy
deed wrought by God upon us itself assigns the everyday to us as our task.
Viewed in its ultimate perspective the position is not that the everyday
is simply something which is assigned to us by chance, by the laws of the
earth and of our own lives to be our lot, and then God intervenes, so to
say from outside the situation and helps us to endure this alien and godless
situation in which we are placed. This is not the state of affairs at all.
At basis it is rather that this ‘everyday’ itself is something that is
given to us by God in Jesus Christ through the bond which we have with
him in the grace of baptism and the giving of it is constantly renewed
in the sacrament of the altar.
What we celebrate in the Eucharist is the ordinary made extraordinary.
The bread is ordinary; the wine is ordinary. They become extraordinary.
More importantly, it is our ordinariness that become extraordinary. And
the miracle is that it is the ordinary things that save us. Our whole lives
are graced when transformed by the love of God that is grace. All the sacraments,
in one way or the other, celebrate the way in which the ordinary, boring,
and weary experience of life is transformed by the love that goes into
it. Dragging yourself to work each day because you love your family. Scrimping
to get the kids through school. Working overtime to pay the medical bills
for Mom and Dad as they get older. All of it is tough stuff, but because
of love, we would not really want it any other way. To paraphrase the great
mystic Julian of Norwich, all pain can be changed to joy by love.
Of course, this is the great lesson of the life, death, and resurrection
of Jesus. From one point of view, Jesus was God, and it was wonderful and
noble, and all that stuff, okay. On the other hand, he was a human and
a flop by human standards. His friends deserted him. His mom was humiliated.
His plans failed. His career was shot. And it is pretty clear that he knew
this and didn’t like it. In the garden he sweat blood, and on the cross
he cried out that God had forsaken him. Judging by most standards, he was
right. There is good evidence to show that Jesus didn’t know how it was
going to come out three days later, and he was not pleased. And let’s not
get too down on his friends. After all, from the perspective of Good Friday,
it certainly seemed wise to cut their losses and clear out. Again to quote
Rahner:
This Good Friday, was the futility of life, the hatred of enemies,
betrayal of friends, loneliness, remoteness from God, an exposure of the
stupidity of human aims and designs and death. What is all this? Precisely,
as we may express it, the concentrated, the purest essence of what is apportioned
to us again and again gradually and piecemeal in our everyday lives.
Jesus’s death is the concentrated essence of the everyday, and it is his
death to which we are united every time we share in the Eucharist. In fact,
we pledge ourselves to it! Why do we do such a dumb thing? It seems that
just as Jesus’s death was salvific, so is our everyday. This everyday saves
us — or rather, our accepting of it does. After all, this is God’s will
for us. This is what God gave us. The everyday takes great courage, and
this is the assignment God has given us to help us grow in faith and hope
and love.
But we all know the end. Jesus rose from the dead. The dull, boring,
killing part of the everyday was transformed once and for all into the
joy that love brings, and only the joy remains. Now that is a gift! We
know we have it when we love and are loved despite all evidence to the
contrary. So hug your kids, your parents, your spouse, your friend. When
they smile and hug you back, God is hugging you. And you will know, for
sure, that you have grace. ML
Dr. Gary Macy is the John Nobili, SJ, Professor of Theology at Santa
Clara University. He has published numerous articles and 10 books, including
The
Banquet’s Wisdom: A Short History of the Theologies of the Lord’s Supper,
2nd ed. (Akron, Ohio: The Order of St. Luke’s Press, 2005). His most
recent book, The Hidden History of Women’s Ordination: Female Clergy
in the Medieval West, has just been published by Oxford University Press.
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