Thursday, May 22, 2008 // Grace is Gratuitous

Tonight I was riding my bike out by Longview Lake like I have been known to do. It was a beautiful night- earlier today it was stormy, and so it was nice and cool tonight- the perfect night for a bike ride. As I was riding, I had to stop at a place overlooking the lake and just take in the sight. As I was standing there, the wind was blowing through my hair, and it was made me remember a passage out of John 3:

The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.

I couldn't help but imagine the Spirit of God moving near me and within me. As I imagined this, I also thought about how so often I feel like I am in charge of so much of my life, and have so much control, but in reality, I am not in control- I am merely like the grass or the waves moved by the wind.

Psalm 135 says:

The LORD does whatever pleases him,
in the heavens and on the earth,
in the seas and all their depths.

He makes clouds rise from the ends of the earth;
he sends lightning with the rain
and brings out the wind from his storehouses.

And even at the conception of creation the Spirit of God is likened to the wind, hovering over the face of the deep.

Tonight I was appreciating the beauty of creation, and I realized, as I often fail to do, that I had nothing to do with it. It was there because God made it, and despite my delusions of grandeur, it's quite possible that the universe doesn't exist for me.

Any movement I have made towards God is only because God has moved towards me. I owe everything to God, and yet most of the time I live and behave like God owes everything to me.

It's not without reason that the scriptures say:

God opposes the proud
but gives grace to the humble.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church I think brilliantly describes grace:

Grace is favor, the free and undeserved help that God gives us to respond to his call to become children of God, adoptive sons, partakers of the divine nature and of eternal life.

Grace is a participation in the life of God. It introduces us into the intimacy of Trinitarian life: by Baptism the Christian participates in the grace of Christ, the Head of his Body. As an "adopted son" he can henceforth call God "Father," in union with the only Son. He receives the life of the Spirit who breathes charity into him and who forms the Church.

The exciting thing about grace is that God gives it so freely, and not because of me, because I certainly don't deserve it. It blows my mind to think about the Trinity, as I mentioned in my last post. I can't even begin to describe how amazing it is to think that grace allows us to plunge deeper and deeper into that mystery, because, in some way that I will never understand, God has shed his love abroad in our hearts and allows us to share in the divine nature.

I can only pray that the next time the wind blows through my hair as I ride my bike that I will desire to love God more and more and dive deeper into the mystery of the Trinity.