Misunderstood grace

But stay with them for a while, for these questions lead into the mystery of a love that searched out and found such an unlikely soul as Dysmas. It is the same love that found us, and if we don't think that we are equally unlikely candidates for salvation, we have not begun to understand the meaning of grace. - Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, Death on a Friday Afternoon

With apologies for not even getting past a single sentence in this book between my last entry and this one, but this gets to the root of a major obstacle to our being vessels of grace.  I cannot write about this without also acknowledging Fr. Robert Spitzer, and I've previously written at length about the coincide-ence of these two wonderful approaches to that bring us to the same  point.

We seem to easily internalize the prevalent idea that we're saved because we're good - and the implication that others are not saved because they are evil or, at least, not good, not good enough, not as good as we are - much more easily than the idea that any degree of goodness in us is due to God's grace at work in our lives. We think of our goodness as an attribute that is ours because of our makeup, our personality, our virtue. No matter how much we say that any good thing that is ours is a gift from God, including an exhaustive list of our good traits, we insist on giving ourselves the credit for most of it.

It's easy to see why we feel this way with regard to decisions we make. When we decide not to have an affair, not to steal, to help a stranger, to feed someone who is hungry, to help build someone a home, it is natural - it is in our nature - and it is important to realize that we could have chosen otherwise. And yet, for someone living by grace, it is equally important but not natural that we realize that these decisions we make and efforts we put forth are also God's gift to us, which we accept and receive by choosing to participate in God's grace.

It isn't me. It's grace. Yes, I must choose to participate with it, yet that is still grace.

If I have been saved, I am no more deserving of it than was Dysmas. We think like the laborers in the parable who toiled all day in the field only to receive the same wage as those who started late in the day. The job was a blessing, and while it offends our sense of fairness for another to receive the same reward for far less labor, we've forgotten that God's love is such a great reward that we could never earn it with any amount of labor!

(Of course, St. Dysmas is an easy comparison. Maybe we should choose someone we can all agree was truly and utterly despicable, whose crimes against humankind cannot be denied. If I will not do for an example, perhaps Adolph Hitler or Josef Stalin might. No, I'm not suggesting that any evil I have done was as great as theirs, though it might be true that I should have been better equipped not to do mine.)

And neither am I, because of my failings, less a candidate for salvation, by the same logic. I mustn't take that as freedom to do whatever I want, but rather should find that considering such a gift causes me to want to respond in ways that please the Giver.

Grace means that I accept a love that is greater than I could ever deserve, and freely offer it to everyone else because I recognize it was offered to me freely, as well.