The Inevitability of God's Grace

I knew that title would get you. In fact some of you are already hopping mad over my presumption (aren't you--just admit it). But as usual with something so deceptively direct it is--well deceptively direct.

Sometimes you read something one way and it doesn't say anything at all to you, but you hear the same truth expressed a different way and suddenly it all comes clear. So with this passage:

from The Living Flame of Love
St. John of the Cross quote in:
Carmelite Prayer:A Tradition for the 21st Century
ed. Fr. Keith J Egan

. . . when the soul free itself of all things and attains to emptiness and dispossession concerning them, which is equivalent to what it can do of itself, it is impossible that God fail to do his part by communicating himself to it, at least silently and secretly. It is more impossible than it would be for the sun not to shine on clear and uncluttered ground.

Allow me to trace the line of thought that made of this seeming nothing the stuff of epiphanies. God's grace and desire for us is like sunlight--it falls on everything and everyone equally. We are all people who live in a deep wood, building our houses and keeping close to ourselves, protecting ourselves from all interference. Some few of us tire of this protected living, tire of the darkness of the self-contained gloominess of our own fabricated identities. We wander abroad far from the things that own us--mostly in shadow but occasionally in the dappled light of a thinner part of the wood. And then, all of a sudden, we stumble into a wide open green, no trees, no houses, no barriers, no protection. We are immersed in sunlight, completely enveloped in light. For some the experience is too intense and there is a retreat to the cool darkness of the wood. But for others, the light is the source of endless delight and a sort of rueful torment--that it had taken so long to emerge into the light.

God's grace bathes us all. It provides whatever light there is in the dark wood. And when we give up our love of darkness and seek to emerge, we will suddenly discover ourselves whole and entire in the midst of Him.