Dear Father, now that we are celebrating the “Year of Grace” in Australia, can you just remind me what grace is?
There are two main types of grace – sanctifying and actual: in order to do justice to your question, I will speak now of the first and leave the second for next week.
The word grace in general refers to that freely given, a gift. For example, we say “by the grace of God” meaning by the gift God gives us or refer to an ex gratia payment, meaning a payment not due in justice but freely given.
The Latin word gratia has also come to mean thanksgiving for God’s gift.
In this sense, we say Grace before and after meals: we thank God and ask him to bless us and the gift of the food.
Likewise, the Spanish for thank you is gracias and the Italian, grazie.
The Latin for thanksgiving is gratiarum actio, literally action of graces.
So the two meanings of gift and thanksgiving for the gift, which are closely related, are expressed by the same word.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church sums up the meaning of grace in general: “Grace is favour, 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” (CCC 1996).
What exactly is sanctifying grace? The Catechism sums it up succinctly: “Grace is a participation in the life of God” (CCC 1997).
That is, in addition to the natural life we receive from our parents, we have supernatural life, a sharing in God’s own life, the life of the Blessed Trinity, in our soul.
This is an awesome gift, completely undeserved. It gives us an extraordinary dignity.
The Catechism describes it like this: “It introduces us into the intimacy of Trinitarian life: by Baptism the Christian participates in the grace of Christ, the Head of his Body” (CCC 1997).
This life of God in the soul has a number of aspects. Through it, the three divine persons come to dwell in the soul in what we call the indwelling of the Blessed Trinity. Jesus himself announces this in the Last Supper (cf Jn 14:17, 23).
Also, we become not mere creatures but the very children of God: “As an ‘adopted son’ he can henceforth call God ‘Father,’ in union with the only Son” (CCC 1997).
And in what can only be termed a great mystery, we become in some way divinised or deified, “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Pet 1:4).
That is, through grace we share in the very nature of God. All this is truly the beginning of holiness.
As the Catechism says, “The grace of Christ is the gratuitous gift that God makes to us of his own life, infused by the Holy Spirit into our soul to heal it of sin and to sanctify it.
It is the sanctifying or deifying grace received in Baptism. It is in us the source of the work of sanctification” (CCC 1999).
We receive sanctifying grace for the first time in Baptism and it remains in the soul as an “habitual grace”, a stable quality, as long as we do not lose it through mortal sin.
It has been called the inchoatio vitae aeternae, the beginning of eternal life, which is destined to reach its fulfilment in the eternal life of heaven.
What practical consequences do we derive from this momentous gift?
First, since this grace is truly sanctifying, we do well during this Year of Grace, and always, to strive to grow in holiness, in sanctity.
What does this mean in real terms? Essentially, it means to grow in love for God: through regular times of prayer which are real encounters with God, times of loving conversation with him.
Also, it means making an effort to receive the Sacraments of Penance and the Eucharist more regularly since they increase the life of grace in us and help us to grow in the love of God.
And always, it means striving to do the will of God in all things since, as Jesus says, “If a man loves me, he will keep my word” (Jn 14:23).
What is more, through our good works, we receive more grace.
Naturally, it means making a great effort not to commit sin, especially mortal sin, since sin offends God who loves us so much.
And when the soul is “dead” through mortal sin, we cannot gain merit for our good actions.
So if we commit mortal sin, we should return to God as soon as possible with true contrition through the gateway to grace of the Sacrament of Penance.
In this way the “Year of Grace” can be also a “Year of Holiness”.