Grace and Works: Meditations On The Need For Holiness

Meditations in 1 John: Free Grace and Holiness of Life

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Those who, like ourselves, have had to travel through all the stages of the ascent from sin to holiness leave their example for our encouragement. But while we imitate them we must aspire to Him. Let not thinking end, but turn your meditations to practice. Generally there is to be nothing visionary in our religion.

Hence the abrupt "do. Our religion must not be a barren homage to the saintly qualities of others. What man has been man may be, by the grace of God, even though the man may have been a Paul. Every scriptural ideal of excellence may be realized in practice. The pagan writers had their noble ideals, but nowhere outside the Bible is there such a consummate standard as this.

And then, again, the highest moralists who sate not at the feet of Jesus despaired of their own teaching, imperfect as it was, "unless indeed," as one said, "God should become incarnate to teach us. As thinking must not terminate in itself, so practice must be the diligent regulation of our life according to all the principles of holiness.

There is a sense, indeed, in which our religion from beginning to end is God's work; but the formation of Christian character is our own task under His blessing, and its perfection is conferred upon us, not as a gift simply, but as the seal upon our efforts, and their exceeding great reward. We must work out our own salvation by governing our lives according to these holy principles particularly.

If we would be perfectly true we must act out the truth in thought, word, and deed; so with dignity, etc. There can be no encouragement more mighty than that the God of Peace shall be with us. God will be with us animating our pursuit by the assurance of reconciliation. There is no spirit for the pursuit unless we know that the guilty past is pardoned.

Confronted with God’s holiness

Jesus said that we should let out light shine before men Matthew 5: Our expression of holiness good works , according to Jesus is our light shining. That shows that the holiness of God is marked by a blazing light. When Jesus was transfigured before three of his disciples on a mount, what marked that experience for those disciples was the intense brightness of the cloth.

Brighter than any human can make it, it was unnaturally bright. When confront with the holiness of God what sinful man seeks to do is to run away. When Jesus performed the miracle of a big catch after Peter had fished all night but caught nothing, he reacted by saying Jesus should depart from him, a sinner Luke 5: Is there a relationship between miracle and holiness?

At least in the mind of Peter, the display of miracle by Jesus was a manifestation of his holiness, since he wanted Jesus to depart from him. He felt his holiness contrasted with his sinfulness. Jesus opened the eyes of someone born blind John 9. But while the Pharisees were trying to put a label of sinner on the man who healed someone on the Sabbath day, the one healed lectured them that God only hears the holy. As far as he was concerned the miracle performed on him was the sign of the holiness of Jesus. That means the miracles is a symbol of the holiness of the one performing the healing; it was a maker of the manifestation of the presence of God in his life, at least to the Jewish mind in that time.

Holiness is an heavenly quality. There are the holy angels Matthew The word holy expresses purity; to be holy means pureness; pureness of purpose, thoughts, intention and action. Therefore holiness must have a standard with which it is measured. And God is our standard of holiness, so we were told to be holy as our heavenly father is holy. There has been some confusion in the church concerning what constitutes holiness, where the emphasis should be; the religious-legalistic focus on the externals, while the relationship holiness focused on the thoughts and intents of the heart.

The latter is approved by Jesus, while the former is seen as the foundation for hypocrisy. There is need for holiness in our thoughts, attitudes, motivation, and bent of mind. We are warned against wrath, envy, rancor, lack of self control.

To find the right "way" of prayer, the Christian should consider what has been said earlier regarding the prominent features of the way of Christ , whose "food is to do the will of him who sent him , and to accomplish his work" Jn 4: Jesus lives no more intimate or closer a union with the Father than this, which for him is continually translated into deep prayer. By the will of the Father he is sent to mankind, to sinners. This did not in any way prevent him, however, from also retiring to a solitary place during his earthly sojourn to unite himself to the Father and receive from him new strength for his mission in this world.

On Mount Tabor, where his union with the Father was manifest, there was called to mind his passion cf. Contemplative Christian prayer always leads to love of neighbor, to action and to the acceptance of trials, and precisely because of this it draws one close to God. In order to draw near to that mystery of union with God, which the Greek Fathers called the divinization of man, and to grasp accurately the manner in which this is realized, it is necessary in the first place to bear in mind that man is essentially a creature, 16 and remains such for eternity, so that an absorbing of the human self into the divine self is never possible, not even in the highest states of grace.

However, one must recognize that the human person is created in the "image and likeness" of God, and that the archetype of this image is the Son of God, in whom and through whom we have been created cf. This archetype reveals the greatest and most beautiful Christian mystery: There is otherness in God himself, who is one single nature in three Persons, and there is also otherness between God and creatures, who are by nature different.

Finally, in the Holy Eucharist, as in the rest of the sacraments—and analogically in his works and in his words—Christ gives himself to us and makes us participate in his divine nature, 17 without nevertheless suppressing our created nature, in which he himself shares through his Incarnation.

A consideration of these truths together brings the wonderful discovery that all the aspirations which the prayer of other religions expresses are fulfilled in the reality of Christianity beyond all measure, without the personal self or the nature of a creature being dissolved or disappearing into the sea of the Absolute. This profoundly Christian affirmation can reconcile perfect union with the otherness existing between lover and loved, with eternal exchange and eternal dialogue. God is himself this eternal exchange and we can truly become sharers of Christ, as "adoptive sons" who cry out with the Son in the Holy Spirit, "Abba, Father.

The majority of the great religions which have sought union with God in prayer have also pointed out ways to achieve it. Just as "the Catholic Church rejects nothing of what is true and holy in these religions," 18 neither should these ways be rejected out of hand simply because they are not Christian.

On the contrary, one can take from them what is useful so long as the Christian conception of prayer, its logic and requirements are never obscured. It is within the context of all of this that these bits and pieces should be taken up and expressed anew. Among these one might mention first of all that of the humble acceptance of a master who is an expert in the life of prayer, and of the counsels he gives. Christian experience has known of this practice from earliest times, from the epoch of the desert Fathers.

Such a master, being an expert in " sentire cum Ecclesia ," must not only direct and warn of certain dangers; as a "spiritual father," he has to also lead his pupil in a dynamic way, heart to heart, into the life of prayer, which is the gift of the Holy Spirit. In the later non-Christian classical period, there was a convenient distinction made between three stages in the life of perfection: This teaching has served as a model for many schools of Christian spirituality.

While in itself valid, this analysis nevertheless requires several clarifications so as to be interpreted in a correct Christian manner which avoids dangerous misunderstandings. The seeking of God through prayer has to be preceded and accompanied by an ascetical struggle and a purification from one's own sins and errors, since Jesus has said that only "the pure of heart shall see God" Mt 5: The Gospel aims above all at a moral purification from the lack of truth and love and, on a deeper level, from all the selfish instincts which impede man from recognizing and accepting the Will of God in its purity.

The passions are not negative in themselves as the Stoics and Neoplatonists thought , but their tendency is to selfishness. It is from this that the Christian has to free himself in order to arrive at that state of positive freedom which in classical Christian times was called "apatheia," in the Middle Ages "Impassibilitas" and in the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises "indiferencia.

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Paul who openly uses the word "mortification" of sinful tendencies. Therefore, one has to interpret correctly the teaching of those masters who recommend "emptying" the spirit of all sensible representations and of every concept, while remaining lovingly attentive to God. In this way, the person praying creates an empty space which can then be filled by the richness of God. However, the emptiness which God requires is that of the renunciation of personal selfishness, not necessarily that of the renunciation of those created things which he has given us and among which he has placed us.

There is no doubt that in prayer one should concentrate entirely on God and as far as possible exclude the things of this world which bind us to our selfishness. On this topic St. Augustine is an excellent teacher: However, he continues, do not remain in yourself, but go beyond yourself because you are not God: He is deeper and greater than you.

The great Doctor of the Church recommends concentrating on oneself, but also transcending the self which is not God, but only a creature. God is "deeper than my inmost being and higher than my greatest height. From the dogmatic point of view , it is impossible to arrive at a perfect love of God if one ignores his giving of himself to us through his Incarnate Son, who was crucified and rose from the dead. In Him, under the action of the Holy Spirit, we participate, through pure grace, in the interior life of God. When Jesus says, "He who has seen me has seen the Father" Jn What he means is rather a vision made possible by the grace of faith: This "seeing" is not a matter of a purely human abstraction "abs-tractio" from the figure in which God has revealed himself; it is rather the grasping of the divine reality in the human figure of Jesus, his eternal divine dimension in its temporal form.

A Christian on the Mount

Ignatius says in the Spiritual Exercises , we should try to capture "the infinite perfume and the infinite sweetness of the divinity" n. While he raises us up, God is free to "empty" us of all that holds us back in this world, to draw us completely into the Trinitarian life of his eternal love.

However, this gift can only be granted "in Christ through the Holy Spirit," and not through our own efforts, withdrawing ourselves from his revelation. On the path of the Christian life, illumination follows on from purification, through the love which the Father bestows on us in the Son and the anointing which we receive from him in the Holy Spirit cf. Ever since the early Christian period, writers have referred to the "illumination" received in Baptism.

After their initiation into the divine mysteries, this illumination brings the faithful to know Christ by means of the faith which works through love. Some ecclesiastical writers even speak explicitly of the illumination received in Baptism as the basis of that sublime knowledge of Christ Jesus cf. Any subsequent graces of illumination which God may grant rather help to make clearer the depth of the mysteries confessed and celebrated by the Church, as we wait for the day when the Christian can contemplate God as He is in glory cf.

Finally, the Christian who prays can, if God so wishes, come to a particular experience of union. The Sacraments, especially Baptism and the Eucharist, 26 are the objective beginning of the union of the Christian with God. Upon this foundation, the person who prays can be called, by a special grace of the Spirit, to that specific type of union with God which in Christian terms is called mystical.

Without doubt, a Christian needs certain periods of retreat into solitude to be recollected and, in God's presence, rediscover his path. Nevertheless, given his character as a creature, and as a creature who knows that only in grace is he secure, his method of getting closer to God is not based on any technique in the strict sense of the word.

That would contradict the spirit of childhood called for by the Gospel. Genuine Christian mysticism has nothing to do with technique: There are certain mystical graces , conferred on the founders of ecclesial institutes to benefit their foundation, and on other saints, too, which characterize their personal experience of prayer and which cannot, as such, be the object of imitation and aspiration for other members of the faithful, even those who belong to the same institutes and those who seek an ever more perfect way of prayer.

Besides, the prayer experience that is given a privileged position in all genuinely ecclesial institutes, ancient and modern, is always in the last analysis something personal. And it is to the individual person that God gives his graces for prayer. With regard to mysticism, one has to distinguish between the gifts of the Holy Spirit and the charisms granted by God in a totally gratuitous way. The former are something which every Christian can quicken in himself by his zeal for the life of faith, hope and charity; and thus, by means of a serious ascetical struggle, he can reach a certain experience of God and of the contents of the faith.

As for charisms, St. Paul says that these are, above all, for the benefit of the Church, of the other members of the Mystical Body of Christ cf.

With this in mind, it should be remembered that charisms are not the same things as extraordinary "mystical" gifts cf. It is certain that a charism which bears fruit for the Church, cannot, in the context of the New Testament, be exercised without a certain degree of personal perfection, and that, on the other hand, every "living" Christian has a specific task and in this sense a "charism" "for the building up of the body of Christ" cf.

Human experience shows that the position and demeanor of the body also have their influence on the recollection and dispositions of the spirit. This is a fact to which some eastern and western Christian spiritual writers have directed their attention. Their reflections, while presenting points in common with eastern non-Christian methods of meditation, avoid the exaggerations and partiality of the latter, which, however, are often recommended to people today who are not sufficiently prepared. The spiritual authors have adopted those elements which make recollection in prayer easier, at the same time recognizing their relative value: In prayer it is the whole man who must enter into relation with God, and so his body should also take up the position most suited to recollection.

In some aspects, Christians are today becoming more conscious of how one's bodily posture can aid prayer. Eastern Christian meditation 32 has valued psychophysical symbolism , often absent in western forms of prayer. It can range from a specific bodily posture to the basic life functions, such as breathing or the beating of the heart. The exercise of the "Jesus Prayer," for example, which adapts itself to the natural rhythm of breathing can, at least for a certain time, be of real help to many people. Understood in an inadequate and incorrect way, the symbolism can even become an idol and thus an obstacle to the raising up of the spirit to God.

To live out in one's prayer the full awareness of one's body as a symbol is even more difficult: Some physical exercises automatically produce a feeling of quiet and relaxation, pleasing sensations, perhaps even phenomena of light and of warmth, which resemble spiritual well-being. To take such feelings for the authentic consolations of the Holy Spirit would be a totally erroneous way of conceiving the spiritual life. Giving them a symbolic significance typical of the mystical experience, when the moral condition of the person concerned does not correspond to such an experience, would represent a kind of mental schizophrenia which could also lead to psychic disturbance and, at times, to moral deviations.

That does not mean that genuine practices of meditation which come from the Christian East and from the great non-Christian religions, which prove attractive to the man of today who is divided and disoriented, cannot constitute a suitable means of helping the person who prays to come before God with an interior peace, even in the midst of external pressures. It should, however, be remembered that habitual union with God, namely that attitude of interior vigilance and appeal to the divine assistance which in the New Testament is called "continuous prayer," 34 is not necessarily interrupted when one devotes oneself also, according to the will of God, to work and to the care of one's neighbor.

In fact, genuine prayer, as the great spiritual masters teach, stirs up in the person who prays an ardent charity which moves him to collaborate in the mission of the Church and to serve his brothers for the greater glory of God. From the rich variety of Christian prayer as proposed by the Church, each member of the faithful should seek and find his own way, his own form of prayer.

But all of these personal ways, in the end, flow into the way to the Father , which is how Jesus Christ has described himself. In the search for his own way, each person will, therefore, let himself be led not so much by his personal tastes as by the Holy Spirit, who guides him, through Christ, to the Father.

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