Living a life of grace is 'hard work'

Did the martyrs and holy men and women live a somewhat different kind of life than we do?  Whenever we read about those wonderful and heroic lives of the saints, the picture that we often get in our heads is that these people were specially set aside by God to manifest a special love for him through the difficult and often painful times that they lived in.  It seemed as if they were born with a certain immunity to the ways of the world, and at the crucial point in time, were able to make that terribly difficult decision to remain steadfast in the faith and an option for God.

Much as I would like to believe it, the opposite is more the reality.  Each person who lives in a state of grace does not do this in any easy way.  To want to be steadfast in your faith, to live as a ‘friend of God’, is to respond positively to God’s constant outreach with purposefulness and a constant awareness.  And this requires a dedication that goes way beyond mere good feelings.  It requires a decision to love, which is the ‘meat and potatoes’ of any good and godly relationship. 

If living a life of grace and holiness is easy, it implies that one does no ‘work’ but is taken up along the currents of goodness without much effort.  But that is hogwash, and makes little sense in our world of the material.  If there is one thing that the spiritual life and the physical world have in common, it is that where there is ‘no pain’, there is ‘no gain’. 

What is the ‘pain’ in a life dedicated to God and holiness?  Among other things, it is generally a life of delayed gratification, a willingness to see the crosses in life as hidden blessings, an openness to letting hardship and defeat in life be teachers of deeper truths, and to not be too absorbed by the fact that our human lives are so imbued with the never ending thirst and yearning for status, companionship, thrill, sex, fame and pleasure.  This is not to say that the holy person is a boring oddball.  He or she just has a ‘graced’ intuition that these things have a very limited happiness value, and that there is a deeper, more lasting and even eternal quality to his or her existence.  Those who practice a religion will know that it is in God.  Those who do not, search far and wide for this.

As I look out at the congregation from the presider’s chair in the sanctuary on a Sunday Mass gathering, a whole sea of faces returns the gaze, and this sea of faces often give me the picture of a great mixture of people who are in different kinds of relationship with God and their fellowman and woman.  The “I-am-bored-and-wish-I-could-be-somewhere-else” look is ever prevalent on the faces of many who perhaps have not yet appreciated that their total presence in Church one hour a week is a very weak response to love God who continues to love us every second of every day. 

Then there are those who are showing signs of fear, anxiety, depression, worry and sadness.  Hoping to find an answer to their perplexities in life, they come to ask God for help. 

The other end of the spectrum are those who have come with a willing heart and a knowing that this is something that is right and good, though it may not always feel good and right.  They don’t only come before God once in a while when the feeling is there, but with a weekly (or even daily) consistency because they know that responding to a divine love (or any other love) is a decision that is very often exclusive from feelings. 

Are we ‘categorised’ in these boxes and remain stuck there?  The truth is that we are a mixture of all of them at various points in our lives, and if we recognize ourselves and know where we stand, we will ask ourselves why, and with God’s grace, want to live for a higher purpose than ourselves and our worries.  It takes a lot to want to live this way, because more and more, it will require us to put ourselves, our needs and our fears out of the centre of the equation, and put God there.  This is the main difficulty of living a life of grace.  It is this re-orientation that fills many with trepidation and fear, and we human beings will be the best procrastinators of deep change because we have a rather limited notion of what a life of grace provides.  Most of these notions are stilted and biased, but we will only realise this when God opens our minds in love and mercy.

Helen Keller is known for many sayings, and one about happiness had her saying, “Many persons have a wrong idea of what constitutes true happiness.  It is not attained through self-gratification but through fidelity to a worthy purpose”.  Though the truth in this is deep, it does lack a key or answer for those seeking a ‘worthy purpose’ because much conflict and violence comes as a result of different people having different definitions of what a ‘worthy purpose’ is. 

But fellow Christian who is reading this, I hope that a mindfulness of what we have been graciously baptized into (a life of Christ) is your only real and lasting worthy purpose.  It takes hard work to respond to this at each moment of our lives, but you and I know that this brings with it a peace that nothing in the world can give.  It gives us strength to ride out the many difficult storms of life, and a willingness to be people of cheer despite the sacrifices that true living and loving often requires.