The gift of grace

THE Feast of the Transfiguration of the Lord, celebrated on August 6, reminds us that we are meant to share in the life and nature of God. Yes, we too will be transfigured from our natural selves to the luminous supernatural life with God.

And this is made possible because in spite of our natural limitations, let alone, our infranatural defects, God is ever willing to offer us his gift of grace which would enable us to share in God’s life and nature.

Yes, we are meant for a supernatural life. Our human nature, with our spiritual soul that enables us to know and to love, and therefore to enter into the lives not only of others but also and most importantly, of God, urges us to develop a supernatural life.

It’s a life with God always. It just cannot be exclusively our own life, taken personally or collectively. It’s a life that depends mainly on God who gives us the grace that purifies and elevates it to his, but it also depends on us, on our freedom to correspond to this loving will of God for us.

Let’s remember that our human nature has been designed by God in such a way as to give us a choice whether we want to be with God or to be simply with ourselves. We are not meant only to stay on the natural level.

With God’s grace, God makes himself present in our lives. That is why St. Paul once said that we are “temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you and which you have received from God.” (1 Cor 6,19) With this grace, God in his Trinitarian life dwells in our soul, divinizing us as he wants us to be, but always with our agreement and cooperation.

Yes, we are capable of living the life of God. As St. Augustine once said, we are “capax Dei.” And that’s because we have been designed and wired for it. Even if we don’t consider yet the truths of faith about ourselves, somehow we can already know we are meant to know God. That’s because there’s something spiritual in us. We are not purely material beings, stuck to the material world only.

Our spirituality can be discerned by the fact that we are capable of thinking and loving, operations that are not material but are spiritual. Here we use concepts and reasons that are spiritual, not material.

Since we are capable of spiritual operations, there must be something spiritual in us, following the principle that “operare sequitur esse,” the operation follows or is determined by one’s being or essence. This is how we can rightly conclude we have a spiritual soul.

To divinize us, God gives us sanctifying grace which we normally receive through the sacraments, especially in the sacrament of the Holy Eucharist where we become concorporeal and consanguineous with Christ.

We have to develop a taste and even an appetite for the supernatural life with God and of things supernatural in general. In this we have to help one another, because in the end, this is our common and ultimate end in life—how to live our life with God, how we can be immersed in God even as we are immersed also in the things of the world.

We have to understand also that our supernatural life does not in any way nullify our humanity, and everything related to it—our senses, emotions, our family and professional, social, political life, etc. If anything at all, it promotes these aspects of our life, purifies them and elevates them to the supernatural order of God.