Am I taking the grace of God in vain?
St. Paul warns us: “We entreat you not to accept the grace of God in vain” (2 Cor 6:1). We generally think of this as applying to “other people”, especially those who have heard the Gospel but not accepted it, or those Catholics who know what the Church teaches, but refuse to change their own ideas and behavior based on that teaching. But in reality, Paul’s entreaty is directed at all of us—indeed, at all of us all of the time.
Another great quotation is St. Augustine’s exclamation: “Late have I loved you, O Beauty ever ancient, ever new, late have I loved you! You were within me, but I was outside, and it was there that I searched for you. In my unloveliness I plunged into the lovely things which you created. You were with me, but I was not with you. Created things kept me from you; yet if they had not been in you, they would have not been at all. You called, you shouted, and you broke through my deafness. You flashed, you shone, and you dispelled my blindness. You breathed your fragrance on me; I drew in breath and now I pant for you. I have tasted you, now I hunger and thirst for more. You touched me, and I burned for your peace.
He was, of course, reflecting back on all the time he frittered away avoiding conversion to Christ. Once he converted to Catholicism, Augustine certainly did not accept the sacramental grace of God in vain. But he was well aware of how many other kinds of grace he had squandered prior to that point, and how even his fleshly attachments had induced him to waste so many of the graces that had been won for him by his mother’s (St. Monica’s) prayers.
Like him, I am sure that most of us squander at least some of the graces we receive. The more we grow in Christ, the more delicate we become to the squandering of grace in our own lives. And we become increasingly aware of the meagerness of our response. This in itself becomes an incentive to rely on God’s love rather than our own strength, but at the same time, if we are serious, we can hardly avoid examining our own consciences.
Then, we will say (again with St. Paul): “I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me, and the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me” (Gal 2:20). For this is what Baptism itself does: It incorporates us into the life, death, and resurrection of Christ, joining us to His own mystical body, the Church.
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