On Grace
“Bless us, O Lord, and these, Thy gifts, which we are about to receive from Thy bounty. Through Christ, our Lord. Amen.”
With our students we say this prayer before meals. Often we refer to this as “saying grace”, a prayer of thanksgiving. But there is also grace which is God’s great love for us, despite our faults.
Grace is both simple and profound. Have you ever tried to explain what grace is?
When you look it up in the dictionary, there are many definitions depending on how it is used. One of them is, indeed, “a prayer said by Christians before a meal to thank God for their food”. Another is “the quality of being pleasant or polite”.
On Wikipedia, there is further explanation of what grace means for us spiritually according to different faiths. There are specific explanations of the different kinds of grace within us, and a breakdown of how this has been debated over time. From here there is a link to St. Thomas Aquinas’s thoughts on grace: “grace can be given either to make the person receiving it pleasing to God (gratia gratum faciens) – so that the person is sanctified and justified – or else to help the receiver lead someone else to God.”
Did you know there were so many ways to talk about grace? Again, it is both simple and profound. Maybe that’s because grace is something so important that we all need it somewhere in our lives.
Father Casey Cole tells us “there is created grace, gifts given to us by God but the gift of God's very self. We experience this first and foremost in the sacraments, but also in our daily prayers, interactions with the people of God, and in service to the poor. There are many ways to encounter God in God's very self.”
It has been said on repeated occasions that we are in unprecedented times. Let us aim to give grace to one another. In unprecedented times, let’s give each other unprecedented grace.
Grace is not a strange, magic substance which is subtly filtered into our souls to act as a kind of spiritual penicillin. Grace is unity, oneness within ourselves, oneness with God. -- Thomas Merton
1 https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/grace
2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_in_Christianity#Roman_Catholicism