The author of this essay, from the time of its writing, is a Benedictine monk in Solemn Vows from a Religious contemplative community located at the wilderness of Chama Canyon, Northern New Mexico.
As of the present, he is officially relieved from the confines of his Religious community in order to experience life outside with the equipped tools he gathered and learned in the entire duration of his stay from both the seminary and his monastery in order to allow him to get going with life in the world.
His way of life was a life of prayer in meditation and contemplation. His everyday life was spent mostly in prayers from 4:00 o’clock in the mornings to 7:30 in the evenings for seven days of the week. His day of prayer began when all of nature was silent and he was free to meet the living God through prayer.
His monastic day revolved around communal and solitary prayer, finding its source and apex in the grace of God.
The author offers the readers with a discussion, not on the details of his monastic encounter inside the Cloister, but a discourse on the role of prayer and grace in relation to spirituality in response to holiness.
SAINT
VINCENT SEMINARY
UNDERSTANDING
THE ROLE OF GRACE AND PRAYER
IN RECOGNIZING THE NEED FOR A SPIRITUAL
THEOLOGY
A THESIS PAPER
SUBMITTED
TO MRS. XIMENA DEBROECK, M.A.
IN
PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS
FOR
THEOLOGY 622: INTRODUCTION TO SPIRITUALITY
BY
BROTHER
LAWRENCE ALBERTO C. PILARCA, O. S. B.
SEPTEMBER 29,
2009
BENEDICTINE
ABBEY OF CHRIST IN THE DESERT
ABIQUIU, NEW
MEXICO 87510
The main goal of this essay is to give light to the readers by offering a deeper understanding of the tasks of grace and prayer in one’s journey to a sound spirituality.
The paper talks about the meaning of grace in relation to holiness through prayer. Likewise, it articulates on the relationship between the acts of prayer and the acts of receiving grace.
Its discussion focuses on prayer as an important tool in achieving a good Christian life filled with grace.
Also, the essay gives emphasis on understanding spirituality in relation to cultivating one’s holiness. Its arguments shed light on the nature of grace which must be understood as one which is not received only by contemplative monks and nuns as well as figures in the Religious and Secular life, but as one which should be received by all Christians who believe in the Trinitarian God who is the Father almighty in union with the Son and the Holy Spirit who invites us all to the call for holiness.
The author exercises great care in writing this article by binding his arguments confined only within the topics on prayer and grace in relation to understanding spiritual theology. In so doing, the author turns the readers away from reading it to a certain ambiguity.
The author constrains the paper to a limited scope allowing him to clearly express his arguments within the bounds of concerns on grace and prayer.
Thus, at the end of this paper, the readers will get a glimpse of a good deal of understanding on the role of grace and prayer in understanding spiritual theology as effective means of perfecting their spiritual growth toward a passage to a higher level of sanctification.
The introduction of this essay gives us an overview of the whole content of the paper with particular emphasis on the role of prayer and grace to one’s spiritual life.
This section talks about the definition and nature of grace as it supplies us with an essential knowledge that will enlighten our minds as we progress in reading this paper.
An understanding of grace shows a collective thought that pertains to an unmerited divine assistance given to human beings for their regeneration or sanctification.
Likewise, it is a virtue coming from God received by human beings who are unworthy of it. Similarly, it is a state of sanctification enjoyed by every human being who believes in the supernatural power and love of God through His divine revelation.
The book of Charles Journet entitled “The Meaning of Grace”, gives a profound explanation of the word grace. According to him, grace has three interdependent senses that congregate with one another to give sense to its meaning.
Journet’s arguments talk about the first sense of grace as an act of wishing for someone’s well being. This means to say that the recipient of the act is the receiver and therefore, has the favor of the giver of such wish which is grace.
The action is considered an act of love because the giver freely expresses affection towards the recipient. An analogy to this describes the author’s experience when he took his Solemn monastic vows of consecration in year 200.
The well-wishers and guests who attended the celebrations expressed their lovely greetings and wishes for the author’s continued perseverance and adherence to God after the consecration. In another sense, grace, as articulated by Journet, is in itself a gift for someone’s well being.
The gift comes from someone who loves. It is received by someone who is worthy of it. It is in that something which is given freely that symbolizes and represents this well-wishing.
This is shown in another analogy that tells us the story about the author’s monastic consecration illustrating the second sense of grace. He received gifts both from the affective love of God and a multitude of guests who witnessed the significant occasion.
The gift he received that was given freely by the Former is Himself and His love, while a bunch of letter-envelopes and boxes of chocolates and tangible gifts were given freely by the latter.
These gifts are manifestations of grace. The third sense of grace refers to that of gratitude on the part of the receiver who has been given the favor.
A sense of gratitude from someone who receives favor is the act of giving thanks. This act of thanksgiving that comes from the recipient who receives the favor is also grace. These three senses are mutually supporting and equally dependent from each other forming a relationship of interdependence.
As Journet puts it, the favor comes first and goes before the gift, which after having been received by someone who is worthy of it, makes an act of acknowledgment and thanksgiving after receiving the gift from the giver.
Significance of Grace in the Spiritual Life The previous section talks about the meaning and nature of grace as a significant aspect in reaching the depths of one’s holiness.
Grace is one of the major elements in the establishment of a good prayer life towards holiness. Journet speaks about two kinds of grace in his book.
The first is called habitual grace with the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. This involves God Himself pouring out in us through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. Since God does not dwell directly in us, He sends down the Holy Spirit to come upon us and fill us with His grace, which causes our souls to be transformed and makes us worthy of the indwelling.
The other kind of grace is called actual grace which refers to the human being’s capacity to accept God freely which brings the human being to a higher level of sanctification. Journet makes a clear argument in his book about the significance of actual grace.
His argument talks about actual grace as a great possibility for us to exercise such openness and docility to accept God freely. For it is only in accepting God that we can be delivered from sin and finally be given justification. Journet says, “Actual grace is the divine impulse that produces in us acts of free adherence to God, of free acceptance and consent.” So, the realization of an actual grace would require a strong conviction from our spirit and our free will to humble ourselves to God.
This free adherence to God will eventually empower us to achieve a higher stage of sanctification. The whole process influences our human experience in our response to the call for holiness.
The Role of Prayer in Response to Grace The previous section tells us how grace influences our whole human experience in dealing with our spirituality as a journey to holiness.
Our human experience of opening ourselves to God in response to grace makes us worthy to acquire a life filled with holiness. It is through emptying ourselves through prayer that we can achieve such zealous endeavor.
Working towards developing a good prayer life requires an enormous effort to be able to accept and sustain the grace from God.
Prayer is a saving act of lifting up our hearts and minds, opening them up to respond to the possibility of the Triune God coming down to fill us with His Holy Spirit in order to bestow us the gift of grace.
In the same way, prayer is fundamental in our Christian life because it is our doorway in entering into a deep personal relationship with God.
The prayer of adoration allows us to raise our praises to God. Offering them to God allows us to humble ourselves so that our contrite hearts can eloquently express our prayer of contrition.
The prayer of contrition softens our hardened hearts and takes away our infirmities. Cleansing us from our infirmities through the act of contrition invigorates us. In return, we offer an act of thanksgiving to God so that our whole being can purely pray for a well-merited prayer of supplication.
When our hearts and minds have already been attuned to these approaches of prayer, as introduced by Prof. DeBroeck in our class discussion, then and only then we can worthily receive and sustain the grace that God offers us.
The preceding discussion in this paper, though concise and limited, offers the readers a backdrop of knowledge on the significant role of both grace and prayer in understanding our spirituality.
Also, it articulates on the relationship between grace and prayer in establishing an appropriate understanding of the nature of human spirituality.
The arguments in this paper will guide us somehow in increasing our awareness and knowledge of the relationship between grace and prayer as we climb to the ladder of a much higher stage of sanctification. Thus, prayer and grace work together as one unified factor that helps us to deepen our understanding with the nature of our spirituality in response to the call for universal holiness.
Also, with prayer and grace, we will come to the end of our earthly life filled with holiness and sanctification. This will be our sure passport to a clear passage in God’s Heavenly Kingdom where He dwells and reigns with His Son and the Holy Spirit in the company of all the Saints and Angels together with the most holy ones who have long been gone before us.
Garrigou-Lagrange, OP. The Three Coversions in the Spiritual Life. Rockford, Illinois. Tan Books and Publishers, Inc., 2002.
Journet Charles. The Meaning of Grace. New York, NY: Scepter Publishers, Inc., 1996. Paul John II Pope. Catechism of the Catholic Church. 3211 Fourth St, NE, Washington: DC: United States Catholic Conference, 2007.
response from the author's professor:
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