The Evidence of Grace

I have often wondered from time to time why this faith experiment of mine has not run it's course. Every since I was a kid, I have had a DaVinci-esqe interest in diverse multitudes. I was never one to follow fads or trends, but I have picked up, put on and changed hobbies, identities, friends, and devotions that numbered in the hundreds until they run their course and are traded in for something else.

Part of me always had a fear, when I became a Catholic at the age of 18, that this was "just another thing," something people would say at 28, "Oh, remember when you were Catholic? How long did that last?" I knew my conversion ran deep, I knew Truth was unchanging, and I approached my Confirmation day with the sincere conviction and recognition that I was being wed to the Church for life. Still, my track record would lend itself to speculation--was it just a matter of time before I would experience doubt, tire of the outfit of faith, and resume the eternal quest of seeking that which remains eternally elusive? Was this really the final destination, or a rest stop on the way? After all, what does anyone know at eighteen anyway?

Twenty years later, though, my faith has not gone anywhere. In fact, my belief in the lordship of Christ and the truth of Catholicism has only firmed and hardened in the mold. I've done my best to conform my life to the Christ's teaching and submit to the authority of the Magisterium, though admittedly with starts and staggers. But even that fact in and of itself contributes to what I would consider the evidence of grace.

The writer Hilaire Belloc famously noted, "As a Catholic, my faith tells me that the Church has a divine origin, but my own experience tells me that it must be divine because no human institution run with an equal mixture of ineptitude and wickedness would have lasted a fortnight."

In applying this sentiment to my own personal life of faith, I have no doubt that the evidence of grace, the working of the Holy Spirit, is apparent in the very fact that I remain Catholic, and happily so. By extension, remaining married in this day and age seems to be no small feat either, and that too, for the Catholic Christian, is facilitated only by supernatural grace--the sacramental oil that keeps the engine from overheating and throwing a piston under stress when we co operate with and dispose ourselves to it. Grace is what sustains our faith under duress, grace is what helps us to bear suffering, grace is indispensable in maintaining fortitude when ever natural tendency in our being is to turn and run from the hard work, whether that be in marriage or in religious devotion.

James Faulkner has a great line in Paul Apostle of Christ: "Men do not die for things they doubt." We're often told that it is normal and natural to doubt from time to time, and while I can appreciate the sentiment, the Christian life cannot operate in the field of the natural alone. We think of the miraculous in terms of supernatural occurrences--a tumor disappearing, a dead man rising. But the transformation of the ordinary, the mundane, the natural, and the base--is this not miraculous in its own right? Is it not a miraculous occurrence to believe--die even--when doubt is an ever-constant temptation of the Evil One sitting on the horizon?

To stay married in the face of duress, the remain true to vows when temptations abound, to sanctify ordinary work and make it holy, to face one's death without fear--this is the sacramentalization and elevation of the everyday. Earthy bread and wine become divine flesh and blood for our consumption and redemption; ordinary water becomes holy, infused with the ability to wash away sins; Oil seals and binds the Spirit in the lives of the faithful anointed. Men and women--ordinary men and women--become holy. And people like me, sinners with lousy track records and a history of fickleness, are able to remain Catholic. I can't quantify it, can't subject it to the scientific method. But it is for me, beyond refute, the evidence of grace...active, alive, and substantiated.