This Body of Death
By Fr. Conor Donnelly
(Proofread)
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. My Lord and my God, I firmly believe that you are here, that you see me, that you hear me. I adore you with profound reverence. I ask your pardon for my sins, and grace to make this time of prayer fruitful. My immaculate Mother, St. Joseph, my father and Lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.
We are told in St. Paul, “Unhappy man that I am, who shall deliver me from the body of this death?” (Rom. 7:24). The practical experience of our own vileness and our own incapacity is meant to generate in us a profound distrust of ourselves, a great humility, and a sense of the necessity of having recourse to God, not only for certain difficult things, but for the right accomplishment of each deliberate action.
This awareness is meant to make us understand that we are to base all our hopes of advancement in the interior life, not on our own efforts, but on the healing and saving grace of God.
When we have a vivid realization of the part that grace plays in our interior life, when we in consequence long for it ardently and beg for it with the greatest earnestness, and not with a merely theoretical acknowledgement of its necessity;
when we have a firm trust that God, owing to his interest in our good, will give it to us generously for the asking of it; when we confess to him with simplicity that unless it be given to us, we cannot be spiritual; and when finally we have learned to cling childlike in this way to the hand of God, placing all our expectation of sanctification in his goodness, then we are in the dispositions that favor spiritual progress.
This intimate realization of the constant and absolute necessity of actual grace is a great light given to the soul by God himself.
The ordinary Christian who does not try to have an interior life may not have it.
Such a person believes that once one’s sin has been remitted and sanctifying grace restored, one can face anew the spiritual combat with no greater handicap than the weakness inherent to nature, even if sin had not been committed.
Very few think of any other abiding consequences of their transgressions, except that of the possible temporal punishment which they call for even when remitted.
And yet neither the absolution nor the expiation entirely restores the condition of things that existed prior to our lapse. The evil effected in the soul by sin is not entirely healed by the infusion of sanctifying grace.
This is true in the case of the sin of nature called original sin, and it is equally true in the case of our personal infidelities to God.
When by baptism we are made children of God, we are not exactly restored to the condition of original justice. We are not precisely circumstanced in the same way as if there had been no fall of our first parents. We are not, from being children of wrath, completely transformed into children of light. There is given us rather the potentiality of a complete transformation than the actuality.
Our nature remains with a certain strong bias to revolt from God’s ruling of life.
Though we are in friendship with God, we are unable to accomplish the duties imposed on us by that friendship without the continual influence of actual grace.
Our theology teaches us that our free will has not been essentially corrupted by original sin, and that therefore there remains in it the power to conquer by its own forces temptations of a feeble kind.
After the fall, there still remains in us the capacity to do some little good in the natural order by the native virtue in us, as for instance, to love one’s parents or one’s country, to do kindness and to be just in situations that do not demand much sacrifice.
But we cannot of ourselves persevere by our own strength in the observance of the natural law. That is, we cannot keep for a long time out of mortal sin by our own efforts.
Every Christian knows that it is impossible to elicit an act meritorious of eternal life without grace.
But not so many are aware that the child of man is incapable of doing even the good proportioned to his nature, except for a short time and in matters that involve no great difficulty.
We require God’s special help to do consistently what is theoretically possible for us without it. We need it as well to rise from sin. We need it to persevere without relapsing, and we need it to make any step forward.
The good that we are capable of doing without the special help on God’s part is so negligible that it can without exaggeration be said that we can do little or nothing of ourselves.
Even when our feet are set in the way of holiness, there remains in our nature a strong resistance to being directed to the final goal towards which grace points.
Nature is like a coiled spring, ready to return with force to its relaxed position once the pressure of God’s hand is removed, or better, when there is removed the attraction exercised by divine grace.
Sin not only deprives us of grace, it excites in us a resistance to its action.
The more sinful we are, the stronger is our resistance and the less powerfully grace affects us, even though in its own intrinsic strength and efficacy it remains the same.
When we abandon God by sin, there remains a tendency to be violently wrenched away from him, and to return to ourselves as to our center of gravitation.
The effect of actual grace is constantly needed to correct this vicious inclination, to maintain us in the right path, and to keep us subject to God.
We deceive ourselves utterly if we think that we have but to will to be good in order to be so.
God has not only to effect in us the willing, he has to aid us in the doing.
The humble realization of this causes to rise to our lips prayer of the humble kind that compels God’s goodness to exercise itself on our behalf.
Prayer is infallible in its effects when it is really prayer.
It is really such when it arises from and is the practical expression of absolute powerlessness for good on our part, of absolute dependence on God, and of perfect confidence in his good will to save us.
God, being truth itself, cannot resist what is true.
When therefore our petitions for things pertaining to the supernatural life express, along with hope and trust in God’s goodness, our essential dependence and indigence and helplessness, they are irresistible.
The realization of the terrible inertia that our nature presents to the movement towards its supernatural end, which God desires to impress on it, inspires us to ask of him not merely such grace as would suffice for salvation, but such as is strong enough to break down our resistance and set our footsteps firmly in the way of sanctification.
We ought to make our petitions therefore not merely for what the theologians call sufficient, but for what is designated by them efficacious grace.
This kind of actual grace, to which our wills must yield their acquiescence, should be the constant theme of our petition, and will not be refused to us by God if it is asked for with earnestness, sincerity, and humility.
Sanctifying grace is not of itself sufficient for us in the pursuit of holiness. It needs to be supplemented by the action of actual graces.
A great dullness with regard to spiritual things is one of the consequences of sin. And this remains even after we have been restored to the friendship of God.
Not only is the mind slow in apprehending truths of the supernatural order, there is even a positive repugnance to enlightenment.
We have a tendency to resist the truth when its acceptance threatens to entail renouncement and sacrifice.
We love darkness rather than light, because nature withers and shrinks in the glare of supernatural light.
We are ignorant of God, and to a large extent are quite willing to remain in ignorance. We are afraid to know him except vaguely, because clearer knowledge would involve on our part a clearer perception of our duty and of our obligations towards him.
The acquisition of truths of the natural order is a work of labor and of pain, a labor from which we shrink.
From the point of view of his bodily nature, man seeks to evade the labor of acquiring knowledge. We shirk the task of inquiry, even when the truths to be discovered involve no consequences necessitating a change in our moral habits.
How much more are we inclined to shrink from the work of inquiring into truths of the supernatural order, that need still greater and more sustained efforts to apprehend, and which are fraught with consequences affecting fundamentally our whole moral being.
A rigid discipline has to be imposed on all the faculties of our soul, on imagination, on will, and on intellect, and a laborious exercise has to be demanded of them, if God is to be intimately revealed to us, and if the truths acquired concerning him are to flash with a vivifying as well as illuminating effect on the soul.
We require grace from God to seek and to have this illumination. We require that our intelligence be strengthened and enlightened to be able to seize upon and penetrate into the inner meaning of objects of knowledge which are beyond the range of its natural powers.
Grace, such as is the light of faith, much as it puts the soul in possession of the power to penetrate into the inner meanings and moral applications of the truths presented to us in the objects of faith, needs special light.
This grace of illumination enables the mind to rise from a cold acquiescence in the supernatural truth to a warm acceptance of it. It enables it to rise from an adherence which merely holds a thing to be true to one which makes the truth so held have a vitalizing effect on the whole conduct of life.
Grace makes us pass beyond the stage of holding to be true what God has revealed, to the condition of being possessed by that truth and of being vivified and transformed by it.
What is truly good is obscure to the eyes of the natural man. Objects pertaining to the soul’s interests are seen in a false light and in a distorted manner. Even natural objects are not perceived by him in their true perspective. He does not see the hollowness of all that is temporal and transient.
To see with unclouded vision, to hold one’s gaze fixed on eternal truths without flinching from them, to have the science of the true and the good, that is all the effect of strong actual graces.
While it is a great help to our sanctification to penetrate into the inner sense of the supernatural truths themselves, we still need to discern the bearing of those truths on those inner and outward events in which our life develops itself.
The things of this world, its happenings, ourselves, our thoughts, our emotions, our determinations, have their external aspect capable of being seized by sense or by reason.
But besides this, since all things are ordained by God’s providence to guide and conduct us towards, as well as to shape us for, our supernatural end, all these have another aspect which is revealed only to the eyes of faith.
From this point of view, we are to a large extent hidden to ourselves. We cannot easily understand the workings of our own soul, in so far as these workings affect our life of grace. What is really good for our salvation in things outside of ourselves, in the events which affect our existence, and within ourselves, in the realities of our own conscious life, is not easy for us to perceive.
A special illumination, the effect of actual grace, is demanded to light up all those objects, in order that the soul may be able to discern their supernatural bearing and import. Neither the things of this world nor our own selves appear in their true color, their true shape, their true outline — the shape, color, and contour they have when they are viewed in the light of eternity — unless they are irradiated by a ray streaming from the intelligence of God into ours.
In that illumination, it becomes possible to see the real value of things and their bearing on our spiritual life.
Not only must grace give us a clear understanding of supernatural truths and a spiritual discernment of temporal things, it has a further role to fulfill in imparting to us a taste for everything that tends to develop the divine life in our souls.
We must acquire a hunger and thirst after justice, that is, after union with God. And we are to master the attraction which is being continually exerted on us by what flatters sense, imagination, and intellect.
To be able to persevere in the pursuit of perfection, we must love divine things.
Original sin, whose effects have been intensified by our own personal sin, has corrupted our tastes, inspiring us with a strong repugnance for what draws us to God, and giving us a strong inclination to what ministers to our pleasure, our pride, and our vanity.
As the manna that fell from the skies to feed the Israelites in the desert appeared to the majority of them, owing to their gross tastes that hankered after the fare of the land of exile, insipid and unpalatable, so to ourselves, tainted by sin, the satisfactions that are enjoyed in intimate commerce with God appear cheerless and empty.
Owing to the earthly taste developed by indulgence in our natural inclinations, the taste of the Lord is not sweet to us. It is the work of grace to effect a radical transformation in our appetites.
A new being must appear in the place of the old Adam, with tastes, aspirations, and tendencies different from those of the carnal man.
With the Church, we pray that God should give us the grace to love what he commands, to aspire after what he promises, so that amidst the changing things of the world, our hearts may be fixed there where true joys are to be found.
It is difficult, if not impossible, for us to live without delectation of some kind. Our hearts will inevitably seek after the satisfactions given by the creature if they are not formed to value only those found in God.
We must not seek the Creator merely for the satisfaction we shall have in him, for God is worthy to be sought for himself alone, apart from the happiness that is found in union with him.
But in very fact, there is found in the search after God a peace and a happiness that surpasses infinitely all the pleasures of earth.
What more delectable than Jesus, the Son of God, can be thought of?
“O Jesus,” one prayer says, “who are the hope of sinners, how gracious you are to those who make their prayers to you, how good and tender to those who seek you. But who can express what you are to those who find you?”
The will as well as the intellect requires its appropriate aid in order that we may be able to give effect in action to our supernatural determinations.
This then is the threefold work of actual grace, namely, to illuminate our minds, to purify and elevate the affections of our hearts, and to strengthen our wills to the accomplishment of all good.
The series of collects of the Masses of the year are simply variations of the strong cry of the Christian soul to God for the efficacious grace to effect all this in itself.
In the ever-present consciousness that one who is in the least degree interior has of the weakness that is in the will, when it endeavors to make life’s actions harmonize with conviction, there is a certain poignancy in the cry that spontaneously rises up to God for his help.
It is only when we seek to reduce to act our resolutions to keep united to God and to steel ourselves against the appeal of self and creatures, that we realize the great languor as regards supernatural things that has been caused in our life of volitions by sin.
We realize that great graces, taking away this native weakness, counteracting its effects, and replacing it by vigor, are required in order that we may be able to live according to the will of God.
As one collect says, “Of your mercy, O Lord, we beseech you, grant us the mind always to think and do what is right, that we who cannot even exist except through you, may be able to live according to your will.”
These beautiful prayers of the Masses of the year, being those of the Church, are the expression of the yearning of the exile, struggling painfully through this world to his eternal home, conscious of the obstacles that beset the journey, conscious too of his native weakness and inconstancy, and moved by this consciousness to send up a strong appeal to the loving kindness of God to send down his graces, by which alone this toilsome journey can be brought to a happy termination.
It is essential for us then to have a deep realization of the constant need we have of actual efficacious grace in order to keep our wills in conformity with that of God. And we should, following the spirit of the Church, unceasingly petition for such graces as will overcome all the obstacles in ourselves and outside of ourselves to our progress in the interior life.
I thank you, my God, for the good resolutions, affections, and inspirations that you have communicated to me during this meditation. I ask your help to put them into practice. My immaculate Mother, St. Joseph, my father and Lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
EW
Based on The Voice of a Priest, Sermon Five, by Edward Leen, C.S.Sp., edited by Bernard J. Kelly, C.S.Sp. (Sheed & Ward, 1946).