God’s grace, the gratuitous favor he shows us and His very own life He shares with us, comes in a few different forms. We can distinguish first of all sanctifying grace and actual grace.
“Sanctifying grace is an habitual gift, a stable and supernatural disposition that perfects the soul itself to enable it to live with God, to act by his love” (CCC 2000). Sanctifying grace is infused in our souls at baptism, and makes us pleasing to God. Sanctifying grace elevates us to become sharers in God’s own life. This state of sanctifying grace can be lost through a mortal sin, but regained through repentance and the sacrament of confession.
Sanctifying grace, which is a permanent disposition, can be “distinguished from actual graces which refer to God’s interventions, whether at the beginning of conversion or in the course of the work of sanctification” (CCC 2000). So the movement of God’s grace before our conversion and baptism, which cannot be attributed to sanctifying grace, is termed an actual grace. Also, all the little (and larger) helps God gives us on a daily basis to live the twofold law of love of God and love of neighbor are actual graces. When your natural inclination is to go off on someone with road rage, and you feel an intervening calm allowing you to practice patience, consider that an actual grace.
The point here, perhaps, is that God’s grace pervades our whole lives. God’s very life dwells in us in a habitual, permanent way through the gift of sanctifying grace, and God offers us the aids to live a life worthy of His calling continually through actual graces.
No comments:
Post a Comment