Wednesday, April 13, 2011

Pure Gift

We just finished watching the first game of the NHL playoffs, which the Capitals won in overtime, 2-1. It was pretty exhausting. I don't know if I have much to say tonight.

Perhaps I should just allow Msgr. Luigi Giussani to say something about what I am so often seeking, and trying to express, in my thoughts and actions and words:

The purest and most objective value of Christian life is the awareness of the absolute gratuitousness of God's interventions in history, because there is no greater, sweeter, and more exalting truth. The encounters, which He created to make men and women--us!--part of His Kingdom, are a pure gift that our nature would not have been able even to imagine or foresee. They are a pure gift above and beyond any capacity of our life. They are "Grace."

In His Mystical Body, Jesus Christ takes up again this entire Kingdom of "Grace," of the supernatural goodness of God's power. Just as Jesus of Nazareth's existence among the Jews and the possibility of encountering Him were grace for them two thousand years ago, so are the Church's existence in the world and the encounter with her in society grace for us today.

--from  Notes on the Christian Method, chapter 1