Not Wasting Grace

(Mountain valley - found here)

“This … should be our goal this Advent: that we will not waste grace. Great things are put before us. The Church becomes, even in her tenderness, very dramatic. ‘Wake up!’ she says. And she will say this again and again in Advent: ‘Get up out of this torpor, this stupor. Wake up! Now is the time to rise from the spiritual sleepiness, the same old dreary infidelities, the same wastefulness, the same old idling paths, the same old petty self-indulgences. Wake up!’ she says.

The incarnate Word came to deliver us from the old slavery of sin. We all know how our faults enslave us. We know how we are committed (in a very dark kind of commitment) to our impatience, to our self-will, to our unwillingness to bear with one another’s idiosyncrasies and failings. And certainly we have all had the unhappy experience many times of how these things leave a very bitter taste in our mouths. When we give vent to our impatience, when we show our displeasure with one another, when we strive to get our own way, we know how very quickly this turns to the bitterest of ashes in our mouths. We never have any lasting satisfaction from these things, and sometimes we have not even momentary satisfaction—we are unhappy in the very act of committing the fault. And if getting our way does bring us some momentary satisfaction, we know how evanescent it is, how very quickly it goes, and the bitterness it leaves. This is what Christ came to deliver us from; he came to fill in the valleys in us and to lower the mountains in us. But he can’t do this unless we are aware that there are mountains to be leveled, that there are valleys to be filled. The way to be sure of never attaining this awareness would be to fasten our gaze on the valleys of deficiencies or the mountains of faults in others.

So, let us not be foolish; let us work with our Redeemer to fill in the valleys of our own deficiencies and to level the mountains in ourselves because we all have very tall mountains, taller than we know. We are not able to recognize their height yet. But the holier we become and the more we cooperate with grace, the more we are aware of our deficiencies and of the mountainous faults within us. When we do arrive at this stage, we are so occupied with the valleys to be filled and the mountains to be lowered in ourselves, that, ipso facto, by a kind of happy reflex, we find no mountains in others; we haven’t the time to look for them. We haven’t the time or the taste to comment on possible valleys of deficiencies in others. Let us love to dwell on this. 

…God is coming to cleanse our hearts. Will we let him cleanse them? We have that feeling that everything is going to be better; everything is going to turn out all right. Yes, if we will allow it. Will we allow it? At Matins we were told rousingly, ‘Let us cleanse our hearts for the coming of our great King.’ What needs scrubbing up? Will we not find that we have to use God’s grace to grapple with this fault, this weakness? Cleansing is sometimes an abrasive thing; it hurts. You have to scrub and scrub, or scratch and scratch at a thing. We think of the things that we do to the utensils in the kitchen, in the bake-room. If they were sentient, I think they would say, ‘Stop that!’ They don’t want to be treated like that. That is what our poor little weak hearts do; we want God to stop. And that is the subject about which we want to question ourselves in prayer. This season, fraught with grace, is opening out before us. We will not be the same at its close as we are now; we will be different. It is up to each one of us which way the difference will be. It is a season of great adventure, and, yes, the heart should walk on tiptoe, for it is a season of wonder.”

~Mary Francis