Monday, October 11, 2010

Faith is movement

Faith is a two way movement, always initiated by God, who uses everything, especially our difficulties, to draw us to Himself. God uses our difficulties because it is precisely in this aspect of our existence that we realize we are not self-sufficient. Those who open themselves to God's loving care come to see, as Bl. John Henry Newman observed, that
"[t]en thousand difficulties do not make one doubt."


In writing about the works of Graham Greene, seeing that they are thoroughly imbued with grace, Owen Cummings observes that the greatness of Greene's oeuvre "lies in recognizing and struggling with the ambiguities not of life in general, but our own individual lives, even as we strive to remain faithful to God." He goes on to observe that "[t]he grace of Graham Greene lies in accepting our complexity, our fragility, our permeative sense of incompleteness and yet not giving up." Finally, the greatness of Greene's writing "lies in glimpsing, albeit occasionally and partially, that our holy God is"- here he quotes a Methodist hymn- "the Love that will not let us go" (Thinking About Prayer 75).

If you have never read Greene's The Power and the Glory, or his The Heart of the Matter, the latter of which Cummings uses for his discussion of Greene's narratively unpackaged theology of grace, you have two great things to which to look forward.

Veni Sancte Spiritus, Veni per Mariam

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