Day 42 A roadmap to freedom

I hope you have a very Holy Saturday!  Thomas continues his novitiate year.  His brother has joined the Royal Canadian Air Force and trained to be a bomber pilot.  He visits Thomas for a week before he goes off to war.  Thomas asks him if he wants to be baptized and he says yes.  So Thomas goes about spinning him up on Catholicism in one week in the hopes that the Church will baptism him.  He states that his brother doesn't want a lot of abstract ideas, just the plain truths so Thomas teaches him all he knows in 4 days and ends up more exhausted than if he had worked in the fields.  They talk about their lives growing up and Thomas writes:

Was there any possibility of happiness without faith?  Without some principle that transcended everything we had ever known?    pg 396

And then Thomas breaks down how it all works.  He writes:

I spoke about faith.  By the gift of faith, you touch God, you enter into contact with His very substance and reality, in darkness: because nothing accessible, nothing comprehensible to our sense and reason can grasp His essence as it is in itself.  But faith transcends all these limitations, and does so without labor: for it is God Who reveals Himself to us, and all that is required of us is the humility to accept His revelation, accept it on the conditions under which it comes to us: from the lips of men.

When that contact is established, God gives us sanctifying grace: His own life, the power to love Him, the power to overcome all weaknesses and limitations of our blind souls and to serve Him and control our crazy and rebellious flesh.

"Once you have grace", I said to him, "you are free, Without it, you cannot help doing the things you know you should not do, and that you know you don't really want to do.  But once you have grace, you are free.   pg 397

As I meditated on this it all is very Zen. We can't really know God due to our human limitations that is why it must take faith.    And we come to learn about God from each other.  We talked about how we can learn God's will by talking to others.  The second paragraph then follows nicely.  Once we have contact with God and believe in Him we are ready to accept at least many of the graces that He  showers down on us. These graces give us the strength and courage to due God's will, not our own.  And then the third paragraph tells us that once we are doing God's will we are truly free. We are free from the piddly things that tie us down in this world and are free to become what God wants us to be.  Quite a paradox isn't it?  I liken this to a roadmap to freedom.  

My prayer today Lord, thank you for the gift of faith, thank you for your sanctifying grace.  Help me continue to grow with your graces and work on my weakness and limitations.  Help me to move the world closer to you each day until I am truly free.  Amen

Pax

Joe