Weight

"But the harder I try

The more clearly can I

Feel the depth of our fall

And the weight of it all

So this might, could be

The most impossible thing

Your grandness in me

Making me clean" 

-David Crowder

If there is one song that I would consider my "all time favorite" song, it would be "Wholly Yours" by David Crowder. More than anything it, I feel, categorizes my spiritual walk, all of it. The themes that arise from the song are a real gut-check if you seriously sit down and think about them, it's hard to just walk away from some of the lyrics. 

Tonight was one of those nights that it was hard to just "walk away" from these lyrics. I went to mass at St. Benedict's tonight. I decided to go a little earlier to get some prayer time in silence before mass started. As I was sitting in the pew, reflecting on the Psalms this portion of "Wholly Yours" came to mind in particular. I've been reading through St. Augustine for my senior seminar about grace, predestination and free will. Augustine was making me angry today because the more and more I read of him, the more and more I feel like Augustine makes God out to be this distant, impersonal deity that arbitrarily chooses who He will love. It made me angry, but on the flip side of Augustine's theology, it highlights something that I suppose is just hard for me to swallow. The entire underpinning of everything Augustine writes is to show how great God's grace is; so much so that we cannot merit it at all. This seems fairly straight forward, but as I was sitting waiting for mass to start tonight a sudden awareness overtook me: the harder I try to be holy, the more I see I cannot be holy. 

This is the gut-check, this is being made aware that I am "full of earth and dirt." Anything that is good within me does not flow from me at all, not even a little bit. The only goodness that I am capable of is that goodness which God helps me to achieve. Granted, my free will must consent to it, but above and beyond that, I am not the initiating factor here. God's grace is "everything that is bright and clean," as the song phrases it, but I think the most miraculous part about all of this is that the sanctifying grace which is offered to us is not some exterior puppeteering. The grace is internal, intimate, renewing us from within. He is holy, I am not, yet He is changing me piece by piece making me holy like He Himself is holy. How is it that this happens? Well, by becoming wholly His. This was all I could think of throughout mass, the incredible gift that grace truly is, and how undeserving we are. St. Jerome said once, "It is our part to seek, His to grant what we ask; ours to make a beginning, His to bring it to completion; ours to offer what we can, His to finish what we cannot." The more I strive after perfection, the more I see that it will never be mine on my own will and merits. This is the most impossible thing: that He Himself is bringing to completion in me the sanctity that He wishes to bestow. Man is the only creature that needs something outside of himself to complete himself, and God is beckoning to us all, He wants to make us holy, like He is.