God's Grace: Our Life-Law

Edward Holloway FAITH Magazine May-June 2008s

Meditation by Edward Holloway
from a 1980s parish newsletter

Ialways got into trouble at this time of year, as a boy, for pulling up Grandad’s runner beans to see if they had roots on yet, and if they had, I made a progress report. There was war between us until he gave me a patch of my own -somehow Grandad’s came up first, and much more often.
We all love the Spring ‘though, season of light and love, and of life more abundant. A time of grace. I once heard a missionary who had worked all his life in the East say that they could find no word in Japanese to translate what we call “God’s grace” until somebody hit on an expression which meant the lushness of the grass in the springtime, and that was it!

Of course it was, the deepest meaning of what a Christian calls the Grace of God is a life within that bursts out in charity, joy, peace, patience, sweetness, purity. There is nothing fusty in a life like that. Christ came to give it, and said so.

He said much the same thing in St. Mark’s Gospel, where Our Lord says that the Kingdom of Heaven - which is within you, remember - is like a farmer who sowed his fields and went away, and the seed sprang up while he knew not, first the blade, then the ear, and last the ripe corn in the ear... for the earth of itself brings forth fruit. Now the seed lives by the earth and the sunshine and the shower. It is made for them, they are the Law of its nature, they make it live and grow. And that, just that, God is to us. The contact of his Mind and Heart and Teaching is the sunshine and the shower and Law of life of our souls. We are made of him, and only he can control and direct our destiny.

Nothing else in material creation can do this for us, and nothing in the universe except men, or beings like them, can need it either. That is why God became Man at the end of the ages, when men could take it in, so that he might be all this for us in the fullest possible way. So Jesus Christ is the Master Mind of the world, the greatest and purest of Lovers, the utterly authoritative Truth - sometimes hard to hear who alone can command by right the clever, powerful minds of men of the scientific age.

We have to let him touch our minds and hearts within, we have to help him not hinder, and we have to know him, love him, listen honestly to him. For “He came unto his own and they received him not. But to as many as did receive him, he gave power to become children of God. And the Word (the Mind who is God) became Flesh and dwelt among us ... and of his fullness we have all received, and grace upon grace.

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