Spirituality: Gerald May “Grace: Qualities of Mercy” Addiction and Grace Part 6 of 8

Often we do not sense the constancy of God’s grace-giving love. In many situations God may seem unloving or even completely absent. Sometimes this is because we are blinded by our attachment; we are so preoccupied – our attention is so kidnapped by our compulsions – that we tune out the background of God’s love. I am convinced that our brain cells do habituate the constant reality of God’s love.

Many other reasons exist for our lack of appreciation of God’s constant love. Sometimes the activity of grace so transcends our understanding that it becomes essentially invisible to us. We cannot notice God’s loving presence because it is too numinous, too elusively mystical to be perceived. There are also occasions when we cannot appreciate grace because we really do not want to. And sometimes God actively hides grace from us. But of all the possible explanations for our lack of awareness of grace, there is no possibility of God being indifferent, or falling in love with someone else instead of us, or pouting because of some insult, or being otherwise elsewhere attached.

The immanent God in us becomes wounded with us, suffers, struggles, hopes, and creates with us, shares every drop of our anger and sadness and joy. The reality of God is so intimate as to be experientially inseparable from our own hearts. But that very same God is at once transcendent, the creating, sustaining, and redeeming Power over and above all things. We should not be dismayed that God’s being surpasses understanding, for it is precisely through this mystery that God incarnate can both lovingly share our condition and powerfully deliver us from it. It is through this mystery that grace remains absolute, permanent, and victorious.