Praise be Jesus and Mary, now and forever.
Continue our series on Franciscan spirituality today, we are going to talk about the gratuitousness of grace.
One of the best things about grace, God's grace, is that it is free.
So for us Franciscans to say money can't buy love is the same thing as saying money can't buy grace either because for us grace and charity are essentially the same thing.
When Franciscans speak of our innate desire for God, it doesn't mean that man naturally has to be in a state of grace, or that he can realize his supernatural calling by natural means, or that we can even merit God's grace.
The disposition of our human nature to receive God's grace, our unconscious tendency towards our ultimate end, which needs to become a conscious tendency towards God, that disposition enables, establishes an intrinsic relationship between what's natural and what's supernatural as we noted in our last reflection.
The supernatural presupposes the natural and responds to the deepest desires of our nature.
In order for nature's expectation to become a reality, in order to move from our innate or inborn desire to the supernatural life, we have to have the means necessary to reach that.
The means is God's grace.
Just because we have a desire for what's transcendent and supernatural, doesn't mean that we therefore have it.
Just like just because I have a desire for food doesn't necessarily mean I have food to eat.
Again, we're disposed to the supernatural, but we are not born with it, much like a farmland is disposed to receive seeds and help them grow, but it doesn't mean that it already has those seeds.
And just like a grain of wheat doesn't germinate if it's not planted, so too grace doesn't come into our souls unless God gives it to us, unless he infuses it into our soul.
God's intervention is absolutely necessary in order for our desire to become a deliberated one and an efficacious one, which leads to the possession of heavenly blessedness.
God's divine intervention, so when he actually grants us his grace, it's actually something that honors us in the highest way possible.
We have a nature that's so noble that nothing in the universe can compare with it.
And it's only the grace of God which perfects our nature.
So to our natural passive capacity for the supernatural, the most excellent active power of God, comes to meet that.
Man is, as Father Ciccarelli says in his book, says in Italian, man is beatificabile.
That means that man is able to receive blessedness.
We have an aptitude to receive God's supernatural elevation and beatification.
Grace gives us the sufficient disposition for heavenly bliss.
God who put this tendency towards the supernatural in us also gives us the means to realize it.
In philosophy they say that the one who wills the end or the purpose of something also wills the means.
That's true with the Lord as well.
We can't merit God's grace.
Our nature doesn't require or demand that we be in God's grace.
And the Franciscan doctors strongly emphasize the absolute gratuity of God's grace.
It's given to us purely through God's benevolence without any preceding merit on our own.
His grace transcends the limits of our created nature and achieves effects or results that are formally superior to our natural forces and abilities.
Therefore, it can only come from the liberality of God's divine love.
As Blessed John Duns Scotus says, he says, grace is properly called the gratuitous will of God insofar as it is pure gift.
God's grace is a gift that's superadded to nature, to use St. Bonaventure's words, and it's formally distinct from the natural gifts given to us at creation.
The gratuitousness of divine grace is included in the etymology of the word itself because as St. Bonaventure notes, it comes freely from the divine goodness because it makes man acceptable and grateful to God as his adopted child.
Grace is an entity or quality generously and freely given by God to rectify, perfect, and elevate human nature and render the soul capable of accomplishing works that are meritorious for eternal life.
By means of grace, we cooperate as adopted children of God, so not just as mere creatures anymore.
And who can deserve to be merit or deserve or merit to become or be called an adopted child of God?
Essentially, no one can.
Again, grace doesn't freely, doesn't presuppose any merit on our part.
Merit is based on a relationship of fidelity and justice.
While grace always remains a gift of kindness and a gift of divine mercy, grace is a gift of paternal love, which was only due to Jesus Christ, actually not to any of us.
So this bond with God through grace is realized in Christ, in Christ in whom we are predestined, chosen, loved by the Father, and called by him to union with his Son in the spirit of love and the Holy Spirit.
The first, highest, absolutely gratuitous grace is the Incarnation, in view of Christ's absolute predestination.
John Duns Scotus says that with the Incarnation, Jesus merited the first grace so that we could be united to him.
We were made children of wrath because of our sin, and our human nature became, as St. Gregory of Nyssa says, alien from the womb of life and wandering outside the womb in which it was formed, unquote, says St. Gregory of Nyssa.
We were then gratuitously reunited with the Father in the blood of Jesus.
So outside of his passion, there's no other meritorious cause of union with God.
Grace is merited to us by Christ, and it's through that grace that we become adopted children.
Christ is our everything, and we are a participation in him, he engrafts us into his very life.
So we were created in order to be joined to God in Christ, and we have within us an urging or a longing for this union, but we can only realize it by becoming members of the mystical body of Christ, and remaining constantly in a living relationship with him, living in his grace, in a state of grace, day by day.
Let's ask Our Lady for the blessing, then, to always remain in the grace of God, and to continue to grow in that grace each day of our lives.
Praised be Jesus and Mary, now and forever.