Revelation And The Grace Of God
Edward Holloway
God the Environment of Man
Material life is programmed to a law of control and direction immanent within its nature, and within the impact of other material things. But when the material, through the soul of man, is taken into the order of God and spirit, then God becomes man's environmental law. God provides for man a life-law and wisdom, a truth, a good, a meaning, a final end, and the inner nourishment we call "grace" to grow to the plenitude of the likeness of God.For we are not fulfilled in sun, air, earth, and water like all other life around us. We are not animals; earth and angel mingle as one in us. We are not fulfilled in possessions, fame, fortune, money and physical excitement; even power leaves the heart unloved. All these are gathered under a greater, ordered wisdom at the core of the ultimate "me". This is what I call my "soul", or spirit.Earth, air, sun and flowing waters are not my joy-place. God is the joy-place of man. God is reality, peace that is stable, wise joy in thinking, timeless happiness in possessing. And God as "parent" is also the answer to human seeking. He is "our Father". The Church is familial, she herself is "mother" but our true "fatherhood" is not of earth. Mother Church binds earth to heaven - to God.
(From a FAITH Magazine Editorial)
Grace: The Life of the Soul
The earth we live on is a delicate creation. It is a delicate interplay or equation of forces and of natures acting one upon another. We men can destroy that balance by wiping out whole chains of life. We can destroy the equation, the balance, which holds the planet and its life-forms together through our heedlessness, our greeds, and our lusts. It follows that "doing as 1like", being greedy, lustful and selfish are the very opposites of the wisdom, goodness, and right proportion in which God has balanced the order of nature itself. We have to recognise that there is such a thing as natural law, which is to say a right wisdom, and right way in the order of life and existence. If there is such a law in the conservation of nature, we will find that there is one in our own personal being, and in the proportion in which our mind rules the body, or should rule it, in matters of "right and wrong". The young man and woman of today has entered more fully upon this "likeness to God" over creation, in power to understand, and to rule. In the order of human right and wrong, in the order of noble friendship and love which is pure, we have to rise to the same measure of our sonship and daughterhood of God. This is not done by arrogance and alcohol, nor by drugs, pills and rubber goods. We live our lives in the likeness of God by recognition first of what his order of wise good is for us, and then by putting it into practice by free consent of our own wills. In doing this, we will experience peace, strength, and joy. To live this way is not, as a matter of fact, to live by our own unaided powers: it is to live by the grace of God within the spiritual soul of each of us, through the strength and power of life which that grace of God prompts within us.
What is grace?
Grace is the life of your soul. The life of that inner you which possesses itself in peace and joy of being - or in the opposite on some occasions. "I am come that they may have life, and may have it in more abundance", said Jesus Christ who is the source of grace because he is God in person and in being. As the sun quickens all life upon the earth, so God is the sunshine of the soul. The touch of God's sunshine within our being quickens us in a life more abundant of conscious joy through God. This touch of God within us, which is a real thing, prompts the life more abundant of nobleness, of character, ideal, and desire; of true vision of doctrine and moral goodness of life. God is truly the sunshine of our spirit, and as St. Paul said so arrestingly nearly two thousand years ago "in him we live, and move, and have our being" (Acts 17:28). This life abundant of the central core of our spiritual being increases by prayer, the joining of the mind and heart to God, which is a sort of "turning into the sunshine" natural to us as spiritual beings. In the same way in its own order, you can observe the way in which plants and shrubs" grow towards the sun". The plant seeks its sunshine: the soul seeks its God. For "not by bread alone does a man live, but by every word which proceeds from the mouth of God" (Matt. 4:4). This life of a man towards God, the "Kingdom of heaven which is within you" (Luke 17:21) increases by truth, and by living the good, and more ardently desiring to live in perfect good. It is expounded more fully and more clearly by "every word which proceeds from the mouth of God", as we have already quoted.There is first the inner word of our own understanding and seeking towards God, and then, to aid and develop our own degree of possession, there is the word that proceeds from God through priest and prophet in revelation, and finally in himself as the Word made flesh. Do we not see a parallel between the manner in which God poises the universe in being, and the manner in which he rules the spiritual order, and provides for us, his sons and daughters? We said that we could show the existence of God because all creation was poised within a Unity-Law of control and direction, which argued to mind, and was centred in a personal mind. It would be no use if the 'mind' was scattered everywhere. In a similar way that same Unity-Law goes on, in a higher order, when God creates the spiritual soul into living matter and man is made. God provides for us not in the balance and proportion of nature around, in the environment as it is called. He provides for us in himself in him we live, and move, and have our being. God provides for us by the union and communion of grace, prompting wisdom, love, revelation, and ultimately the whole majestic economy of the Church in Christ! That is why the inner Word of God, the Logos, became the Word made flesh for our salvation. Salvation means abundance of health, and of life.
(Catholic Formation pp 10-11.)
From science to revelation: God's Unity-Law in history
Because a man is both body and soul, in perfect harmony of natural union Band synthesis, mankind "does not live by bread alone". That is to say not by the fixed determination, limitation of life, and material satisfactions, followed by mere total death, of animal life around him. We have already said that man lives by the inner touch of God, prompting wisdom, and prompting good, or growth in grace in the being of a man. A man learns from the contemplation of God within his own self, but he learns with full clarity only through the spoken word of human social intercourse. A man needs the word of speech, because man is not an angel. He is not a purely spiritual being. If we were like the angels of God, we would learn and love through direct and perfect communion of contemplation with God. God made us human, of body and soul working in harmony together, and the body must share in all the works of a man, to be harmoniously true to the proper order of human nature.
In our case even God needs and must use the word: we must expect God to reveal himself through words, and to raise up great souls, great spiritual leaders, who will speak in his name through the word: our very nature makes us expect it. Therefore, across the ages, we ought to look, through the mists of history, for the word revealed in priest and prophet. We must expect it to be operative from the beginning, slowly developing across the ages, through which indeed, given the confusion of human sin, we cannot in detail trace it. We should however expect it to be there, and expect this word to gather strength and erupt into human history, as time and culture made it possible for God to act. We would expect to see it passing from the word of tradition alone, to the word of both tradition and scripture, but a scripture, or writing, which lives and is interpreted by a tradition which lives on in men and in the world. For this tradition and this scripture, or 'holy writ', is the word of God with the authority of God and not merely the holiness or the genius of unaided man. We find it uniquely in the Christian Bible: first as the 'Old Testament' which prepares, prophesies, yearns, and expects, and is far from perfect. In this pamphlet there is no possibility of offering proof in detail. Once more we ask the reader and the teacher to pause. In pausing, let us take in once more the miracle of unity in coherence of the picture itself, as fulfilling the creation of God, in the race of man, with continuity of process and of power.
Jesus Christ: climax of the Unity-Law
We find what we must expect of God, if God must commune with men in both the inner word of prayer and love, land the social word of teaching and prophecy, we find what we must expect of God in the Old Testament. Here we find a potential looking forward quite expressly to a climax which is to come. The climax does come. Once more, this is not the place for detailed exposition and proof, only the picture, incoherence and continuity, can be offered now. We find it fulfilled, and they yearning passes to possession in the New Testament in Jesus Christ. For God is in Christ revealing himself as Teacher, Saviour, Redeemer, and the spiritual nourishment of man as the Bread of Heaven. As it is written: "the Word was made flesh and dwelt amongst us" (John 1:14). That Christian and Catholic Faith of ours can stand the most searching scrutiny of intelligent youngsters. It is they who will be joyfully humbled before the mighty wisdom of God. For the Faith is utterly coherent from beginning to end. Indeed it should be: it is the economy, or master plan of creation and salvation, of the God who said "I am alpha and omega; 1 am the beginning and also the end". And God is nothing if not unity, and coherence. This vision of the faith crowns the order of nature with what is necessary and to be expected. It makes sense from the existence of a real personal God and the creation of man through the spiritual soul. Then, it crowns the beginnings of mankind with the primeval revelation of God to Man. It sweeps on with the development of human history and culture to that climax of God's communion with men which is the enfleshing of the divine Word, Our Lord Jesus Christ. Through the fall of man, and the incursion of original sin, God's noble creation had already been crowned with thorns (Genesis 3:17-18). We men crowned Christ in person with thorns, and crucified Him. Yet he replied with the splendour of his redemption, and the work of God, and the vision of his work sweeps us on, in spite of sin, until all things are crowned with Christ as the Universal King.When a modern youth thrills to the wisdom and the unity of the universe which he comes to know from the scientific culture of this age, it is as well to refer him to a section of the fourth Eucharistic Prayer of the new Roman rite: "You formed man in your own likeness, and set him over the whole world to serve you his Creator, and to rule over all creatures". In making the modem youngster understand the dignity and power of being a man, we can make him understand that he must rule over his own nature, in its powers and urges of spirit and of flesh, by personal wisdom, truth, and control. For we are sons and daughters made in the likeness of this God, whose works and true wisdom we contemplate.
(Catholic Formation pp.14-15)
Edward Holloway
God the Environment of Man
Material life is programmed to a law of control and direction immanent within its nature, and within the impact of other material things. But when the material, through the soul of man, is taken into the order of God and spirit, then God becomes man's environmental law. God provides for man a life-law and wisdom, a truth, a good, a meaning, a final end, and the inner nourishment we call "grace" to grow to the plenitude of the likeness of God.For we are not fulfilled in sun, air, earth, and water like all other life around us. We are not animals; earth and angel mingle as one in us. We are not fulfilled in possessions, fame, fortune, money and physical excitement; even power leaves the heart unloved. All these are gathered under a greater, ordered wisdom at the core of the ultimate "me". This is what I call my "soul", or spirit.Earth, air, sun and flowing waters are not my joy-place. God is the joy-place of man. God is reality, peace that is stable, wise joy in thinking, timeless happiness in possessing. And God as "parent" is also the answer to human seeking. He is "our Father". The Church is familial, she herself is "mother" but our true "fatherhood" is not of earth. Mother Church binds earth to heaven - to God.
(From a FAITH Magazine Editorial)
Grace: The Life of the Soul
The earth we live on is a delicate creation. It is a delicate interplay or equation of forces and of natures acting one upon another. We men can destroy that balance by wiping out whole chains of life. We can destroy the equation, the balance, which holds the planet and its life-forms together through our heedlessness, our greeds, and our lusts. It follows that "doing as 1like", being greedy, lustful and selfish are the very opposites of the wisdom, goodness, and right proportion in which God has balanced the order of nature itself. We have to recognise that there is such a thing as natural law, which is to say a right wisdom, and right way in the order of life and existence. If there is such a law in the conservation of nature, we will find that there is one in our own personal being, and in the proportion in which our mind rules the body, or should rule it, in matters of "right and wrong". The young man and woman of today has entered more fully upon this "likeness to God" over creation, in power to understand, and to rule. In the order of human right and wrong, in the order of noble friendship and love which is pure, we have to rise to the same measure of our sonship and daughterhood of God. This is not done by arrogance and alcohol, nor by drugs, pills and rubber goods. We live our lives in the likeness of God by recognition first of what his order of wise good is for us, and then by putting it into practice by free consent of our own wills. In doing this, we will experience peace, strength, and joy. To live this way is not, as a matter of fact, to live by our own unaided powers: it is to live by the grace of God within the spiritual soul of each of us, through the strength and power of life which that grace of God prompts within us.
What is grace?
Grace is the life of your soul. The life of that inner you which possesses itself in peace and joy of being - or in the opposite on some occasions. "I am come that they may have life, and may have it in more abundance", said Jesus Christ who is the source of grace because he is God in person and in being. As the sun quickens all life upon the earth, so God is the sunshine of the soul. The touch of God's sunshine within our being quickens us in a life more abundant of conscious joy through God. This touch of God within us, which is a real thing, prompts the life more abundant of nobleness, of character, ideal, and desire; of true vision of doctrine and moral goodness of life. God is truly the sunshine of our spirit, and as St. Paul said so arrestingly nearly two thousand years ago "in him we live, and move, and have our being" (Acts 17:28). This life abundant of the central core of our spiritual being increases by prayer, the joining of the mind and heart to God, which is a sort of "turning into the sunshine" natural to us as spiritual beings. In the same way in its own order, you can observe the way in which plants and shrubs" grow towards the sun". The plant seeks its sunshine: the soul seeks its God. For "not by bread alone does a man live, but by every word which proceeds from the mouth of God" (Matt. 4:4). This life of a man towards God, the "Kingdom of heaven which is within you" (Luke 17:21) increases by truth, and by living the good, and more ardently desiring to live in perfect good. It is expounded more fully and more clearly by "every word which proceeds from the mouth of God", as we have already quoted.There is first the inner word of our own understanding and seeking towards God, and then, to aid and develop our own degree of possession, there is the word that proceeds from God through priest and prophet in revelation, and finally in himself as the Word made flesh. Do we not see a parallel between the manner in which God poises the universe in being, and the manner in which he rules the spiritual order, and provides for us, his sons and daughters? We said that we could show the existence of God because all creation was poised within a Unity-Law of control and direction, which argued to mind, and was centred in a personal mind. It would be no use if the 'mind' was scattered everywhere. In a similar way that same Unity-Law goes on, in a higher order, when God creates the spiritual soul into living matter and man is made. God provides for us not in the balance and proportion of nature around, in the environment as it is called. He provides for us in himself in him we live, and move, and have our being. God provides for us by the union and communion of grace, prompting wisdom, love, revelation, and ultimately the whole majestic economy of the Church in Christ! That is why the inner Word of God, the Logos, became the Word made flesh for our salvation. Salvation means abundance of health, and of life.
(Catholic Formation pp 10-11.)
From science to revelation: God's Unity-Law in history
Because a man is both body and soul, in perfect harmony of natural union Band synthesis, mankind "does not live by bread alone". That is to say not by the fixed determination, limitation of life, and material satisfactions, followed by mere total death, of animal life around him. We have already said that man lives by the inner touch of God, prompting wisdom, and prompting good, or growth in grace in the being of a man. A man learns from the contemplation of God within his own self, but he learns with full clarity only through the spoken word of human social intercourse. A man needs the word of speech, because man is not an angel. He is not a purely spiritual being. If we were like the angels of God, we would learn and love through direct and perfect communion of contemplation with God. God made us human, of body and soul working in harmony together, and the body must share in all the works of a man, to be harmoniously true to the proper order of human nature.
In our case even God needs and must use the word: we must expect God to reveal himself through words, and to raise up great souls, great spiritual leaders, who will speak in his name through the word: our very nature makes us expect it. Therefore, across the ages, we ought to look, through the mists of history, for the word revealed in priest and prophet. We must expect it to be operative from the beginning, slowly developing across the ages, through which indeed, given the confusion of human sin, we cannot in detail trace it. We should however expect it to be there, and expect this word to gather strength and erupt into human history, as time and culture made it possible for God to act. We would expect to see it passing from the word of tradition alone, to the word of both tradition and scripture, but a scripture, or writing, which lives and is interpreted by a tradition which lives on in men and in the world. For this tradition and this scripture, or 'holy writ', is the word of God with the authority of God and not merely the holiness or the genius of unaided man. We find it uniquely in the Christian Bible: first as the 'Old Testament' which prepares, prophesies, yearns, and expects, and is far from perfect. In this pamphlet there is no possibility of offering proof in detail. Once more we ask the reader and the teacher to pause. In pausing, let us take in once more the miracle of unity in coherence of the picture itself, as fulfilling the creation of God, in the race of man, with continuity of process and of power.
Jesus Christ: climax of the Unity-Law
We find what we must expect of God, if God must commune with men in both the inner word of prayer and love, land the social word of teaching and prophecy, we find what we must expect of God in the Old Testament. Here we find a potential looking forward quite expressly to a climax which is to come. The climax does come. Once more, this is not the place for detailed exposition and proof, only the picture, incoherence and continuity, can be offered now. We find it fulfilled, and they yearning passes to possession in the New Testament in Jesus Christ. For God is in Christ revealing himself as Teacher, Saviour, Redeemer, and the spiritual nourishment of man as the Bread of Heaven. As it is written: "the Word was made flesh and dwelt amongst us" (John 1:14). That Christian and Catholic Faith of ours can stand the most searching scrutiny of intelligent youngsters. It is they who will be joyfully humbled before the mighty wisdom of God. For the Faith is utterly coherent from beginning to end. Indeed it should be: it is the economy, or master plan of creation and salvation, of the God who said "I am alpha and omega; 1 am the beginning and also the end". And God is nothing if not unity, and coherence. This vision of the faith crowns the order of nature with what is necessary and to be expected. It makes sense from the existence of a real personal God and the creation of man through the spiritual soul. Then, it crowns the beginnings of mankind with the primeval revelation of God to Man. It sweeps on with the development of human history and culture to that climax of God's communion with men which is the enfleshing of the divine Word, Our Lord Jesus Christ. Through the fall of man, and the incursion of original sin, God's noble creation had already been crowned with thorns (Genesis 3:17-18). We men crowned Christ in person with thorns, and crucified Him. Yet he replied with the splendour of his redemption, and the work of God, and the vision of his work sweeps us on, in spite of sin, until all things are crowned with Christ as the Universal King.When a modern youth thrills to the wisdom and the unity of the universe which he comes to know from the scientific culture of this age, it is as well to refer him to a section of the fourth Eucharistic Prayer of the new Roman rite: "You formed man in your own likeness, and set him over the whole world to serve you his Creator, and to rule over all creatures". In making the modem youngster understand the dignity and power of being a man, we can make him understand that he must rule over his own nature, in its powers and urges of spirit and of flesh, by personal wisdom, truth, and control. For we are sons and daughters made in the likeness of this God, whose works and true wisdom we contemplate.
(Catholic Formation pp.14-15)