March 9, 2025
1st Sunday of Lent
“If I am not [in His grace], may it please God to put me in it; If I am, may it please God to keep me there.”
- St. Joan of Arc, in response to the question of whether she knew she was in God’s grace
My friend Kathy and I have this ongoing inside joke, which originated like this:
Carlo: You know, Kathy, since meeting you, I’ve made a lot of positive changes in my life—I’m eating healthier, I’m getting more sleep, and I’m actually going out and meeting new people. It’s like you took me out of Plato’s cave. I can’t imagine what my life would be like if I hadn’t met you.
Kathy: But Carlo, that wasn’t all me. You made the choice to respond to all these possibilities.
Carlo: You know, you always say that when I credit you with something.
Kathy: Yes, because I want to encourage your self-determination.
So now, whenever parishioners compliment her on her singing and she tells them, “Carlo picked the song and worked with me on it—this was all him,” I give her a dose of her own words and go, “But Kathy, whatever happened to your self-determination? You also made the choice to step up and respond to my musical instructions.”
We observe from experience that different people, when offered the exact same possibilities (or the exact same grace, to speak from a faith-based perspective), may not respond in the same way. Why do some people cooperate with grace more than others? Inversely, why do some people fall to temptation more than others?
One of my fond memories about our former parochial vicar, Fr. Joseph Kim, was that he loved superhero movies. One of his favorites was Batman, particularly the Christopher Nolan adaptation. In Chris Nolan’s The Dark Knight, the Joker forces the citizens of Gotham into all kinds of difficult situations that bring out the worst in them—Batman, of course, is the one who holds firm to his moral compass, never succumbing to the Joker’s pressures. By contrast, in the 2019 film Joker starring Joaquin Phoenix, the Joker is depicted as a misunderstood victim of a cruel society that ultimately drove him to madness. Thus, whereas The Dark Night attests to the power of the will, Joker attests to the power of external forces. Why did the Joker succumb while Batman was able to stand firm?
Did you know that one of the biggest unsolved mysteries in Catholic theology is the exact relation between Divine grace and human free will? The apparent and immediate answer is of course that God offers everyone His grace, but it belongs to human free will whether to accept or reject it. The complicated part arises when we assert, as St. Augustine taught, that one’s free choice to cooperate with God’s grace is in itself a grace bestowed by God:
This question, then, seems to me to be by no means capable of solution, unless we understand that even those good works of ours, which are recompensed with eternal life, belong to the grace of God, because of what is said by the Lord Jesus: “Without me you can do nothing.” (John 15:5)
- St. Augustine, On Grace and Free Will, Ch. 20
Accordingly, the Catechism teaches that “The preparation of man for the reception of grace is already a work of grace… God brings to completion in us what he has begun, “since he who completes his work by cooperating with our will began by working so that we might will it.” (CCC 2001) One may then ask, “Ok, so where exactly does the human will end and God’s grace begin?” Well, theologians have been grappling with that since the time of Augustine all the way through the 17th century, culminating in intense theological debates between the Dominicans and the Jesuits, in what became known as the De Auxiliis controversy. In 1607, Pope Paul V “ended” the controversy by affirming both the Dominican and Jesuit views as tenable and banning any further publication of books on the matter unless otherwise approved by the Holy See. The Dominicans and Jesuits were instructed to await a final resolution from the Holy See, and to this day, that resolution has yet to come. Don’t you just love big theological questions?
Now, if you ask me where I stand on all this, I’d respond with my favorite answer: “I don’t know.” I’d like to believe that there are many things I have the power to act on and many choices I can make. At the same time, I recognize the limits of own ability. Case in point: one thing I’ve always struggled with is advocating for myself. When people with particularly strong opinions put pressure on me to do what they want, I tend to just give in even when I disagree. One of my friends who’s a therapist would of course invite me to reflect on why that is. The thing is, I know exactly why that is. I can tell you with great self-awareness all the things in my childhood that led to me being this way. But simply knowing the causes doesn’t exactly fill me with the fortitude needed to make the changes that I know I need to make. If everyone could simply do what they knew to be right, against all external pressures, through sheer force of will, the world would probably be sooooooo much better. But I know that at times, my will itself is lacking, and that I need some kind of grace, in whatever form that might take. Perhaps sometimes, that grace might take the form of a special friend who pulls you out of Plato’s cave.
With my peace,
Carlo Serrano, Music Director
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