Grace

I was watching Touched by an Angel the other day. Andrew told some good-deed doer that people had been trying to build stairways to heaven for a long time (think Tower of Babel) but that they always came up short. Andrew says that however high you get on that ladder you build, inevitably you must ask God to look down, have mercy and carry you the rest of the way.

Before modern astronomy revealed the true extent of the universe, I am sure that some fancied they could build a tower to heaven, if they could just figure out a way to get that high. I don't imagine it was just Nebuchadnezzar trying to do it, either. In our own era, there was the brazen provocation of the engineers who built the RMS Olympic, and then the RMS Titanic, who felt that even God could not sink the Titanic. (And it didn't even need God, just an iceberg, to go down.)

I can't get there by myself. I fail at attempts to win grace for myself all the time - reigning in my own grumpiness, fear, anger or selfishness is a task I fail at regularly. I know some people dismiss religious belief as a crutch. But what they say with dismissiveness, I assert with boldness; of course my Jesus is a crutch! I am totally adrift in this universe. We think we are powerful; our modern science has reduced mortality in North America to the point where most of us can predict the length of our comfortable lives. We know exactly how our future health will hold out, when it will give out, and can narrow to within two kinds of illnesses (heart disease and cancer) how we will check out.

But it is all an illusion; we have built our post-industrial industry on top of fossil fuels that will give out. And even the grains of sand on the beach can be numbered. In much of the rest of the world, people live with the same day to day uncertainty most of the animal kingdom gets by on. As beautiful as this universe is, it has little to offer us in the way of hope. We are not gods, nor are we part of God.

Instead it behooves us to rely on God. What we do wrong, He can forgive. What we lack materially, He will grant us spiritually. Where we suffer, He can promise respite.

He is my only hope. Nothing in this world would make any sense to me, myself included, without Him.

Agnes Dei! Miserere Nobis!