Paradox is one of the central structures of the mysteries of the Catholic faith. The way these paradoxes are traditionally formulated is “both/and.” For example, Jesus Christ is both fully divine and fully human. Likewise, the Most Holy Trinity is three distinct persons in one Godhead. We could put this another way, God is both unity and trinity. The most difficult paradox is around God’s activity within the world and human agency. This one is the most practically difficult for a variety of reason, the most important of which is need to safeguard free will.
I am going to make a list of doctrines that relate to this paradox of Grace and Free will:
- God is in charge. Often called God’s providence and omnipotency.
- God selects us for salvation (known as predestination). It is not merited by our works and God initiates our salvation.
- God has perfect foreknowledge of all things that will happen, including our ultimate destination.
And yet we believe:
- We are completely responsible for all our actions.
- We have a free will and must respond to God’s grace.
These statements seem contradictory at first, that is the nature of paradoxes. In fact, most people erroneously believe that Catholics don’t believe in predestination despite the fact that all doctors of the Church clearly teach this doctrine and it is clearly in the Gospels and the New and Old Testaments (most prominently in Romans in the New Testament). With this in mind, almost everyone tries to resolve the paradox with some clever statement, which ironically is most of the time slightly heretical.
The key is not to resolve the paradox, but to penetrate its truth through contemplation. Contemplation is a kind of beholding, or seeing, the truth revealed by God. This does not take place with our rational faculties, but only happens when we transcend their natural operations and behold them by a kind of intuitive grasp. Thus, we see them in glory and marvel at the divine wisdom.
A simpler way to explain this is that we learn to accept that God has a plan for my life and to trust that plan. This is easier said than done. Our limited human nature constantly seeks to pull us back to our limited and natural ways of thinking and understanding. We struggle to accept mystery and in a certain regards, these truths can disturb us.
Likewise, there is a danger in misunderstanding the doctrines of predestination and providence. We can collapse the paradox and set up a false duality. If God already knows everything and has a plan, why do I need to strive? Why work out my salvation with fear and trembling? The problem is in creating a false duality and false binary. This is another characteristic of our nature, that we naturally create these binaries to define our reality.
We must learn to let go of these lower ways of knowing and loving God. Ultimately this takes place not in intellectual exercises, but in the silence of contemplation. We must learn to enter into the heart and normally the Lord leads us to this experience of paradox through the purgations of the dark night of the senses and the dark night of the spirit.
It is by suffering that we pierce the veil between us and God. This is what the Doctors of the Church teach us. To penetrate these mysteries, we must be illuminated by grace and discover them in silence, each according to his station and vocation.
So what is the advantage of penetrating this mystery? A few things.
First, we develop the confidence needed to live out our vocation in Christ. This confidence is described best by St. Paul. He seemed to have a contagious confidence which poured out in his letter where he exclaimed, “What can separate us from the love of Christ!” Likewise, as Padre Pio taught, we learn to pray more and worry less. This doesn’t mean that we never experience negative emotions, but rather that we learn how to work against negative emotions and inevitable desolations we all experience.
Second, by being illuminated to the divine archetypes, we learn to read people and situations with greater clarity because we see things as God sees things. This is powerful no matter what our station or vocation in life. You learn to be less reactive and more proactive because everything becomes charged with the grandeur of God. Every situation is a powerful opportunity. We become a hammer and not a nail and feel a sense of agency in our life.
In short, we become a saint!