Aquinas on the Mystery of Trinitarian Indwelling by Fr. Thomas Joseph White, OP

In a spiritual reflection on the theology of grace, Fr. White explains the role of the Holy Spirit and the gift of grace in orienting the human soul to the trinitarian God. Using the framework of St. Thomas Aquinas, he analyzes the essential role of baptism and the effects of grace, namely the healing and perfecting of human nature and ultimately, union with God.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Yeah, the Angelicum, where I have the privilege of teaching and being at right currently responsible, it it is the place where John Paul II did his doctoral studies. So his legacy overshadows us with an immense privilege and also, in a way, an obligation to think seriously anew in every generation, the givens of the faith and the spiritual profundity of the faith in the face of uh the challenges of the contemporary age. Happily also we can boast that the current pontiff completed his doctoral studies at the Angelicum, so we feel amazed and blessed that the first American Pope also studied uh at the Angelicum, which is for us uh an astonishing uh work of providence. Uh what No, so theology can be presented in more, you might say, expositive ways, where you just try to lay out the mystery of the faith in various ways. It can be um polemical or argumentative, where you try to show why you think a given option makes more sense than another. But what I'm gonna do tonight is actually a little bit more like the place where scholasticism and spirituality meet and present a spiritual theology of grace. And so after a preface about the mystery of the Holy Trinity as the source and end of the spiritual life, I'm gonna really speak about what grace is as derived from the Trinity and as transformative of the person. Then I'm gonna speak about the Christological conformity of grace or how grace conforms us to the mystery of Christ. And I'm gonna then talk about baptism and how baptism is a ground and invitation to a contemplative life of union with the Holy Trinity. And all this is really from Thomas Aquinas, and it's sort of in the spirit of Angelicum spiritual theology that was a great movement in the 20th century to think of theology, uh Thomistic theology, Aquinas as a sort of spiritual mentor or spiritual master for our inner lives. So the title is Thomas Aquinas on the Mystery of Trinitarian Indwelling. In the beginning was the Holy Trinity, and the Holy Trinity has created the visible and the invisible worlds, the world of human beings, and also the world of angels, in order to share God's divine nature with us, to grant us a share in God's own life, God's eternal life of contemplation, which we may partake of by grace or gift. We are contemplative creatures, even just according to our nature, prior, you might say, to grace. We are invited to contemplate the world around us, not only to analyze it, but to gaze and wonder upon it, to make insight into the nature of things, to grasp in awe the truth, the beauty, the goodness of the deep down being of things. But we're also called by grace to participate in the divine nature of God Himself, a nature that is Trinitarian. By participate, I don't mean becoming the divine, I mean to live a certain kind of grasp of the inner life of God and love of union with the goodness of the Trinitarian life of God. The eternal Father, in knowing and loving himself from all eternity, in his eternal depths of goodness, begets the word and wisdom of the Son, to whom he communicates forever the plenitude of the divine nature as God from God, light from light, so that all that is in the Father is in the Son, and all that is in the Son is in the Father as the one God. And the Father likewise, from all eternity, in loving himself in his eternal depths of goodness, loves the word he begets, and with the word and through the word he spirates or breathes forth immaterial love. From his eternal wisdom there comes forth love, as from knowledge we can grow in love of other things. God eternally, knowing himself, loves himself. This love is the Holy Spirit, a person who is the fire of immaterial love, who is, you might say, shared as the bond of union of the Father and the Son. The love that is the Holy Spirit is the mutual love of the Father and His Word, of the Son with the Father. And just as the Holy Spirit receives all that he is and has as the Lord, as the uncreated God, God from God, coming forth from the Father and the Son as their mutual love, so the Holy Spirit contains within himself the plenitude of the divine nature. The Holy Spirit is the one God, even as he is the subsistent love of the Father and the Son. This is the mysterious Trinitarian life that God has in himself, that we know opaquely through faith, but that God wishes to share with us, and that remains inaccessible to us and unknown to us, naturally speaking, unless God reveals it to us by grace and communicates to us a means to participate in his divine life. That means of participation, as we shall see, is principally the incarnation, the crucifixion, and the resurrection of Jesus. For now, however, we can consider the Trinity as the principle and source of grace, the font, and the Trinity as the final end of contemplative union. Grace is given to us from the Trinity and for communion with the Trinity. So what does it mean to say this that we receive grace from God? So now I come to the first part of the talk: grace and causation. Now, when Saint Thomas considers the mystery of grace in its essence, he makes creative use of the Aristotelian causes. You've heard of this stuff: form, matter, efficient causality, final causality. Essentially, he notes at the start, grace grace in us is something created by God. When we are in a state of grace, we're given something by God that can be or not be present in us, something we can gain or lose, something we can receive or forfeit. And this is something other than God Himself, strictly speaking, even if it leads us into deeper communion with God. What then is grace essentially, or if we consider it in terms of the formal cause, what is it in itself? It helps to note that grace is a mysterious dimension of our being that is created by God and communicated to our human person as an addition to our human nature, but very importantly also in complement to it. As you probably know from classes or from your own reading or history or background, Aquinas often says, grace does not diminish our nature, grace does not do violence to our human nature. Instead, it works to heal our nature, and also as important as the healing, it elevates our nature so that we can be more ourselves in the natural order that is healed and go beyond ourselves into the life of God. And that's why we also talk about grace as supernatural. Super in Greek just means above. Above our nature, there's the nature of God, and grace takes us out of ourselves into beyond ourselves, into the nature of God supernaturally. In sum, grace accomplishes two things in us that are coordinated. It heals our nature and it elevates it into spiritual friendship, supernatural friendship with God. Friendship with God, the meaning of the Christian life. Concretely, if you ask, well, how does that cash out in my practical life that I should live in a state of grace, that the essence of grace should be in me, you can see it flourish or you may say flower in the human soul in three ways. First, through the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity, the living habits by which we turn our minds and hearts to God in belief, in hope, and in unit of love. And then relatedly, the infused moral virtues, I'm speaking of prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance, transformed by Christian grace so that they are placed in the service of faith, hope, and love, to live out Christian prudence, Christian justice, Christian fortitude, Christian temperance. And thirdly, and finally, this implies the gifts of the Holy Spirit, dispositions placed in us in virtue of our baptism that allow us to be moved in special ways by the Holy Spirit so as to be more deeply conformed to Christ's life within us. Now, all of these, the infused theological virtues, the infused moral virtues, and the gifts of the Holy Spirit, originate from within the wellspring of a soul that is in a state of grace. You might think here of a spring of mountain water coming forth from a source where much gushes forth in purity from the mind and heart of the one in a state of grace. Or you could think of a multitude of fruits that grows slowly from one tree, as if the root of grace living in the soul, putting its roots down in the soil of the soul, uh, flowers in so many dispositions of the theological and moral virtues. If we then turn to the question of efficient causality, where does grace come from? The question points us towards a transcendent origin. The answer is clearly God Himself. It is the Holy Trinity, intimately present at the heart of all things as the creator, who is also present in a distinct way in the spiritual soul of each person, who takes a new initiative in the creature, the spiritual creature, to be the author now of grace. For indeed, God is present to all human beings, including those who have no current awareness of or openness to grace, uh, but God can take a step forward from that and initiate the relationship of grace by offering grace to the soul in the, you might say, in the essence of the soul, or from within what is most intimate in the very being and the very faculties of mind and will in the human person. We should recall here the doctrine of divine omnipresence. It is the case that God as creator is always already present in all things as the cause of their being, the one who gives them existence in all that they are. If you could think about being or existence as something you could touch, like physical, wherever you would touch it, you would find God is already most intimate to it as the source of it. And Aquinas quotes Dionysius in saying, God is all things as the cause of all things, not because he's positing pan-intheism, but because he's saying wherever you find created being, God is more intimate to the thing than it is to itself, just because God gives it to be in all that it is, always. As creator, then, God is more interior to us in our spiritual soul, which is suspended in being by God's creative power, than we are present to ourselves, whether we're aware of it or not, whether we're in a state of grace or not. What is new in the mystery of grace is that the God who has always been present in the inner core and heart of our being, hidden from us, now makes himself known, without doing any violence to the person, in fact, by liberating us from within, so that we may come freely to know him and love him, giving us to discover him personally in his transcendence and indeed in the darkness of faith. So Aquinas talks about a second presence of God, not as creator, but as redeemer, presence by grace, as he gives grace to angels and human beings in virtue of this communication, so that we come to know God, not merely as an omnipresent creator, perhaps philosophically decryptible, but now in a new way through living friendship with God in spiritual communion with the Holy Trinity, that is that who is unveiled to our mind and heart through faith, hope, and love. And this leads to the question of the final cause of grace. What is it for? What are the ultimate effects of grace? What may we hope for from grace? And here we can note that the ultimate purpose of grace is to lead us into communion with God in Himself. And here Aquinas sometimes talks about uncreated grace or an uncreated gift. He just means the gift of God in Himself, knowing God directly and immediately. God gives us created grace so we can be elevated to live in communion with God in Himself, in His divine life. This communion is established already in this world in virtue of the theological virtues. And Aquinas says beautifully, faith places us immediately in contact with God Himself, the first truth. The reason that's kind of beautiful, though it's abstractly stated, is he says, you know, when you touch a truth, the mind is alighted to become itself. But when you have faith, you're invited to really have immediate contact with the ultimate truth in itself by a simple act of faith. You just do know the Father in the darkness of faith. You just do know the eternal Son, Jesus Christ. You just do know the Holy Spirit. You touch the term of the intellectual life every time you make a living act of faith. By faith, we know the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit personally and directly, however obscure this knowledge may be, however dark the faith may seem, it really is contact with who God is. So it's already a conduit, the faith is already a conduit, of mystical friendship with God and a call to conformity to God's own life welling up within us or springing up in us. In the darkness of faith, we each live something like that which is depictive in depicted in narrative form in 1 Kings 19, 11 through 13, where Elijah goes down to Sinai amidst the crisis of fidelity and the false prophets of Israel, and he sits in a cave in Sinai, and instead of hearing the sort of loud sounds of lightning or thunder, he hears the voice of God in a whisper coming from within. Faith is the secret whisper of the truth about God given in all objective luminousness to the soul. And by hope, we possess God's eternal life even now, because hope is a movement of the will that tends towards eternal life, possession of God, as the final end of decision and rest. What are you hoping for? I want to become a neurosurgeon. That seems formidable. What are you hoping for? I want to become a Formula One race car driver. Okay, that's hard work. What are you hoping for? I hope to see the Holy Trinity face to face. It's actually much easier. It's much easier. And it's also much more exalted. It's formally supernatural. We can live eternal life already in hope by placing our free, our final end in God and seeking perfect union with the Holy Trinity. And then accordingly, by accordingly, by charity, we love God in Himself and are united supernaturally to the persons of the Holy Trinity. Faith and hope, informed by charity, teach us to love Jesus Christ, to serve him, to do the will of the Father, to be inwardly docile to the Holy Spirit who wishes to dwell within us. And charity, Aquinas actually defines, if you want to be a Thomistic nerd for a second, secunda secunde 23 question 23, article one, he defines charity as friendship with God. Charity creates a common life, a shared life with God in the obscurity of faith and the simple poverty of supernatural hope. So we can speak then of grace as something within us that comes from the Trinity and that leads us into the life of the Trinity. And this is why Pope Leo XIII in the 19th century and others in the modern era speak of grace effectuating in us divine indwelling. Indwelling, God the Holy Spirit coming to indwell in us, the Father and the Son coming to indwell in the soul. Christ speaks of this indwelling clearly in John 14, 23. If a man loves me, he will keep my word, and my father will love him, and we will come to him, and we will make our home in him, to indwell in the soul. God makes his home in the place that is the human person. God makes his home in us, and this inhabitation or divine indwelling is made possible by the life of grace within us. God can make his home in our souls and dwell there in radiance and light, enlightening us in our mind with Christian wisdom, granting us the strength to love him and all other creatures for his sake. And indeed, if you one way to think about the saints is God dwelling as sunlight in these luminous souls which he comes to inhabit, filling them with the light of wisdom and knowledge, warming them with the rays of hope and love, so that others in turn are warmed by warmed by the fire of the love of God present in them, enlightened by the God's presence within their minds and their souls. God dwells in the friends of God. He makes himself known as their father. He inspires hope in them in all things, to give them heroic fortitude. He lifts them up into the light and wisdom of the Son. He moves them inwardly by the fire of the love of the Holy Spirit, so they become actually flexible and strong in the vigor of divine charity. They become Christlike as those who receive and study the truth of God, they become more virtuous and loving in accord with the gifts of the Holy Spirit. They become gentle and strong, spiritually generous and flexible but principled, active and alive but recollected, moved inwardly by the gifts of the Holy Spirit, to become more and more spiritually free. And indeed, who is more free or more human than the saints? So I turn now to the second part of the lecture, the Christo conforming orientation of grace, or how this life of grace conforms us to Jesus Himself. Christianity confesses that Jesus Christ is both true God and true man. Accordingly, and this is not evident, but it is a fundamental teaching of the faith, grace is received from Christ not only insofar as he's Lord and God, but also insofar as he's human. Jesus, the man Jesus, in his human mind and heart wills us to receive from his plenitude of grace, grace he possesses also as man. So there's a distinction to be made about how Christ is the source of all grace. He's the source of the grace in one sense in virtue of his deity, and in another sense, that's coordinated, of course, in virtue of his humanity. As God or as Lord, Jesus Christ is the eternal Son, who is one in being with the Father and the Holy Spirit, and indeed it is God, the most holy trinity, who is the font of all grace, giving life to the soul from within, where I've already said God is already present to us as our transcendent and incomprehensible creator. The Trinity is the author of created grace. The Trinity infuses grace into the soul to elevate the human person into the sphere of the Trinitarian life, into friendship with God. However, one person of the Trinity alone is also human. The eternal Son of God, the Word of the Father, has become human from conception to death. He has experienced human life among us as a subject in history. He has also remained forever human in both body and soul, in the glory of his resurrection and ascension into heaven, the state we call heaven, or beatitude, glorification of his human soul and body. So now, as man, Christ has a human soul inundated with created grace, indeed his grace. Saint Paul tells us this is the grace of headship, or as the theologians call it, capital grace, the grace of Christ as head of the church, which is his mystical body. Christ as man shares his grace with us. Saint Augustine notes that this metaphor of headship and mystical body is one that indicates the directionality of the lines of all grace. All grace flows out to us from God and from the humanity of Christ, as the grace that Christ Himself possesses, that He has merited to share with us. He, Christ, who is conceived as man in a state of grace, has lived out his life in a human state of grace that is most epitome, most perfect, in order to merit for us the life of grace that he in turn shares with us. Our grace then is patterned after his image, it's exemplified in his perfection. Even as Jesus Christ, now in his glorified state, wills to communicate grace to us in his human heart, in his human mind, so he also, by that same measure, wills to conform us to himself. Sort of like in the natural analogies, a good mathematician makes you able to solve math problems like he or she does, or uh a good professor of Latin teaches you to be able to decline verbs like he or she does. But I mean on a higher level, it's also the case supernaturally, Christ gives us grace to teach us and form us to become like himself. He's the meritorious cause of our grace alone as our Savior, who is reconciled as God, but he's the exemplary cause of our grace as one who possesses it in plenitude and most perfectly, so that when we receive a share in it from him, he conforms us by the reception of that grace to what he possesses in abundance. And so we can speak here, Aquinas says, of an instrumental causality. The principal causality is that of Christ as Lord, or God, he's the principal source of grace as Lord, but his human nature works as an instrument. Think about a violin player instrumentally playing the violin. You can't make the piece work without the violin. So God gives the grace that he gives to us through and in with concord with the human mind and heart of Christ, and that human willing, that human intentionality of wisdom in Christ's mind in glory is an instrumental cause of our grace. He shares his grace interpersonally with each of us as the head of the mystical body. As Paul says, He knew me and he died for me. He knows us now and he to each of us gives grace or wishes to convey grace, and indeed wishes to make us deeper shares in his own life. The life of grace in us in turn then conforms us to Christ. It moves our souls inwardly so that we may become more like him in our human nature, despite the abyss of difference that exists between him and us, which we are right to recognize. Yes, Christ is sinless, we are sinful. He has the plenitude of created grace in his human soul that is incomparably greater than that of any other human being, except in a qualified sense his mother, the Virgin Mary. We are very limited in our degree of perfection or our participation in the life of grace. However, all that being said, and it's very important to say, it is the very Christ, it is the very grace of Christ we receive a participation in from our baptism, and it is his justice that justifies us, and his righteousness that makes us righteous, and his life that enlivens us. I'm going to turn now to the third part of the talk, the contemplative horizon of all baptismal life. Baptism is the ordinary means of sacramental participation in the grace of Christ. It is the most fundamental way in which we become recipients of Christ's grace in not just a punctual or original way, say when we're uh initially baptized, but in an enduring and habitual way through the course of our lives. We are changed forever by baptism, and we are also set out, you might say, through an initiative of God's uh um election or God's initiative uh decision on our part to press us inwardly into a life of conformity to Christ. However um obscure that may be to us, however um clueless we may be about that at certain parts of our life, and um and however uh unremarkable that may be in its consequences or effects in the visible world. Baptism is a kind of invitation um that does not necessitate our conformity to Christ. Indeed, it doesn't necessitate that we remain in a state of grace, but it's a deep fundamental invitation and pathway that can uh have lasting and deepening consequences through the course of our life. Now Aquinas asks the very pertinent question if baptism is a participation in the grace of Christ who has overcome death, why do baptized people die? Why do they they not forever live in the body now glorified if Christ has redeemed them from death and from the consequences of sin? So I want to deepen my point about conformity to Christ by looking at what baptism does as the grace of baptism conforms us to Christ. Now the answer Aquinas gives to that good question is telling. The grace of Christ does not simply recreate anew the situation of the original Adamic family so that the fallen human race can be restored to what it had been meant to be from the beginning prior to our collective fall into sin and our forfeiture of the grace of our original parents. Rather, God, who respects human beings and permits them to sin, engages in a new economy of redemption after the disaster, which is just uh collective is collective as well as the individual disaster of original sin. And he now gives us law and grace before the time of Christ in Israel to prepare for the redemption, and then in the fullness of time, Christ enters into the historical life and sphere of fallen human beings and is himself killed by them in his human nature. And here is the crux. By dying in righteousness and by rising from the dead in a recreated, glorified state, God has now made his own human life of grace among us available for all human beings, even in a world in which we still die, and even through the very process of dying. You might say, instead of resetting the battle back to the terms of peace, God entered into the battlefield and became himself a fallen soldier, but now gives those who are living on the battlefield a directionality. It's a very male analogy, but you know, you'll you'll excuse me, I occupy that half of the human race. Now, this life this life of Christ and his grace is available inwardly to the soul in this life, meaning we can already live the mystery of the resurrection now, as Paul says, in the soul, made alive in a new way by the resurrected Christ. And it is to be communicated eventually to the body eschatologically in the world to come, in the resurrection, in the end times. Consequently, even after the bodily death and resurrection of Christ, yes, we still die, but actually we now die entirely differently. For we can now die in Christ, suffering death fruitfully in him as an act of love of God and neighbor, and we die physically unto life in the resurrection, and unto life for the final judgment. His death has become an effective model for our death, indeed for the death of every human person, and his resurrected life is a model for our eventual glorification in both body and soul. And that's real, that's at play in the world, and that will be eventually the truth and destiny of the human race, whether we like it or not, whether we participate or not, this is coming. Christ is alive now in the Eucharist, he's really present, he's really present in the world giving grace to people, he's converting hearts and minds, and Christ is going to have some kind of eschatological end times, accumulative uh recapitulation of reality subject to him. Now, baptism sets us out actively on the way to this eschatological life in Christ. We're not only baptized into his crucified righteousness and his death, but also into his resurrection and his life, his glorified life. And so his glory can live in us, especially in the life of the soul that I've mentioned. It makes a claim upon us. But just because we're called to serve him in works of sanctification and righteousness, penance and spiritual maturation, so we're also called to enter into the drama of the cross in view of the mystery of resurrected life. We're called to allow Christ to live his mystery anew in us, like a living tree of one who's been crucified, but who even in his crucifixion has always remained life in itself and transformed the vehicle of his own suffering into now a vehicle or an instrument of the communication of life in those who are doomed to die, so that their own deaths are rendered fruitful with the very life of that original tree of life that is the cross. This divine life in Christ crucified reasserted itself in the resurrection of Jesus, the Son of God, who now lives in his glorified body and soul, and extends his divine life into us by grace, like so many branches and flowers of the cross, that tree now living in the mystical body of the church, that glorified Christ in his heavenly state of perfection, putting out vines into the vineyard of the whole mystical body of the church, prolonging in us the mystery of crucifixion and death and resurrection into the spiritual life, and inviting all the members of his mystical body to live in him, the new Adam, that Adamic death that he died for us so that we might live in that Christological life, the life of the Lord. So if you I mean, this is a very basic set of claims about Christianity, but just because it is a true set of claims, presupposing that the faith is supernatural and comes from God, then the grace of baptism must be inherently contemplative in orientation. Baptism opens our mind up to an ultimate horizon of eternity and life in the Trinity. And so even in the simple darkness of faith that's communicated to everybody, however learned or unlettered, however mature or however young, however infirm or however agile, those who have faith can learn to look upon the face of the eternal Father in the faith, and the Father awaits the soul of each person in that encounter. The eternal word made flesh seeks to enlighten the mind of everyone in the darkness of faith, and the dark and in the faith, Christ awaits that encounter with us. And the Holy Spirit seeks to inflame the heart of every human being with hope and love, and that living flame of love is meant to burn within us at the core and center of our being, and that is something that also awaits us in the simple darkness of faith. Although it's clear that there are special elevations of grace reserved to only a few of the greatest saints, Saint Thomas underscores that every human person, just because he or she is baptized, is giving, is given the immediate privilege of seeking spiritual intimacy with the divine. And he says beautifully in his late simple meditations on the Creed for the non-liter uh literate people of Naples uh the soul the uh that faith is like a spiritual marriage or a mystical marriage of the soul with God. Every human being is invited by baptism into spiritual marriage with God, where the soul can touch the face of God and know Christ by intimacy and love Christ as the greatest good of every human person. Charity places this places the soul in an immediate proximity to God through spiritual friendship and elevates the soul to find God as its homeland above the vicissitudes of time and the uh the travails of suffering in this human life, which are inevitable and significant. In this sense, the seed of grace given in baptism is already mystical in orientation, and this is why the church has come to affirm clearly at the Second Vatican Council the so-called universal call to holiness, present in baptism as such. All who are baptized are called to holiness, all who are baptized are called to spiritual friendship with God. I want to conclude. I think how am I doing on time? Yeah, all right. So, yeah, I'm I'm gonna I'm gonna move towards a conclusion, allow a little more time for conversation. I've got a few more pages here, but the the um the airplane is approaching the runway. Please put your seats up to the upright position. Your tray tables may you can tell I spend a lot of time in planes. Anyway, we're we can see the runway in case you've been wor in case you've been standing up too long. So I want to conclude then by just thinking for a moment about baptism as a seed of heaven and a found a perpetually actual foundation for the Christian life. In his parables, our Lord sometimes refers to the kingdom of heaven as a tree which begins as a mustard seed, but it grows so that eventually all the birds of heaven come to find their home within it. So you find this in Matthew 13 and Luke 13. The mustard seed. He also speaks of the kingdom of God as something within us in Luke 17, 21. The kingdom of God is within you. It's very I mean, we if it's a truism for us, we've heard it too many times to hear it. But there's a kingdom in you. What are you talking about? You have a kingdom in you. I mean, it's worth thinking about your whole life. If we think about the grace of baptism as a seed sown by the sower who's Christ, the seed is the grace of faith, hope, and love that places our soul, you might say, immediately within the sphere of the Trinity or the life of the Trinity. We make God our homeland by grace, the seed like is this life of the Trinity in us. God is within our souls, we are within God. And in this sense, we can come to know God in Himself in faith, we can commune with God in the infallible attachment of hope and the unit of love of charity. As the image of the seed suggests, this initial gift of grace is alive. That's the key thing about the seed. Starts small, but it's alive. What's alive and vital could fight, conquer, and ultimately triumph. Small living things that grow into be great things. That's what the image of the tree is. It grows upward in trajectory toward the life of heaven, which is the plenary possession of God and eternal life. The kingdom within us is really the presence of the king. The king isn't the humanity of Christ primarily, it's God who's king of Israel. The king in you is God. God in you is creating a kingdom. Your soul is the kingdom of God. God is within our souls as we are within God, in the sense that we can come to know God in Himself. And as the seed of the image suggests, God is alive in us, and we are to become alive in God. God's kingdom can put roots down more and more deeply into the soil of our soul, this mustard seed. It's something that can and must deepen within us in the course of our lives, and it must be protected by threats and spiritual enemies. The parable of the soul sower tells us it can grow infertile, it can be unrooted, it can be destroyed. What's alive can die. But it can also, through adversity, grow. A lot of times, if you know people who are like, if you I mean, although it's true I converted, I can't really remember much of that, but I've worked a lot with people who are converts. And one of the things that happens often people like adult converts, they convert like within a year, they find themselves in tremendous spiritual combat. Like, why is this all happening to me? Everything was supposed to be serene. You say, no, this is good. This is how it's supposed to work. You've got something that's going to triumph in you, but it's going to happen through spiritual warfare. That's a good warfare of love, a triumph of faith. This happens to everyone. The cares of the world, the interior temptations of the flesh and of egoism, the antagonism of Satan, they're all very real. And they are real dangers to the life of grace within us, but there are also opportunities God makes use of, as St. Catherine of Siena makes clear, to spur growth within us so that we may live more actively in Christ, even over and against, and in a sense, because of the challenge and external stimulus of adversity. What lives must fight to live, and in so struggling it grows more robust. So contemplative souls are called to become more luminous, more indefatigably hopeful, more conquering in charity through the course of their human existence in this world, through struggle, and in deiform union with the life of the Trinity within us. The soul ascends by this tree of life growing within us up into the kingdom of the Trinity. The intellect is called to be beatified by the Word, seeing all things in the light of Christ, who is true God and true man, known and contemplated as such. The soul is called to see things all t to see all things in terms of the Father, the paternal origin of Trinitarian life, who eternally begets the Son, who is the paternal origin of all created being, both visible and invisible. The Father is known in His Word and makes all things in His Word and His Spirit, just as He recreates all things by grace in the Word and in the Spirit. So the knowledge in so in the knowledge of the works of creation and the knowledge of the works of redemption, we may come to know and contemplate the Father of lights, from whom all things proceed, and, as James tells us in his letter, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change. He is eternally good and eternally luminous. And the heart of man is called to burn also inexorable inexorably with the light of the Holy Spirit, who luminously shines eternally as love shared forever between the Father and the Son, as their mutually spirated perfect love and goodness in whom all things have been created. This calling to Trinitarian Union remains present for all human beings, especially for the baptized, despite their weaknesses and even their moral struggles. The genuine limitations and miseries of fallen human beings, which we all share in, admittedly make us seem ill-proportioned for the gift of participation in Trinitarian life, and these difficulties almost always persist in human persons to a lesser or greater extent until death, and are perfected only or perfectly purified only in purgatory. But nevertheless, the miseries of the soul make even clearer to those who cooperate with the grace of God the absolute gift character of the life of grace and the transformative power of the life of Christ in us. As little flower discovered, even her moral miseries were the opportunity to render grace thanks to God for the grace of mercy that is transformative of the soul. You can leverage your miseries to receive more mercy, as she insightfully unveiled to us. Baptism, then, contains a very deep paternal promise on the side of God that can easily be overlooked. Just in virtue of the fact that a soul is baptized, one may conclude that God has promised in seed to offer the grace of sanctification to that person if he or she should cooperate integrally with God's design of grace. It's never too late to start. The grace in question is not static or merely fixed unchangingly, but is something growing dynamic within each person, flowing up into the heavens, carrying the soul more progressively into the temple of God. Therefore, just in so far as one is baptized, there's always the possibility not only of the reactualization of the grace of the sacrament, but of the but also of the intensification of its effects. There's never a day in our lives we cannot live our baptism more profoundly and have the actual effect of it take deeper root and more extensive effect in our souls. In a certain way, you could say the day you die, you hope, is the day you're living your baptism most finely or most perfectly, or you're serving God for the first time in a new way. It makes sense in this light to promote the idea of contemplative and religious acts of gratitude for our baptism. Human beings should habitually thank God for the gift of baptism, a filial adoption into life in Christ, and they should ask God to intensify in them the effects of baptism. The desire to grow in living faith, hope, and the virtue of charity is something that we should naturally pair with the desire to be inwardly conformed to Christ. His grace not only redeems us, but it also begins our healing and our transformation. To live as a baptized, contemplative Christian is to live in hope of the transformative power of the cross. As John's first letter says, Beloved, we are God's children now. It does not yet appear what we shall be, but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is. Thank you very much.