I have been thinking about grace recently.

Psalm 42 says, “Hope in God, and you will praise Him again.” This strikes me because it seems that if you hope for grace, then you will have eyes to see it: or rather, you will attribute to grace what may otherwise have been attributed to chance or something impersonal. And because of the seeing, the fulfilment of hope, you will open further to hope in grace. So it becomes a self-sustaining feedback loop between self and not-self, a sort of virtuous cycle of openness to or trust in the not-self and seeing, in turn, meaningful response from what is beyond the self.

A priest on Easter was talking about the tomb of Christ as representing the events of one’s personal history. He said that just as the women went to visit the tomb expecting to find death, we expect that if we face our history, then we will find meaninglessness. But instead, he said, the promise of God is that we can find meaning: not meaning in the abstract, but concrete meaning, or causality of the good from the bad. Metaphorically, when we go to the tomb of our history, we are promised that we will find it empty, the stone rolled away. This relates very naturally to the subject of grace: if you hope for or expect meaning and enlightenment of your suffering, you will see it; and by seeing it you can open to more meaning, and so on. As Saint Augustine said, “Seek not to understand that you may believe, but believe that you may understand.”

At the same time, the women did not expect to find the tomb empty. It is not hope that begins the virtuous cycle, then, but grace: Something outside expectation, outside initiative. Grace comes first—not as a reward for faith, but as the unbidden beginning of it.

When I was younger, such virtuous cycles are part of what made me skeptical of Catholicism. But I wonder if such virtuous cycles are not evidence that Catholic doctrine is propositionally false in some absolute way and merely sustained by self-delusion, but rather reflect the mechanism by which the promise of God is fulfilled: with participation of the subject, through interaction with what is beyond the subject.

In fact, the virtuous cycle of hoping for and seeing grace is not at all evidence that the doctrine is propositionally false in any absolute way: it actually doesn’t have any bearing on the truth value of doctrine (and I’m not sure anymore what exactly it might mean, if anything, for something to be true or false in an absolute way). If anything, it would simply explain why Catholicism appears so plainly true for those who have already accepted it with faith, and why those who lead with skepticism cannot see the same apparent truth in it.

Given all that I have said here, I am adopting a posture of hope for grace as we head into the springtime. Let this Easter season be a period of openness to renewal.