THE PROXIMITY OF GRACE

Did you ever feel the presence of holiness, or grace?

Was it the person inhabiting the place, or was it the place itself?

Had something special happened there?

Pilgrimages are journeys of thanksgiving, penitence, intercession, or petition with a religious or devotional intention, and are typically made to shrines, holy places, or locations of religious significance.  Pilgrims align themselves with many religious traditions, including Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, and Christianity.

-       Jesus' parents went to Jerusalem every year at the feast of the Passover.

-      Christian pilgrims often journeyed to Jerusalem and Rome.

-       Popular pilgrimage Shrines of the Blessed Virgin Mary are Lourdes in France, Fatima in Portugal and Walsingham in England.

-       Chaucer's Canterbury Tales pilgrims visit the shrine of Thomas Becket at Canterbury Cathedral.

-       Muslims make a Hajj, or pilgrimage to Mecca honoring Abraham and venerate the tomb of the Islamic prophet Muhammad in Medina.

-       Hindus take the Char Dham, a pilgrimage to four holy sites Puri, Rameswaram, Dwarka, and Badrinath.

-      The Kumbh Mela is the holiest of Hindu pilgrimages, held every three years and rotated among Prayag, Haridwar, Nashik, and Ujjain.

Pilgrims make a journey of the heart to visit locations where ordinary people were transformed by the “proximity of grace.”  Christians call them “Saint.” Muslims call them “Friend of God.”  Hindus call them ”Swami.” There are scriptural and literary references to “chosen people,” “holy men and women,” and “people of faith.”

How do we define a saint?  Is it a person whose faith commitment has shown itself in everyday life?”  And further, how has proximity to that person brought grace to another?

Is grace reserved to saints, or sainted people?  Do we not have saints among us?  Have we not been near a person whose mere presence invokes an inner awareness, or peace, or is a reminder of goodness and grace?

Does grace emanate from an individual, like rays from the sun?  Or is it reflected from God, or a Higher Power, like the sun’s light from the moon?

Are these sainted people somehow favored by a force greater than their own to impart a special grace?  Have you been the recipients of such grace – perhaps as a family member, a new friends or old, a pilgrim, a student, a congregant, or simply by being in the proximity of that radiant presence?

In my childhood I remember my own version of Women of God, Friends of God, whom we called nuns, walking into a room and bringing with them a certain presence.  At that young age I saw it as a loving glow, or humility, or unassuming helpfulness.  Now I see it as a grace reserved especially for those very special women.  To me, nuns of all faiths have always acquiesced to the role of “the moon…” reflecting the grace and love of God without ever having the sacramental authority of their male counterparts in the clergy.  I see now that this made them all the more powerful inwardly, as their humility and courage allowed them to see through to their mission of bringing God’s grace to each of us, in any way necessary.

Two of the most famous Women of God in history have manifested the proximity of grace in their own words:

“Help one person at a time and always start with the person nearest you.”

-       - Mother Teresa of Calcutta

“Christ has no body now but yours. No hands, no feet on earth but yours. Yours are the eyes through which he looks compassion on this world. Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good. Yours are the hands through which he blesses all the world.”

-      -  Saint Teresa of Avila

When Thomas Merton contracted an illness while studying at Lycée Ingres, he spent time with the Privat family in the farming village of Murat, France.  His hosts were a simple couple, who brought Merton a special healing grace, described in his book “the Seven Story Mountain:”

“I just remember their kindness and goodness to me, and their peacefulness and their utter simplicity. They inspired real reverence, and I think, in a way, they were certainly saints… in that most effective and telling way: sanctified by leading ordinary lives in a completely supernatural manner, sanctified by obscurity, by usual skills, by common tasks, by routine, but skills, tasks, routine which received a supernatural form from grace within.”

Look around you at the people who have brought light into your world.  Include those now departed, but life-giving while they were in your presence.  Imagine your life without them and you will likely envision so many circumstances too grim to bear, so many challenges too great to overcome, so many joys empty without their grace.

In our season of silence and solitude, we might reconnect with grace in a deeper, more profound way by invoking the memory of those saints we have been privileged to have in our midst.  Let us rekindle that protection we felt, that support we knew, sheltered and blessed in the proximity of grace. Our inward journey will be all the better for it.