God is more present to things than they are to themselves. 'God who art in my heaven more my heaven than heaven,' said Pere Chardon; he is in me more me than myself. And if for one instant he were to forget the world, it would fall immediately into nothingness.
God unites himself in a new way to the souls who open themselves to his grace and his love. This is a presence still more mysterious, more hidden, the presence of indwelling....In this second way, God cannot dwell in material things; but where there is a spirit, he is able to come down and hold converse with that spirit. And this presence of indwelling is conditioned by the descent, in that spirit, of grace in its fullest meaning. You see the importance of grace: it transforms the soul and fits it for the immediate indwelling of the divine Persons.
God's love is creative, it pours out being and goodness into things, whereas man's love presupposes the goodness, the beauty of things. It is because a thing is, because it is good or beautiful that it draws me to love it. When it is fully good, it ravishes me; when it is only partly good, it invites me: I can love a human creature in spite of all it lacks, because there is some good in it, because I think of it as willed by God, redeemed by the blood of Christ....It is otherwise with God's love, which is prior to the being and goodness of things. That is easy to grasp: before the creation, there was nothing; God could not look on the world and be in love with its beauty. God first willed the world—willing and loving are the same with him—and the world budded forth and grew, as the outcome of his act of love. The world exists because God loved it; it continues because God continues to love it. There is, therefore, an inversion to make when we go from man's love to God's: man's love follows upon the goodness of things, God's is creative of the goodness of things.
For us to be able to know and love God in the most hidden depths of his mystery and as he is in himself, the principle of knowing and loving, which is in God in an infinite degree, has to be, as it were, carried over into us; that is what grace does. It is—and this is a mystery—at one and the same time finite and infinite. It is finite because it is in my soul which is finite. If I am able to grow in grace, if it can be more intense in another soul than in mine, that is a proof that it is finite. But if it makes us enter into the divine intimacy, it must be at the same time infinite.
Each Holy Communion should intensify in us this grace and this indwelling. We should come away from it, our souls more open to, and more deeply penetrated by, the Trinity.
Such are the gifts God makes to the least of souls that rises from a state of mortal sin. A man who has made only a poor confession, with a love still weak, and who has received absolution, already possesses grace and is dwelt in by God. Both the grace and the indwelling desire to grow stronger in him.
I'll let you read the rest....
The Meaning of Grace
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