The Power of Grace

The theologian, teacher, and author Fr. Ron Rolheiser recently penned a column, The Resurrection - The Power of Positive Thinking or the Power of God?, that I think gets at something fundamental about the religious worldview, namely, what is so crucial about the experience of resurrection to Christian belief.

Fr. Rolheiser's Eastertime offering asked whether "the resurrection" Christians advert to is a metaphor for the good effects positive thinking has in our lives. Or, is that sense of resurrection "augmented by something beyond us ... the transcendent power of God breaking into nature and into our lives and doing for us what we can't do simply through will power and positive thinking"?

Perhaps surprisingly, Fr. Rolheiser's answers to those two seemingly opposed questions are yes and yes.

Yes, "faith, hope and positive thinking make good things happen and resurrect life from its many deaths." But also, yes, "a power and grace beyond us" come into play as well. "The resurrection is about power entering our world and our lives from beyond."


Power from beyond is the gift of grace. Grace, theologically speaking, is a freely made gift that we and the world receive from God without our having earned or merited it. It is the "happy ending" that didn't seem possible at the time.

Grace comes to us from beyond by "a power that can re-arrange the very atoms inside of our physical bodies, our aching emotions, and our divided world and raise up new life from the ashes."


To what Fr. Rolheiser says I would add the following suggestion: the difference between the secular or quasi-religious understanding of "resurrection" and the truly religious one boils down to how we experience it.

When he says the secular or New Age version of resurrection "is not just wishful thinking; proper attitude lets the right physical, emotional, and spiritual energy flow into the world and into the body," he hints at what I mean by "experience." Our mind is the seat of the attitudes we take, "proper" or "wishful." The human mind is, notably, conscious ... which means it is mysteriously able to have subjective experience of its own interior states, above and beyond the workings of the brain which produce those states.

It is at this level of consciousness that we experience everything, including, perhaps, "resurrection."

If we experience our life as being raised up from the ashes by a power beyond our ken, then so be it.

If we experience our life as being revived by positive thinking alone, so be it as well.

Who is to say that the one is not just a metaphor for the other, anyway, but actually the same thing, experienced differently?