Repentance, Faith and Grace

According to Helminski and Sufi tradition(also Christian spirituality), there are three things that are essential for the beginning and the sustaining of our journey, or pilgrimage to obtain the ultimate Meaning and Purpose for our lives. This is necessary to answer the question, “Why am I here?”

The understanding and experience of repentance, faith and grace are crucial as we seek to embark on the journey to true meaning and purpose.

Repentance, a word used frequently by Christ in the Gospels, as Helminski teaches in “Living Presence”, means to turn, or re-orient oneself, in a whole new direction, toward a new focus or center. In the Gospels it has come to mean to “live along another “axis of being”, i.e. the vertical dimension, oriented towards the ‘Kingdom of Heaven’.

Once we have been turned inwardly towards that new form of human existence, in order to begin the journey, we need to appropriate Faith. Faith is much more than mere belief. It can be defined as a fundamental trust (at the level of the heart) in the One who calls us into the pilgrimage. We trust the Creator’s guidance and assistance, and so we begin to make progress.

At the same time we are supported by Grace, which is the gift of the divine Presence, undergirding and empowering us to make the journey as pilgrims towards meaning or significance. life itself becomes a dialogue between these two aspects. We are able to move forward in our pilgrimage, using Faith and Grace as a means.

At the beginning of our journey, by faith, we often expect that God will act to change our circumstances, to make life easier and more comfortable for us. But, we learn by experience that this is often not the case. God’s grace acts not to make us more comfortable, but to transform us, and this takes a fundamental trust in God—that he is acting on our behalf, no matter the circumstances-to utilize the grace that is given us for transformation.

Few of us enjoy immediate, radical change within ourselves. We tend to be more comfortable with what we already are, even when this is distressing to us. But what we really need, is transformation.

This is the ultimate purpose of our journey to becoming more like our Master.

~excerpts from Lynn C. Bauman, “Living the Presence, A Manual for Contemplative Christian Practice”.

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