The Solidity of Things Is from God, II

 It’s foolish, then, to assume that your physical, emotional, and intellectual life is a zero-sum game.  You probably already knew that—you knew from experience that if you work on a skill you can usually improve.

But there is an odd tendency among religious people not to extend that thinking to the spiritual life.  Part of the reason, no doubt, is because we are reminded on a regular basis of the basic truth that God does it all.  We cannot save ourselves; we cannot make ourselves feel prayerful when we try to pray; we cannot “get enough grace stored up” to get by even one minute of the day.  And it is a salutary thing to interiorize those facts of the spiritual life.

But “God who created us without our cooperation and consent will not save us without our cooperation and consent.”  Indeed, I wonder—with all due submission to the proper ecclesial authorities—if he really could “save” us, in any meaningful sense of the word, against our wills, or whether that would not be something like squaring a circle: a logical or metaphysical impossibility—a nonsense sentence—the performance of which is beyond even an omnipotent being—indeed, is especially contrary to the nature of such a being.