Welcome to Buoy, a Life in Deeper Water podcast.

Episode 23. I Got Lost on the Way to the Sistine Chapel. (part 2 of growing in the fullness of God’s grace)

(click here to listen now)

Hello human.

Thank you for jumpin’ on this buoy about how God’s grace is working 24/7 in us. How we might recognize it and share it with others freely. How it is part of our witness to others.

I shared in episode 22 that God’s sanctifying grace transforms us into the likeness of Christ. We participate in the process of sanctifying grace by preparing ourselves to receive this grace. Exposing our intellect to scripture prepares our human nature to accept God’s divine grace.

Sustaining grace perfects God’s power. This happens in times of trial and suffering. God sustains us. We spend a lot of time in the middle of sustaining grace because our human nature constantly lets us down. We need God as our stronghold. Always.

And, one other… Saint Thomas Aquinas defined a gratuitous grace:  He said, “This gratuitous grace, in the technical sense, is given not for the sanctification of the recipient, but to allow the recipient to help others to God.“

I Got Lost on My Way to the Sistene Chapel

During our trip to Italy in 2015 we explored almost everything on our own, with exception to our trip to Vatican City. We joined a tour group for the day trip, thinking it would be the best for travel and learning about this world-renown site. Neither of us are very patient with not being able to set the pace on our own, but the benefits seemed to outweigh the disadvantages.

I remember thinking on the bus trip over to Vatican City that I couldn’t get my bearings from watching out the window, no sense of when we entered it, where we were in relation to the maps and pictures I had seen. The way we circled around and came to the door we were to enter. I felt turned around and disoriented by it.

Our tour group was about 30 people, but as we entered we blended into the masses. The lines were very long and bulging with people, and the colorful sign our tour guide held up to keep us together, was similar to the hundreds of other colorful signs being used as a visual beacon to lead the way.

So our tour guide ran through a few instructions about what we were going to do, how important it was to stay with the group, and that we would be departing at exactly 3:30pm, no exceptions. If you missed this departure, you were on your own. That became my second trigger.  Which was silly, because we could just get transportation back into Rome, not a big deal. But I just felt so disoriented on that day. Unsure about where I was. This didn’t help.

Let me give this scene some scale if you are not familiar:  more than 25,000 people tour the Sistene Chapel and the Vatican museums, every day. Crowds upon crowds of faces, bodies, conversations, movement.

As we made our way through one of the museums, I felt myself trying to hear the tour guide, more like keep track of her, and my husband who was on the tail end of our group, completely engaged in the journey. As he should be. I was in the middle busy trying to keep us with the pace of the group. Tour guide sign, husband, tour guide sign, husband. Over and over again. Within an everchanging flow of people walking slower, walking faster, cutting through, cutting across my line of vision. All I saw was people.

Then, at what seemed like a simultaneous point of reckoning, I realized I was following the wrong sign, the wrong guide.  When I turned around to verify my husband’s location, I stared into a sea of strangers.

My sea of 25,000.

I couldn’t just stand there. Hundreds and hundreds of people were moving me along; It was a fast-moving human current of people, insisting I go with them. I kept turning around to find his face, that face that always assured me, that all is fine. But he wasn’t there.

I thought to myself, if I keep going we all end up in the Sistene Chapel, right? If I just keep going I will reach my destination. So I moved along at a reluctant pace with strangers, seeing nothing, and soon ended up in a terraced setting outside with gardens, and a partially terraced walkway that connected two buildings.

I immediately stopped, to assess my full-on panic. Now we had gone to another building. Would I be the missing woman on the news? How could I be lost with so many people going the same direction?

So I back-tracked up the people-stream to the previous building and found a place to step out of the flow, in a corner with a security guard.

I said, “I am lost.” He told me to just follow the flow of the people.

So I tried calling my husband again. It went through this time. His question saved me from being overtaken by anxiety flooding my everything.

It went something like this:

Me: I am lost.

Husband: Describe where you are.

Me: I don’t know. In a little corner with a bench before you go into another room with more art…

Husband: Is there a security guard around you can ask?

Me: Yes, I did, and he told me to just keep going. Which I watched him then do.

Husband: Have you passed the arched hallway with the really tall paintings…

(and he went on to describe the flow of the tour path, in detail. Light fixtures, type of art, floor patterns, furniture… I mean, I came to a complete mental stop, stalled in awe in the middle of my anxiety. That man.)

Me: How do you know this museum so well? I ended up going outside, with a garden…

Husband: Wait, a garden, with plants and trees? I haven’t seen that. I am behind you then. Stay where you are, and I will come to you.

I did not move. Within a few minutes, there was that face I so longed to see. I was all mixed up with emotion:  relieved, grateful, embarrassed, still anxious…

But we had crowd-flow to jump into, and we made it to the Sistene Chapel with little time to spare, as it had special limited hours on that day.  

I saw none of it, or very little, really. And by this I mean the entire Sistene Chapel, filled with world-famous frescoes painted by an artist-saint.  About God, His people, Jesus. And of those frescoes I did not see Michelangelo’s’ The Last Judgement, painted twenty-five years after the ceiling frescoes.

I turned slowly, looking at it all with a clouded panoramic mentality, and missing what I had specifically set my heart out to do on that morning. I stood right there and missed all of this glorious creative work, one of how many others who did not see?

I don’t know how many others missed the real beauty. Admiring, but not recognizing the power of what they were viewing. I was still dealing with the emotional aftermath, you know, that place you land when you are realizing just how distraught you were only when you feel your anxiety levels begin to lower inside. Like when you wake up from a bad dream but can’t seem to convince yourself it was a bad dream because of the stuff that lingers.

Michaelangelo Has Crossed My Path Again

Yet, this beautiful work has now crossed my spiritual path again. To give me back something I had missed, to redeem that moment in my life right now. I came across an article, Aquinas & the Theology of Grace in Michelangelo’s “The Last Judgement” by Maria Cintorino | January 27, 2023

Cintorino says, “In his art, Michelangelo provides a rich understanding of the theology of grace…. When St. Thomas Aquinas speaks about grace, he does so in the context that grace prepares and aids men in fulfilling their supernatural end…. Thus, The Last Judgement of Michelangelo serves as a powerful reminder of the daily struggle to attain heaven, of the theology of grace, and of the importance of one’s own volition in accepting and actively cooperating with the grace which God so freely gives to men.”

Thank you Maria. So beautifully said. Your work is an inspiring example of Aquianas’ definition of gratuitous grace, the grace that brings God’s unmerited favor to others.

Cooperating with God’s Grace

So, how does our daily witness represent cooperating with God’s grace? Reliving my experience on the Vatican tour for this re-telling was not all that comfortable for me. I could easily remember how it felt to be caught off guard with the reality that what I feared and was trying to prevent… happened.

But the reward is this: Picture the crowds of people, your life’s portion of the 25,000, people being moved along by the world, who are distraught, feeling lost, not knowing what to do and where to go? People who are backtracking to a place more familiar, doing life swimming upstream, looking for someone they know, someone to assure them, help them find a way. THE WAY.

The ring I hear on my phone when I envision this, is only on my phone. Mine to answer.

The ring you hear is only on your phone. Yours to answer.

It is ours to tell them to stay put. We will come to them. Just like Jesus finds us.

Yet, the beauty of it all is that our capacity to meet others comes from another gift from God.

Our faith powers His grace in our lives. Faith is God’s divine persuasion. And when we are persuaded, we take action in our lives. God has created us with the capacity to believe that Jesus, as God in flesh, is the “author and perfector of our faith.” (Hebrews 12:2)

The grace of God that sanctifies each of us, reaches beyond our own salvation, into the lives of others.

It is that powerful. This is what living in the fullness of His grace must mean.

So. Our Daily Walk in Grace

Yet I think, what does our daily walk in grace look like? Paul encourages us to bring the grace God has shown us to every conversation:

Colossians 4:6

Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.

This verse is often used to refer to being ready to present your witness. I am seeing it in a new way. I am to bring God’s unmerited favor to every conversation, which I take to mean love unconditionally the person I am speaking with. And I am to season my interaction with the conviction of how I got there; to preserve that conversation with the salt of being a sinner who has been saved. It’s the good news in my life. That every conversation bears the enduring value of the grace He offers to each of us.

In every conversation:

God’s unmerited favor calls me to share that favor with others.

Gods unmerited favor calls me to humility with others.

God’s unmerited favor calls me to answer others.

Paul also speaks of the never-ending supply of grace for every good work… having all sufficiency in all things at all times (that we are always capable of doing every good work).

2 Corinthians 9:8 (ESV)

8 And God is able to make all grace abound to you, so that having all sufficiency in all things at all times, you may abound in every good work.

 

God frees me up from anything that would stop me from helping others. He gives me everything so I can do anything He asks me to do.

Insulting the Spirit of Grace

Paul prays for grace to accompany our spirit, always.

Galatians 6:18

18 The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit, brothers and sisters. Amen.

 

Paul warns of the consequence of rejecting God’s favor, insulting the blood of the covenant:

Hebrews 10:29

29 How much more severely do you think someone deserves to be punished who has trampled the Son of God underfoot, who has treated as an unholy thing the blood of the covenant that sanctified them, and who has insulted the Spirit of grace?

It seems clear to me now, that the status gratiae, defined as one governed by the power of divine grace, is the opposite of trampling:

Lift up holy as holy, always. Because we have been sanctified; and,

Compliment, not insult, the Spirit of grace with my faith, a life that represents gracious acceptance of God’s unmerited favor.

The apostle Peter says in,

1 Peter 5:12:

12 With the help of Silas, whom I regard as a faithful brother, I have written to you briefly, encouraging you and testifying that this is the true grace of God. Stand fast in it.

 

Grace Personified. That’s my Jesus.

Jesus did not use the word “grace” Himself in His earthly ministry. I wanted to share that again today because I keep thinking about it. He is grace personified. It started with God, who so loved the world…

When I accept His grace through the faith He has given me… one amazing thing happens.

Love starts a revolution in my life. And one act of love leads to another.

Episode 24.