A Good Grace is Hardly Found

[Bekah]

Yup - Alice - an open-minded reader really ought to have the meanings which were likely available to the author in mind.  

Catholic Grace comes in two forms:  1.  Sanctifying Grace which purifies the soul and is within you as a preparation for heaven but you have to feed it;  and 2.  Actual Grace which is  "a supernatural push or encouragement.  It's transient.  It … acts on the should from the outside, so to speak.  It's a supernatural kick in the pants.  It gets the will and the intellect moving so we can seek out and keep sanctifying grace."   

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Otoh,  Calvinist Grace is Prevenient Grace.   It's either there from God,  from the beginning,  or it's not.   "… prevenient grace allows persons to engage their God-given free will to choose the salvation offered by God in Jesus Christ or to reject that salvific offer."

*

There is also a kind of Catholic Prevenient Grace in that a person might be "called" in an event of Actual Grace and it's the Pevenient Grace within a person which answers the "call" and allows the person to cooperate with it.  This is really only in the beginning stages of Justification - (freedom from original sin).    

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I think O'Connor is likely dealing with the Sanctifying Grace - the one that puts you in accord with the Church. 

But Pynchon is working more with the Actual Grace which is the more "supernatural kick in the pants."  

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wondering if this is helpful, 
Bekah-in-the-rain


On Dec 2, 2012, at 4:54 AM, alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:

> O'Connor is funny. Indeed, she describes her work as comic, though she
> insists that her comedy does not distract from the seriousness of her
> themes. We are invited to laugh at the violent misfits, at the
> southern inanities, the gothic rags that fix the characters in a faded
> fashion of the southern decadence. Our laughter makes us complicit,
> for we cannot sustain indifference and the rejection of her grace,
> especially on political or anti-religious grounds is only a
> Calvinistic vice inherent in the reader not the author or her story.
> There is nothing depressing about this; indeed, the grace that
> O'Connor uses so skillfully, is a comic element, a carnivalesque
> celebration of freedom, of the free will. So Harry swims away from
> Paradise, in O'Connor's brilliant tale, "The River", and toward God's
> Grace. Like Slothrop, or Oedipa, or Dorothy, Harry is running from
> home and back to a Kansas that is, we fell, not Kansas anymore, a
> Zone, a paralax of parallel universes moving toward Grace.
> 
> So, Pynchon and O'Connor, two Catholics, make use of Grace. The trick
> is to understand what Catholic Grace is, and, as Mark intimated, how
> it is not Calvinized.
> 
> Of course, the religion of the author, of the reader, matters not at
> all. But not knowing what an author is up to, or rejecting it in
> preference to some inhernet vice, some irrational disdain for all
> things cultic, is a limited way to read demanding fictions.