Grace in the Midst of Struggle

Grace might be the slipperiest of the words we sling toward heaven and then duck, not sure if it’ll boomerang back as relief or as a jangling, wintry silence. Maybe it’s a little like catching snowflakes on your hand in Montana; only to watch them melt instantly, real in your palm and gone in the same exhale. For most Catholics hungry for a sturdy definition, the catechism gives something reliable: “the free and undeserved help that God gives us.”¹ But drilled deeper by writers who knew struggle as their daily bread, grace is the scent of bread in the midst of fasting, the glimmer that endures when the lamplight is out, the raw, unlikely music squeezed from fatigue and fear. The ancient desert fathers and mothers, and their surprising kin, Etty Hillesum with her ink-stained heartbreak, Walter Ciszek in his frigid cell, Caryll Houselander stooping over the city’s wounds, remind us that grace is far less a warm blanket and more the wild, bracing wind that makes us stand shivering and awake, alive to God within the struggle itself.

“Grace” is an old word, saturated with theological overtones, but also quietly domestic, like the hush before sleep, like forgiveness after a quarrel. In the hands of contemporary catechesis, it’s a sacramental force, an invisible current making possible all the heroic moves of the saints: loving your enemy, carrying your wounds with mercy, enduring humiliation without bitterness. But in the older Christian witness, the taciturn compass of the desert fathers, grace is not simply a push from behind or a reward dropped down from the high scaffolding of heaven. St. Isaac the Syrian, carving wisdom into the stones of the 7th-century wilderness, wrote less of triumph and more of rupture: “No one has understanding if he is not first confused.”² The gift of grace arrives in that confusion, in bewilderment and scarcity, and so rarely visits as emotional comfort but rather as a “compassionate heart” that has been broken open by its own inability to save itself.³

St. Dorotheus of Gaza warned that to wait for life to become tranquil before seeking God is to miss God entirely, for God has already steeped Himself in our unrest.⁴ Caryll Houselander, a half-century before the Second Vatican Council, saw Christ being continually born and re-born in the churn of human pain, “as if every suffering is another Annunciation,” another yes with fear and trembling.⁵ Grace isn’t the ending of difficulty, but its strange expansion; widening our sight enough to discover love pulsing in old scars.

The paradox at the root of Christian spirituality…the paradox that frustrates the tidy mind and the longing heart…is that God seems attracted to our weakness, our helplessness, our undoing. Not in a condescending way, but as if our permeability is the very site chosen for incarnation. St. Silouan the Athonite, spending silent decades in the thrum and ache of Athos, was famed for his unwavering emphasis that “the greater the struggle, the closer the grace.”⁶ In Silouan’s vision, spiritual dryness isn’t a sign of abandonment, but an invitation. Divine action is not triumphalist. It moves, nearly always, as an underground spring; unseen, welling up from beneath the cracked floorboards of our suffering.

Caryll Houselander makes this ordinary: She describes the human “void”—that sense of deprivation and waiting, as precisely the empty space in which Christ chooses to dwell.⁷ Fr. Walter Ciszek, shorn of every material, psychic, and religious consolation by the Soviet labor system, concluded after years of starvation and isolation that God’s will is revealed not primarily in escape from suffering, but by consenting to it…by recognizing God sitting silently beside us, unafraid of our despair.⁸ The struggle forms the vessel; our consent to powerlessness, strangely, becomes its capacity.

Let’s linger for a moment with three bruised saints, saints not always stamped as “official” in Rome, but whose stories testify to grace grown in the tough, stony soil of human misery.

In Etty Hillesum’s journals, scratched in the dreary, howling transit camp Westerbork before her death in Auschwitz, the presence of grace is nearly scandalous. She records not conversions or consolations, but a radical refusal to let horror have the last word: “There is a really deep well inside me. And in it dwells God. Sometimes I am there, too.”⁹ For Etty, the spiritual life is not an anesthetic, nor a ticket out of atrocity, but an ongoing act of inner hospitality: welcoming God’s mysterious presence in the very center of fear, and working to keep that well from being poisoned by hatred. Her “grace” is neither rescue nor avoidance, but the stubborn flowering of love in terrible ground. She watched and wrote as God’s light flickered in places most would name godforsaken. What we learn? That even the camps were not immune to visitation, that grace does not shrink from the world’s pain but risks being found…and lost…right there.

Caryll Houselander, the anxious, often-ill British mystic of the postwar era, saw all of life, especially ruined or wounded life, as the chamber where Christ is “gestating” within us. In The Reed of God, Houselander speaks almost audaciously about emptiness: the feeling of uselessness, the dry periods of spirit, the profound loneliness that stalks sensitive people, all as potential “rooms prepared for Christ.”¹⁰ Grace for Houselander is not only the fill of the spirit, but the waiting, the ache, the non-arrival. Her own trials, poverty, trauma, and outsider status in the English Catholic scene tutored her to “see Christ in the muddle and panic,” and to teach her readers that being visited by God sometimes looks like tending to one’s own unspectacular frailty with patience. Today, in an age where weakness is treated as a disease, Houselander’s willingness to call grace what happens in the “void” is balm.

Fr. Walter Ciszek, a Pennsylvania-born Jesuit imprisoned in Soviet labor camps for more than twenty years, found that all his efforts to remain “spiritually strong” collapsed. It was only in his exhaustion, his acknowledged inability to cling to even the basic forms of prayer, that he discovered the “core of Christian life”...a relentless, dogged trust that God was present regardless of feeling or outcome. Ciszek attested: “To realize this, to accept it with one’s whole heart, is to possess the true freedom of the sons of God.”¹¹ Grace was not escape; it was the slow, daily recognition that God’s will was not elusive, but given, right there in the next stone to be hefted, the next ache to be endured. Ciszek’s legacy isn’t triumph over suffering but union, willing oneself to remain with God in the pain, and finding God faithful.

Here is a simple confession: Grace found in suffering is not a consolation prize for losers or the faint-hearted. It is the heart of the spiritual journey, the only honest route for those who cannot manufacture clarity or ceaseless gladness on demand. To acknowledge grace as the secret heartbeat within our limitations is, not only for individuals but for whole communities, the difference between faith and mere pious optimism. In facing down despair, in risking love again amid anxiety or loss, we claim the peculiar inheritance of the Gospel: that God’s strength is indeed made perfect in weakness, that by opening our hands inside our tightly clenched sorrow, we let in the only Light that matters.¹²

For today’s world, with its spectacles of disaster and its creeping loneliness, this perspective doesn’t wave away pain but persists in hope; maybe the oldest, stubbornest kind of hope, the one that refuses to turn away from woundedness and, instead, waits with it for the Incarnation to unfold yet again, hidden in the ordinary, in the ache, in the ever-surprising advent of grace.

Endnotes

¹ Catechism of the Catholic Church, §1996.
² St. Isaac the Syrian, Ascetical Homilies, trans. Dana Miller (Boston: Holy Transfiguration Monastery, 1984), 316.
³ St. Isaac the Syrian, Ascetical Homilies, 326.
⁴ St. Dorotheus of Gaza, Discourses and Sayings, trans. Eric Wheeler (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1978), 112.
⁵ Caryll Houselander, The Reed of God (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1944), 16.
⁶ St. Silouan the Athonite, Wisdom from Mount Athos, trans. Rosemary Edmonds (Crestwood: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1974), 43.
⁷ Houselander, Reed of God, 56.
⁸ Walter J. Ciszek, S.J., He Leadeth Me (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1973), 103–109.
⁹ Etty Hillesum, An Interrupted Life: The Diaries and Letters, 1941–43, trans. Arnold J. Pomerans (New York: Henry Holt, 1996), 98.
¹⁰ Houselander, Reed of God, 128–133.
¹¹ Ciszek, He Leadeth Me, 180.
¹² 2 Corinthians 12:9.