For this reason we are always with Christ, and Christ is always with us. The short prayer we used to say when greeting each other—“Jesus is with us. We are with Jesus”—was not a mere wish, or a supernatural way of speaking. It was the expression of a reality that was so because we had received the gift of sanctifying grace, a reality greater than any natural reality. In Donec Formetur, Blessed James Alberione, reflects on the “life” of which Jesus speaks in this passage of John’s gospel. Guido Gandolfo, SSP, elaborating on the Founder’s thought, asks, “What life are we speaking about? Supernatural life, the Founder says clearly. He then adds: life-grace, so as to reach his central point: Jesus is grace! It is precisely this personalized aspect that interests Fr. Alberione. Jesus is grace; he is ‘full of grace.’ He is the true Vine, through which lymph passes to the branches. Consequently, the life of grace in the believer can be correctly understood as “the life of Jesus,” that is to say, Jesus living in the individual.”91
Grace as Divine Indwelling Sanctifying grace makes us temples of the holy Trinity. What does God do in this temple? God continuously imparts to the person supernatural life, as a child in her mother’s womb receives life continuously from her mother. Without a mother the child dies. We are in God and God is in us, in a much more mysterious and profound way than an unborn child is in her mother and her mother is in her child. At the core of our being we participate in the divine life, as Jan van Ruysbroec, a Flemish mystical writer in the 14th century, writes: …the being and the life that we are in God, in our eternal image, is immediately and indivisibly one with the being and life which we have and which we are in ourselves, in regard to essential being. And therefore, in the most interior, most 91
Guido Gandolfo, Retreat Donec Formetur (unpublished retreat notes, English translation, 2004), Day 16.
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