By Way of Grace

Before living waters can flow, we must admit our thirst. One morning, in a hermitage nestled in California's lovely Big Sur country, Paula Huston read a Scripture verse that she had read hundreds of times before: "Let anyone who thirsts come to me and drink." This time, however, the verse penetrated her heart as never before. Much had happened to her in the preceding years: a return to Christianity, a conversion to Catholicism, a choice for a radically simplified life, an increasing hunger for prayer and the Eucharist. Now, Huston understood that all these things were just the beginning. God was calling her to a deeper experience of holiness, an experience that would require arduous work-and the simplest surrender. By Way of Grace is Huston's beautifully written and compelling account of what she learned during her journey into a deeper faith. She gained a keen sense of the profound challenge that orthodox Christianity presents to the secular mind-set she had uncritically absorbed. Her journey also took her deep into a study of the lives and writings of the great saints of the Catholic mystical tradition, where she was spiritually strengthened by the Christian virtues of prudence, temperance, fortitude, justice, humility, faith, hope, and love. Most important, she discovered that Jesus' call to "come to me and drink" is an invitation that will fully satisfy a yearning heart. This book reveals the essential simplicity of holiness and how we can-by way of grace-know, love, and serve God. Faith through Grace I felt sad about the years I'd spent trying to cobble together a belief that I could "live with." . . . I'd been predisposed to unbelief, and as with all types of unexamined cultural mind-sets, I was blind to this fact until I began to compare my way of thinking with the thinking of orthodox Christianity. Only then did I discover the truth: religious faith is not comforting, as atheists so often accuse, but hard. . . . In order to keep it, we must nourish it and protect it; otherwise, it will be blown away by the changing winds of fashion. More, we must never forget that this virtue . . . comes through grace. . . . The beauty of faith is its deep root in love-the very love I'd been so fervently seeking when I set out on my six-year spiritual search, and the love I'd met in person at the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. In that moment, I'd been brought face-to-face with the witness himself, whose testimony undergirds twenty centuries of Christian belief. And I'd found him to be just as described: slow to anger and abounding in love. -From By Way of Grace Saints and virtues in this book: • St. Basil on prudence, the art of seeing clearly • St. Gregory on temperance, the art of holding a balance • St. Bernard of Clairvaux on fortitude, the art of courageous continuing • St. Thomas Aquinas on justice, the art of forgiving • St. Teresa of Ávila on humility, the art of honest self-appraisal • St. Francis de Sales on faith, the art of believing in things unseen • St. ThÉrÈse of Lisieux on hope, the art of patient waiting • St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (Edith Stein) on charity, the art of loving the enemy