Inescapable Grace

I wrote the reflection for today's readings for Give Us This Day. I was drawn as much to the collect as I was to the images in the psalm and gospel:

May your grace, O Lord, we pray, 
at all times go before us and follow after
and make us always determined
to carry out good works.
Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son,
who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God, for ever and ever. Amen.

The full quote from Teilhard de Chardin is: "By means of all created things, without exception, the divine assails us, penetrates us, and molds us. We imagine it as distant and inaccessible, whereas in fact, we live steeped in its burning layers."

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Despite all my years of scientific training, I have a hard time seeing the stars whirling above my head at night not as little twinkling jewels set into a firmament, but rather as enormous, unimaginably fiery suns, their warmth bathing planets millions of miles away. They are so distant, so inaccessible, can I truly believe such a thing possible?

I confess to having the same trouble with grace. I can’t quite grasp the enormity or the power of God’s grace. All too often I imagine it as distant. Inaccessible. Or at least it seems improbable that my sinful self should be able to draw upon that divine warmth. But grace, pointed out Jesuit paleontologist and theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, SJ, is inescapable: We live steeped in its burning layers. Every way we turn, in everything we touch and that touches us, God’s grace assails us, penetrates us, molds us.

The psalmist sings of the earth, full of the kindness of the Lord—full of grace. The sparrows outside my window chirping irrepressibly at dawn, the wind sweeping down the hill, the warm splashes of color streaming through the stained-glass windows of my parish church—always and ever touching and touched by the divine. As am I.

The Collect, too, reminds us that at every moment grace goes before us, grace trails after us, grace propels us outside ourselves to work for the Gospel. Christ above us, Christ beside us, Christ underneath our feet. Every hair on our heads counted, every breath vouchsafed. As improbable as it seems, God is with us. Now and always, inescapable.

Michelle Francl-Donnay

Michelle Francl-Donnay is a wife and mother, a retired professor of chemistry, and an adjunct scholar atthe Vatican Observatory. 

[CREDIT] From the October 2026 issue of Give Us This Day, www.giveusthisday.org (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2026). Used with permission.