Rahner and Grace in a Baltimore City School

"Grace is everywhere as an active orientation of all created reality toward God" - Karl Rahner

I am a teacher in a Baltimore City School, and my students and teaching practice are my ministry. All my students are products of very difficult surroundings: poverty, violence, substance abuse, homelessness, abandonment, broken relationships, disenfranchisement from society and racism. In their daily lives, my students face more hardships than most other Americans face in their lifetime. My students did not choose to be brought into this world, they did not choose their parents, they did not choose their race, they did not choose their neighborhood community, they did not choose their economic status. Yet while they did not choose any of these factors, these factors deeply form a sense of their world and a sense of who God is for them. Because of these factors, most of my students have developed the understanding that God is rarely present in their lives and that he decides to show up only occasionally. This article addresses how my students understand grace, and more importantly, how they experience grace in their lives. This article will propose a way to invite and facilitate my students’ experience of grace through an understanding and experience of Karl Rahner’s theology on grace.

My initial approach to understanding my students’ experiences was formed by my Catholic upbringing. I understood grace as being close to God, as living a life full of faith. The Catechism of the Catholic Church defines grace as “favour, the free and undeserved help that God gives us to respond to his call to become children of God, adoptive sons, partakers of the divine nature and of eternal life” (1996). Through this understanding, I initially found grace to be absent from my students’ lives because I focused on the social sins in which they found themselves. Before, I experienced a detrimental type of empathy towards my students, a sense of constant sorrow and defeat. This type of empathy defined our relationships. Because of this initial response, I was becoming disillusioned by any type of real change that was possible in my students’ lives.

Throughout my time as a teacher, my response shifted to become one that was more proactive and less despairing. After the numbness I experienced when I focused on the social sins surrounding their lives, I focused on trying to re-integrate them into the world in our short-lived classroom encounters. I realized that my students needed to be reintegrated into society and to rebuild the human skills they were deprived of in many ways. Social sins in many ways had fractured their lives, even their own personhood, and I was a mediator and facilitator for them to believe in choices again and the individual impact they have in their own lives. My classroom became the tool to practice this form of reconciliation and a place where they would always feel welcome.

My students practice a very dualistic type of spirituality: there is the world and the divine; there is school and there is church; there are secular authority roles such as teachers, and there are spiritual leaders such as preachers; there are everyday experiences and there are spiritual experiences. My students have developed a Luther-esque theology influenced by St. Augustine, where “human fallenness and the difference between Spirit and Letter, Grace and Law” is emphasized. My students experience a sinful society and social sins from an early age, and hence they tend to not only emphasize the difference between sin and grace in their lives, but also stress sin rather than grace.

Sin-inhibiting Grace

Sin is a present reality for my students. Some of the social sins that they have experienced are the death of a loved one, the incarceration of a friend or family member, substances claiming lives of peers or family members, poverty crippling their dreams and aspirations, and broken relationships manifesting themselves as trauma. While a Catholic notion of original sin means the disposition to sin, for my students, original sin is the condition into which they were born. That is, original sin includes all the social factors that they did not choose that affect their lives adversely. For St. Augustine, “this world, the whole temporal and material plane of creaturely existence…was profoundly affected by the Fall,” (Ludwig 50) and in the same way for my students, the conditions in which they found themselves has affected everything, including their spiritual lives and understanding and experience of grace. St. Augustine is helpful here to contextualize my students’ experiences. In other words, because they emphasize sin and the difference between sin and grace, my students feel undeserving and far from grace.

A Limited Experience of Grace

For my students, grace is not found daily but rather it comes rarely and in very meaningful ways. They experience grace as a manifestation that aids them in the midst of a sinful world, in the midst of the original sin context in which they find themselves. Grace has not only been compartmentalized to the religious realm, but it is also perceived as only available for certain people. My students often correlate good people and grace, where the former is a necessity for the latter. They believe that grace is not only rare, but that it is not offered to sinful people. Adding to this warped understanding of grace is the original sin of living in a society that constantly reminds them that they are sinful or not wanted. Hence, the social disenfranchisement that they experience translates into their spiritual experience of grace. Grace is not within their reach because they feel unworthy to receive it.

Finding Grace through Rahner’s Theology

I have decided to bring Karl Rahner into my reflection because I believe that my students will find tremendous healing and liberation through an opportunity to encounter grace in a whole new light with Rahner’s approach to grace. Carlos Raul Sosa Siliezar sums up Rahner’s importance today 

when he explains that Rahner’s theology addresses “atheism, subjectivism and pluralism.” These three big currents of thought that affect my students’ thinking and our current age make Rahner’s theology around grace overwhelmingly relevant to my reflection. Rahner’s method is one of “transcendental anthropology, one that departs from man, from ‘below’ and from his existence and experience” (139). He claims that “it is a methodological process that does not subordinate faith to experience or entails a subjectivist reduction of faith, but is necessary to overcome the pit that has opened up between revelation and human experience." This is important because it highlights the individual experiences of my students instead of imposing an overall theological theme to their experience. Rahner does not subjugate individual personal experiences to a theological concept of revelation, but rather he begins his theology from a universal human experience.

Rahner on the Human-Person

In Rahner’s theology, the most essential part about being human is the capacity of God, or capax Dei. Our human nature is solemnly founded in the openness to being human “in our knowing, our loving, our creating, our hoping; in our questioning, our dissatisfaction, our discontent, human beings are always open to the more, to the beyond, to something which is always, finally, unattainable." Any human inspiration comes from the divine, from God who gave us the capacity to aspire to the transcendent. In fact, “the essence of being human is such that it is experienced precisely where grace is experienced: grace is only experienced where the human spirit naturally is,” when we are more human, grace is revealed.

Under Rahner’s proposition of the human person, my students can begin to recognize the presence of grace in their everyday lives by being human beings. The human person is incapable of not receiving grace, according to Rahner. Every human endeavor is a vehicle for God to communicate himself. The very process of learning in the classroom for instance, that entails the process of moving from not knowing to knowing, is truly an opportunity to reflect on how grace is present in their lives. Curiosity, that which teachers rely on for students to learn, is a manifestation of grace for Rahner. This activity alone is at the center of education, and adding a reflection component to this process can help my students recognize grace in the process of learning.

Beyond education, the very discontent and dissatisfaction that my students face due to the original sin that they find themselves in, is precisely the most evident presence of grace in their lives. My students have become accustomed to associating their misfortune with a presence of sin in their lives. However, according to Rahner, the feelings of wishing for and wanting a different future and fortune for themselves is a true sense of God’s revelation—of what he wishes for them as well. Through God’s own self-revelation, I believe, God is telling my students that he wishes that they become the best version of themselves and is doing so through the hoping and dissatisfaction they experience daily.

Rahner on Grace

For Rahner, grace and the natural overlap; there exists no difference. In Rahner’s view, “grace is primarily God’s universal self-communication, not the sporadic bestowal of certain divine gifts, and all human beings are the addressees of this communication." Counter-intuitive to how my students think and experience grace, Rahner believes that the entirety of the human experience is the vehicle for God to communicate himself. Thus, grace is everywhere and in everything.

The case is not that grace is not present in my student’s lives, but that my students are not able to see it as such, and this is so because they have been conditioned to think about grace in a particular way. With this understanding that grace is primarily God’s universal self-communication and that all human beings are the addressees of this communication, my students do not have to sit around and wait for grace, they do not have feel worthy of grace to receive grace, they do not have to beg for grace, they do not have to become something or someone to receive grace and they do not need to experience any particular thing to recognize it as grace.

The above understanding is a helpful tool for my students since they understand grace to exist only in rare cases, to a particular group of people, and usually in a religious context. For my students, the language that surrounds grace, and therefore shapes their experiences of grace, is challenged by Rahner. Their ability to create language built around grace is extremely limited. Rahner challenges them to expand their imagination into every realm of their lives, to think critically about what God wishes to reveal about himself to them in every aspect of their daily existence.

Rahner on Freedom

When I speak to my students face-to-face about real hardships in their lives, an underlying premise I have noticed is that my students find it very hard to believe that they are in charge of their lives. They have lost a great deal of autonomy and therefore believe their will and their choices are constructs which are not at work in their lives. The social context and the social sins in which they were born are inhibiting them from the ability to develop a sense of individual independence.  This reality translates into their spiritual experiences. By thinking they do not have ownership over their lives, they relinquish control over any possible change in their lives, they hand over their call to be children of God.

 On freedom, “Rahner says that the human is ‘left to himself . . . placed in his own hands…It is in being consigned to himself that he experiences himself as responsible and free." While it is true that the original sin my students inherited (the social conditions they find themselves in) are not by choice, Rahner still holds that aside from those the human person is radically free. Rahner argues that "freedom is always mediated by the concrete reality of time and space, of man's materiality and his history” and further that, “our being is a task to be achieved, a project to be realized, a process to be brought to completion. We determine and dispose of ourselves as a whole. Our final being is a ‘self-realization,’ a ‘self-achievement,’ worked out in time and space." This is perhaps the most difficult notion to facilitate to my students, but one that is essential to living healthy, rich spiritual lives. Jesus said, “I came so that you may have life and have it in abundance." This life-in-abundance promised by Jesus cannot be fulfilled by my students unless they develop a sense of ownership over their lives, including over their spiritual lives.

For any teenager, but particularly for my inner-city students, thinking about choices is a daunting task. Usually it is framed under the notion that there are good choices and bad choices and my students already find themselves with a plethora of ‘dos and don’ts.’ However, Rahner offers much more than moral obligations attached to choices. Rahner expresses that one way of being completely human and open to life-in-abundance, is by exercising one’s freedom. He does not mean choosing the right moral obligations attached to choices, but rather the human construct of what makes us our own person. Rahner claims, “human beings are mystically constituted to question who they are, and the mystery of who we are leads naturally to the mystery of God." In our choices we define ourselves as different from others and enter into the mystery of discovering who we are and the mystery of God.

For my students, grace through freedom can be understood through the choices that they make and which make up their personality and their dreams. High school is a time for teenagers to explore themselves, and in those choices, Rahner states that God is manifesting himself. In the making of themselves or their own person, grace is abundant. In the freedom of choosing their own dreams, grace is abundant. Their daily choices that aid them to the dreams awaiting on their horizon are a presence of infinite grace.

Making Grace Visible

            I have come to realize the narrow perspective that I had in this situation. In my initial approach to grace in the lives of my students, I quickly believed that they were not able to see grace in their lives, and while this is true, it is also true that I was blind as well. I was focused more on the social factors, the original sin that affects my students daily, instead of the human-filled moments full of grace. Grace was, is, and will be present in their humanity, but I was not able to see this presence. In my reflection, I have come to change my own perspective and approach to how my students are experiencing grace, as a person, and as teacher.

            As a person that is responding to my students’ needs, Rahner is helping me to see grace as the horizon that is always unattainable. The dreams that my students aspire to is a real presence of the revelation of God. Furthermore, the dissatisfaction that they feel is a manifestation of the presence of God that stirs them to move towards their dreams. I thought that grace had to be present in a materialized perspective, but Rahner is teaching me that grace is found in the most personal inner movements of a person. Personally, I have come to understand grace as real change. Therefore, although I came to experience many of my students’ lives as seeming to be stuck in social sins beyond themselves, Rahner is teaching me to see grace present amongst dreams and hopes even if they do not come to fruition during the short time that I am a part of their lives. Today, I respond to my students’ needs by encouraging them to dream, to hope, to be filled with a grace that stirs them to re-imagine a new future for themselves. In everything I do as a person with them, I am committed to a spirituality of hope.

Rahner is also helping me see grace as the freedom we possess simply by virtue of being human and the real grace that is present when we exercise this freedom. Aside from any moral weight on our choices, the very act of making choices (particularly choices that have to do with who we are) is a manifestation of God’s grace. Instead of being focused on the choices that my students lack, I now encourage them to make daily choices that direct them to the infinite horizon of their dreams. These choices can be as simple as choosing the class which will highlight their personality and will help them think of a future career path. I am now committed to empowering my students to believe in their ability to make choices and in the goodness and grace-filled activity that this process embodies.

As a teacher I have come to re-imagine curiosity. In my past teaching experiences, I only saw curiosity as an essential part of the teaching—curiosity had very little spiritual significance. However, through this course, I can now see curiosity is a means to see grace present in the lives of my students. In a high school educational setting, curiosity is at the center of learning. As a teacher, I can see grace operating in the openness that the students have towards curiosity in my classroom. For Rahner, curiosity stimulates the divine experience that stirs an individual to look onto the eternal horizon. The process to spark curiosity means to move the essence of what makes us human, to point to the essential nature of being human that propels us to ask questions and seek for answers. The process of an educator to impart curiosity gives students not only the best experience of learning, but also an experience to live out grace. However, this is only a part of a process for students to be able to see grace. As a teacher, I can plan for opportunities to invite my students to experience curiosity, but another essential step to add to my pedagogy is looking back at the process of experiencing curiosity in the going from not-knowing to knowing. This process of reflection upon their learning is a grace-filled activity as well. Reflection can lead a student to see the divine presence in learning. Currently, I ensure that my teaching is full of opportunities to spark the curiosity of my students, and in this I see grace operating in their lives in a very human way. I am also committed to reflection. I provide daily opportunities for students to reflect on their work. I believe this is essential for learning, but with Rahner, I can now also see that it is essential in seeing God present in the lives of my students.

The story of the disciples on the road to Emmaus is a great metaphor for the blindness both my students and I experienced. The story tells us that two disciples are “downcast” while discussing everything that had happened. Then, “as they talked and discussed these things with each other, Jesus himself came up and walked along with them; but they were kept from recognizing him.” (Lk. 24:14-16). Grace is present even when we are downcast, narrow-minded, and with our focus on things other than the messiah. And then, Jesus speaks to them and they proclaim “were not our hearts burning within us while he talked with us?” (30-31) paralleling the enthusiasm and life-filled experience we encounter when we speak of our dreams and hopes, when our lives focus on our deep and personal desires. Like the disciples, my students and I had our eyes downcast and focused on our plight, but now we know the answer we are seeking for is in our midst. With awareness, grace will come in, walk with us, fill our hearts with dreams, and restore us to fullness of life.