Our Mission and Vision
Bringing souls to Christ and Christ to souls by sharing the lived experience of the Christian life.Belonging is not a place; it is a person: Jesus Christ. Our baptized souls, sanctified by the grace of the Eucharist, joined in Him, share through Him the grace of our everyday life. The Face of Grace Project provides help to understand and dispose yourself to beholding the Face of God in the Grace of the Present Moment. In Him is where you have always belonged.
Our Mission and Purpose:
Many people have heard quoted: “The glory of God is a human being fully alive.” Do you know what the full quote is?
“The glory of God is a human being fully alive.
and to be alive consists in beholding God.”
― Saint Irenaeus
A substantially different and fuller meaning when the full context is presented! This is the mission of The Face of Grace Project. We provide Truth in its full context to guide you on your spiritual journey towards Him who is Truth Itself: our Triune God.
The world presents us with an onslaught of opinions and a lack of real guidance. Capturing pieces of the Faith without the context of the full Faith, many Catholic endeavors leave us yearning to know how to live it. To address that need, The Face of Grace Project introduces you to the spiritual theology of the Catholic church. It is the lived Christian experience for which we were created and intended to have now, in this very moment. It is through the spiritual teachings of the saints that we understand Sacred Scripture as our present reality and that our spiritual communion in this mystical body of Christ isn’t a metaphor.
Prior to the 2020 worldwide Covid-19 pandemic, our society was already suffering many epidemics: loneliness, depression, anxiety, addiction. Suicide was the 2nd leading cause of death in younger millennials and Gen Z, and also of millennials worldwide. In a society where people and relationships are disposable, we have lost memory of how to be family, community, and Church. Our soul’s ache for belonging is stifled by the world barraging our senses for gratification and imposing upon us false images of beauty and truth. We have been educated to live in our feelings and compromise our dignity.
We have forgotten what it means to be human.
As the Church founded by Jesus Christ Himself and in which He continues to subsist in the blessed sacrament of the Eucharist, the spiritual life practiced and professed by His Apostles has been preserved for over two millennia. Yet most Catholics are unaware of these teachings and practices, which draw scripture and doctrine together in the way of living it to the full.
Belonging is not a place; it is a person: Jesus Christ. Our baptized souls, sanctified by the grace of the Eucharist, joined in Him, share through Him the grace of our everyday life. The Face of Grace Project provides help to understand and dispose yourself to beholding the Face of God, the Grace of the Present Moment. In Him is where you’ve always belonged.
Your Guide
A cradle Catholic, Debra Black received the gift of completing the full 19th annotation of the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola in 1998 under individual direction of the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary. She repeated the exercises in 2001 and remained an Associate to the Loreto Sisters through 2009. In 2015 she was missioned through the Lanteri Center for Ignatian Spirituality to provide spiritual direction and lead the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises. Most recently, Debra has completed teaching discernment trainings through the Ignatian Discernment Institute (Fr. Timothy Gallagher). She has conducted spiritual direction, led the Ignatian Exercises, and led small group formations on discernment of spirits for over a decade. Debra currently trains spiritual directors in Divine Mercy University’s Spiritual Direction Certificate program. She also is a perpetual member of the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars and a contributor to SpiritualDirection.com and CatholicMom.com . In addition to over 48 years of professional experience including 38 years of leadership in international higher education, her public service roles have spanned city commissioner, pregnancy clinic board of director, youth and college ministry, public citizen activism, and homeless street ministry. She has self-published several guides to aid the spiritual life as well as books under the Aquinas Press imprint. In addition to her MBA, Debra holds an M.A. Theology with a concentration in Spirituality cum laude from the Notre Dame Graduate School of Christendom College.