Amazing Grace

Not the song (or my God Daughter) but Grace, that gift from God, which is truly amazing.
    
With the question a couple of entries back still aforethought I have to say that there is an incredible difference between the baptism of an infant and communicating an elderly person and yet there is also none. The 'none' being that element which is 'Grace'. The mechanisms are different and yet both are an invitation to 'be with'. Baptism being the entrance (or the recognition of having entered in the case of those who come themselves and also for those who stand for the child) and communion being the means by which we continue.
     
Another common link here is the fact that both (infant baptism and elderly communion) are initiated, commissioned and supported by an adult who is in possession of their faculties, which leads me onto . .
     
One of those people I both dialogue with and respect asked what the thinking would be on people who were impaired and restricted by dementia.  How do people in this situation ask for forgiveness, especially if they have no concept of wrong and resort to primal urges and living. Are they to be regarded in the same way as children who have yet to reach the age of cognisance?
     
My answer was that I seek seek out places where those with Alzheimers/dementia are to be found as often the communion services bring people back, or at least unlocks previously stored memories, and this is a source of blessing and sustaining release for them. They seem to surface for a brief moment and then are gone again but there is something touched by the service that defies psych explanations. The mind has gone but the soul continues to function.
    
The answer, as I see it, is that they don't need to physically (i.e. outwardly) 'ask' because God sees and knows what we cannot see and they cannot say and, being a God of compassion, I believe that for them God's grace far outweighs the legalism and conditions we set and pardons those so afflicted (and many others who are in the same boat for different reasons).
     
A thought - repentance is not only the initiator of relationship but also the response to it and sometimes even when understanding and repentance are hard to come by the love and relationship do not become diminished. God's grace is unchanging and constant - so I see them as continuing in a state of grace.
     
Pax