"You begin to love the change, youve discovered an extraordinary adventure is afoot. You sense a direction, you feel a new impulse, you can smell the sea. And you see that what changes in you changes also in everything around you. - von Balthasar."The world will not disappear in God; rather, the last sacrament will be the entire Triune God revealed in the entirety of glorified creation." - vonBalthasar.
The third way is indivisible, since we interpret and understand the form of Christian revelation either wholly in terms of the self-glorification of absolute love or else we simply fail to understand it. In this respect, Rousselot's theory of the "eyes of faith" was correct: either one sees it or one does not; but the power to see the glory of love requires at least a seed of supernatural love. Nevertheless, this does not rule out (1) the possibility of being scandalized (as a refusal to acknowledge the radiant evidence and to respond by following the path of self-surrender) or (2) the possibility of a groping rational approach toward the decisive vision: the lines of the kerygma and the gospel visibly converge at a point that nevertheless remains "invisible", that is, a transcendental point of unity that cannot yet be fully presumed or taken for granted.
-von Balthasar"The perception in faith of the self authenticating (self-interpreting) glory of Gods utterly free gift of love""Truth and love are inseparable wings- for truth cannot fly without without love- and love cannot hover without truth"
- Ignatius of Loyolaa hunger
St. Thomas - “the philosopher is related to the poet in that both are concerned with wonder" (latin - mirandum)The danger of an eroticized culture:
the instinct of reducing everything to its parts,
so you can move in and destroy, consume, manipulate.
This pornographic impulse can only be defeated in light of the whole mystery
"I dare not reduce it to its parts." We love for the whole person.Let us clothe ourselves in a mutual tolerance of one another's views, cultivating humility and self-restraint, avoiding all gossiping and backbiting, and earn our justification by deeds and not by words...- First letter of Clemement to the Corinthians..("the fathers...saw the formation of the hypostatic union as the real and primordial marriage union, that of God with the whole of mankind...and when the fathers see the actual 'conubium' between God and man realized in Christ himself, in the indissoluble union of the two natures, this is also no purely physical occurrence, with its matrimonial character exclusively derived from the side of God and his intention. It is a real two-sided mystery of love through the bridal consent of Mary acting for all the rest of created flesh. In Mary's flesh is meant all created "flesh" (Jn 17:12) to which God wishes to espouse himself.")...("what never falls away is the nuptial encounter between God and the creature, for whose sake the framework of the structures (of the Church) is now set up and will later be dismantled. This encounter, therefore, must be the real core of the Church. The structure and the graces they impart are what raise the created subjects up to what they should be in God's design: a humanity formed as a bride to the Son, become the Church.")..("It is through the Church that God and man encounter one another, and the Church's consciousness cannot be in any way closed in and bounded; it is open on both sides, to God and to man. Yet it cannot simply be restricted to being this open center, for we must take account of the nuptial simile, which, in its full sense, is a simile of movement (man going to woman in procreation, woman turning to man in giving him back the perfected offspring). There is no such thing as a Church consciousness simply contrasted with Christ, for the Church, bride as she is, is also his body, informed by the consciousness of the Head; and inasmuch as she has her own existence, she stands open to him, to serve as handmaid. In fact, even this mystery, this movement, cannot be ultimate, since Christ cannot be divorced from the Trinity, and that which passes over from him to the Church, in the depths of their intimacy, is the entire trinitarian life in the course of communication.")...
graphic artists, illustrators, guitarists, painters, storytellers,
wprb princeton"each affection of our spirit, according to its variety, has its own appropriate measure in the voice, and singing, by some hidden correspondence wherewith it is stirred." The same applies to the hearers, for even if some of them understand not what is sung, yet they understand why it is sung, namely, for God's glory: and this is enough to arouse their devotion
"There is nothing more beautiful than to have been touched, surprised by the Gospel, by Christ. Nothing more beautiful than to know him and to communicate friendship with him to others."
-Pope Benedict XVI
"We are too desirous of being set at ease, and we do not consent to being taken out of our usual element. That is why we make a petty religion for ourselves and seek a petty salvation of our own petty proportions. The Gospel paradoxes are wine too strong for us, and we keep our ears closed to the great liberating Call. We are lacking courage before all the forms of death which are the necessary gates of life. In our wretched timidity, we leave the freshness and freedom of Christianity in the hands of those who corrupt them, and even that is a pretext for us to move farther away from Christianity. Encrusted in it like parasites, but with no transforming growth grafted in us from it, we pervert in the eyes of those for whom we represent it. Making it serve pre-eminently natural man, we take away from it its greatest attraction and cause it to blaspheme. Such is the history of every century.
Such is, O God, we confess, our own everyday history.
Yet how is it, wonder of wonders, that a little light goes on flickering through?"
- Henri de LubacThe “true light,†however, without which this other diffused light would be deceptive, is always free in its irradiation. “Yet a little while, the light is among you. Walk, whilst you have the light.â€(jn 12.35.) Otherwise, it would not be the Word who is God, person and son, Lord of all who have been “created in him.†If we would live in this light, we have to be attentive to his word that is ever personal and new, because free. It is quite impossible to bring forth this word out of one already at hand, known in advance and kept in store. On the contrary, it flows always new from its source in absolute and sovereign freedom. The Word of God may well require of me to-day something it had not demanded yesterday; consequently, in order to perceive this demand, I must, in the depths of my being, be open and attentive to the Word. No relationship is closer, more rooted in being itself, than that between the man in grace and the Lord who gives grace, between the head and the body, between the vine and branch. But this relationship can only have full play if it prevails, too, in the realm of the Spirit, that is if the freedom of the Word is answered by a corresponding readiness on the part of man to hear, to follow and to comply. It is not just a question of what we are accustomed to call the moral life or life in accordance with Christian precepts, but rather that of the burning centre, the focus and vindication of all moral conduct which divorced from that centre so easily hardens and degenerates into pharisaism. What is at stake is that ever living contact with the God who speaks to us in his word, whose “eyes like a flame of fire†trans-pierce and purify us, whose command exacts renewed obedience, and instructs us in such a way that we seem till now to have known nothing at allTo say that we, together with the rest of creation, were made in the Word, is to assert not merely an original relationship but an enduring and essential “being-in.â€
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"Do not gloat over me, my enemy! Though I have fallen, I will rise. Though I sit in darkness, the LORD will be my light.Because I have sinned against him, I will bear the LORD's wrath, until he pleads my case and establishes my right. He will bring me out into the light; I will see his righteousness."---Micah 7:8-9Man is the being who bears in his heart a mystery greater than himself. He is like a tabernacle erected round a sacred mystery. He has no need, when Gods Word demands to dwell in him, to take specific means to open his heart. His inmost being is readiness, attentiveness, perceptiveness, willingness to surrender to what is greater than he, to let the deeper truth prevail, to lay down his arms at the feet of enduring love. It is true that, in the sinner, this sanctuary has become neglected and forgotten, overgrown and turned into a sepulchre or a rubbish heap. It needs much effort, the effort in fact of contemplative prayer, to clear it out and make it suitable for its heavenly guest. But the place itself does not have to be built. It is there already, in the inmost part of man, and always has been ...For this reason the ineffable relationship of man to the Word of God is, to the endless joy and wonder of those who pray, always and simultaneously a turning inwards to the inmost I and a turning outwards of the I to the supreme Thou. God is not a Thou in the sense of being simply another I, a stranger standing over against me. He is in the I, but also above it; and because he is above it as the Absolute I, he is in the human I as the deepest ground of it, “more inward to me than I am to myself.†And being so inward to it, he is supremely above it; his unity is above that which is merely numerical: it surpasses that of the figure one. Created being in its totality cannot be conceived except as dependent on, and penetrated by, Eternal Absolute Being; neither can the created I. Just as the part loves the whole more than itself, and loves itself most when it does so in the whole, and not in its particularity; so the created I loves and affirms itself most profoundly when it loves the I of God, the I that is absolute and free and opens itself to him in the Word, when he receives Gods Word not as a truth alien to him, contrasting with him - heteronomous - but as the truth which is most his own, most inward to him, that lies hid so deeply (in him and in God) that the I itself has not the power to disclose it. Yet the God who speaks in me is quite other than “my best self†or the archetypal world in the ground of my soul or some other thing lying deeply embedded in nature, its tendencies and potentialities. God is the Sovereign who elects and disposes according to his will; man possesses nothing to enable him with certainty to foresee how the determinate Word will be uttered to him in particular at this particular moment in his life. From his nature alone man can never divine the will of God, the purpose of his life. That would be to ask of the servant what only the master can give. “Behold, as the eyes of the servants are on the hands of their masters, as the eyes of the handmaid are on the hands of her mistress, so are our eyes unto the Lord our God.†(Ps 122. 2). This looking to God is contemplation. It is an inward gaze into the depths of the soul and, for that very reason, beyond the soul to God. The more the soul finds God, the more it forgets itself and yet finds itself in God. It is an unwavering gaze, where “looking†is always “hearingâ€; for what is looked at is the free and infinite Person, who, from the depths of his freedom, is able to give himself in a manner ever new, unexpected and unpredictable Love desires no recompense other than to be loved in return; and thus God desires nothing in return for his love for us other than our love. "Let us not love in word or speech, but in deed and in truth"(1jn3:18). To understand this deed of love primarily, not to say exclusively, as something passed on apostolically from man to man, would be to instrumentalize the revelation of absolute love, wholly reducing it to a means or impulse directed to a human end, rather than seeing it as personal and absolute itself. To center Christinaity in anthropology and thus turn it into a pure ethics would be to eliminate its theo-logical dimension....Indeed, we must love absolute love and direct our love to the Lover...we call this response "worship" and pure "thanksgiving" that gives glory; it is a response that must be fashioned into a form that gathers up and confers meaning upon one's entire existence. Unconditional priority must be accorded to the placing of oneself entirely at the disposal of divine love. Since it serves no ulterior purpose, this attitude of readiness cannot but appear useless in the eyes of the world, which is caught up in so many urgent and reasonable occupations. The ranking of the contemplative life over the active life outside Christianity, becuase it enables one to achieve liberation through a particular gnosis and praxis, corresponds with Christianity - and only at this point - to the superiority of a life given purely as an answer to God's self-giving love. This answer is made in the faith that God's love, from which all fruitfulness stems, will be powerful enough to produce all of the fruit pleasing to him in mankind and the world out of this single-hearted nuptial surrender. This is the essence of Carmel, and of every genuinely "contemplative" life in the Church. ... Prayer, both ecclesial and personal prayer, thus ranks higher than all action, not in the first place as a source of psychological energy ('refueling' as they say today), but as the act of worship and glorification that befits love, the act in which one makes the most fundamental attempt to answer with selflessness and thereby shows that one has understood the divine proclamation. It is as tragic as it is ridiculous to see Christians today giving up this fundamental priority and seeking instead an immediate encounter with Christ in their neighbor, or even in purely worldly work and technological activity. Engaged in such work, they soon lose the capacity to see any distinction between worldly responsibility and Christian mission. Whoever does not come to know the face of God in contemplation will not recognize it in action, even when it reveals itself to him in the face of the oppressed and humiliated.... Moreover, the celebration of the Eucharist is itself an anamnesis, which means that it is contemplation in love and the communion of love with love; and it is only from such a celebration that a Christian mission goes out into the world:"Ite missa-mission est!" For Paul's command to "pray without ceasing" can be carried out in action, not primarily as a technique and training in the sense of the Eastern "Jesus Prayer," but rather in analogy to the young man who carries alive and active in his heart a picture of his beloved even into those occupations that would take him away from her ..."Good intention" is a weak formulation for something much stronger, something that comes to expression in various Christian sayings: let the "glory of God be praised in all things," so that "God be glorified in all things", let "everything happen for the greater glory of God" (Ignatius of Loyola)The first thing that must strike a non-Christian about the Christian's faith is that it obviously presumes far too much. It is too good to be true: the mystery of being, revealed as absolute love, condescending to wash his creature's feet, and even their souls, taking upon himself all the confusion of guilt, all the God-directed hatred, all the accusations showered upon him, all the disbelief that arrogantly covers up what he had revealed, all the mocking hostility that once and for all nailed down his inconceivable movement of self-abasement - in order to pardon his creature before himself and the world. This is truly too much from the Good; nothing in the world would justify such a metaphysics, and therefore it cannot be justified by that individual sign called "Jesus of Nazareth ", which has so little historical evidence and is so difficult to decipher. To build such an extravagant building on such a fragile foundation would overstep allthe limits of reason. And why not, instead, remain with a humanly and ecumenically interpreted Old Testament and its "open" and undogmatic faith? In this sphere, theological speech becomes impossible to distinguish from anthropological speech, and this "open faith" converges with "open reason." But in this case we are still dealing with "wisdom" - and we have thus succeeded once again: to escape from the the absolute sign of the scandal of the Cross.... Once a person learns to read to signs of love and thus to believe it, love leads him into the open field wherein he himself can love. If the prodigal son had not believed that the fathers love was already there waiting for him, he would not have been able to make the journey home - even if his fathers love welcomes him in a way he would never have dreamed of. The decisive thing is that the sinner has heard of a love that could be, and really is, there for him; he is not the one who has to bring himself into line with God; God has always already seen in him, the loveless sinner, a beloved child and has looked upon him and conferred dignity upon him in the light of this love....No one can resolve this mystery into dry concepts and explain how it is that God no longer sees my guilt in me, but only in his beloved Son, who bears it for me; or how God sees this guilt transformed through the suffering of love and loves me because I am the one for whom his Son has suffered in love. But the way God, the lover, sees us is in fact the way we ARE in reality -- for God, this is the absolute and irrevocable truth. --This is why there can be no talk of "merely forensic" justification; the theory is valid only in the sense that, through God's creative and transformative love, we become what he takes us to be in the light of Christ. We can attempt to break down..the stages of the infinitely mysterious process by which grace transforms Christ's love for the Father and for us into our response to love, but these will never reflect anything but fragments of the process. The deeper the rays of God's justifying love penetrate into our being as "sanctification ", the more it unconditionally strengthens and evokes our freedom for love. In a sort of "primordial generation" it calls forth in us a response to love, and though it remains stammering and inchoate in us, the response acquires, through the mediation of the Son's abundant love (and therefore through total faith in him), its own fullness and suitability. For there exists a perfect correspondence between divine and human love in the Son, and he confers this correspondence upon the Church as a perfectly valid measure, so that she can give birth to him, the Son, and all of his brothers in a human way. We have been incorporated into this "perfect measure" (eph4:13) and therefore our deficiencies have always already been overcome and compensated for, so that, out of faith, we can bring ever more fully to life in Christian activity that which God's holy grace has always already allowed us to be in his eyes.... The fact that the horizon of love given to us always lies above and before us, and that the disparity can never be eliminated in this life, at the same time justifies everything presented as the "dogmatic" aspect of faith: if love, which is truth, always remains infinitely more than we can achieve - not as a nonexisting idea, but rather as complete reality (in Christ and in his immaculate bride, the Church), which as such enables us in fact to strive for it - then our self gift in faith to an ever greater love is always necessarily at the same time a self gift of faith to its ever greater truth. By the same token, because it is pure love, we are unable to achieve "insight" into it in a gnostic manner with the resources of our own reason; an encounter with pure love and its gift for us remains the pure, inconceivable miracle. The individual "mysteries," which are "presented as things to be believed," are nothing more than conditions of possibility for the perception of love in Christ: the Father (as the Personal Other) is the one who sends, so that the kenotic and obediential character of the Son's love never be lost from view; the Spirit is the one who is breathed forth, so that not only the freedom and fruitfulness be revealed, but also the shared mutuality, the witness and glorification character, the pure in-itselfness of the love beyond the Logos; the essential identity of the three "Persons" in the Godhead is alone what guarantees the absolute name of Love to God and definitively rescues love - to the joy of those who believe in love - from the clutches of prying reason, giving strength to those "in whose hearts Christ dwells...being rooted and grounded in love,...that they may know the love of Christ which far surpasses all knowledge" (eph3:17). Giana, my second cousin's daughter my niece Sophia Anunziata