The work with which we embark on this first volume of a series of theological studies is a work with which the philosophical person does not begin, but rather concludes.
No fighter is more divine than one who can achieve victory through defeat. In the instant when he receives the deadly wound, his opponent falls to the ground, himself struck a final blow. For he strikes love and is thus himself struck by love. And by letting itself be struck, love proves what had to be proven: that it is indeed love.
When everything is blocked off,′ I was told by a dear friend who lives in Erfurt, “one must try to live in the interstices.′ Apparently, the Christians of the Apocalypse, though they did not bear the sign of the beast, had discovered or created such spaces. From islands like these, true culture, Christian culture, may spread across the earth. Many people are athirst for it.
In the mother’s smile, it dawns on him that there is a world into which he is accepted and in which he is welcome, and it is in this primordial experience that he becomes aware of himself for the first time.
The word of God can require something of me today that it did not require yesterday; this means that, if I am to hear this challenge, I must be fundamentally open and listening.
The first thing the Cross does is cross out the world’s word by a Wholly-Other Word, a Word that the world does not want to hear at any price. For the world wants to live and rise again before it dies, while the love of Christ wants to die in order to rise again in the form of God on the other side of death, indeed, IN death.
Faith’s table is always laid, whether the invited guest sits down or stays away with a thousand excuses and pretexts.
Instead, it is the reality that the God-forsaken one experienced in an eminent way because no one can even approximately experience the abandonment by God as horribly as the Son, who shares the same essence with the Father for all eternity.
Perfection lies in fullness of journey. For this reason, never think you have arrived. Forget what lies behind you, reach out for what lies before you. Through the very change in which you lose what you have snatched up you will at last be transformed into what you crave for with such longing.
Thus it seems that the Cross of Christ, laden with every sinful refusal of man, must stand at the very last extremity of hell; indeed, it must stand beyond hell, where the Son is forsaken by the Father in a way that only he can know.
It is impossible to contemplate the word without the serious intention of doing justice to it in practical behavior. It demands love for God and our neighbor, and does so with such immediacy and unmistakable urgency that it is pointless even to pause before this demand unless we are willing to respond.
In Mary this petition has been granted: she is, as it were, the open vessel of longing, in which life becomes prayer and prayer becomes life. Saint John wonderfully conveys this process by never mentioning Mary’s name in his Gospel. She no longer has any name except “the Mother of Jesus”.1 It is as if she had handed over her personal dimension, in order now to be solely at his disposal, and precisely thereby had become a person.
The Word, then, came into the world – came to what was his, but those who were his did not receive him. He beamed into the gloom, but the darkness turned away. Thus had love’s revelation to choose a struggle of life and death. God came into the world, but a bristling barrier of spears and shields was his welcome. His grace began to trickle, but the world made itself supple and impenetrable, and the drops fell to the ground.
Such a person can see without “pre-judice”, that is, without judging in advance; he will judge only on the basis of what he has really seen for himself.
We dwell in the place in which we are not traveling but are at home. The landscape of God’s self-revelation in Jesus Christ is our home. It is a landscape that we are never finished exploring, for new prospects are always emerging. Nevertheless, it is familiar to us and becomes all the more familiar the longer we reside there.
In the end, only something endowed with mystery is worthy of love. It is impossible to love something stripped of mystery; at best it would be a thing one uses as one sees fit.
In this sense, the methodological form that comes into play here is ultimately quite simple: Scripture is interpreted by Scripture. Scripture interprets itself. Attentive listening to Scripture’s own internal self-interpretation is very characteristic of Redemptoris Mater.
To live with another within the compass of one heart: I must move to the side, must make myself small, so that the other has space and does not feel crowded.
Every kind of integralism, open or disguised, is contrary in principle to true catholicity, which can win to itself and comprise all things only if it delivers itself up and dies like the seed to rise again.
The beautiful is the radiance which something gives off simply because it is something, because it exists.
The Fathers of the Church say that prayer, properly understood, is nothing other than becoming a longing for God.