Rushing Easter

Maybe this happens every year and I'm only just noticing it. Just like Christmas, people seem to rush Easter and ignoring the special character of Holy Week. No one wishes to get in the middle of the heightening controversy between Jesus and the Jewish authorities; no one wants to dwell on the ways in which we betray Christ with Judas; no one wishes to sit with Christ at the Last Supper; no one wishes to stay awake with Christ in the agony in the garden, or to dwell in the pain of scourging and crucifixion. I’ve noticed this especially with the Evangelicals I’m around. Yes, we are Easter people, but there is no Easter without Good Friday. Dwell there, live it this week. There’s a whole fifty days after Easter that you can celebrate being Easter people! Can we not watch with Jesus for one week?

Description of heaven and hell?

In the following quote from Nicolas of Cusa's writtings offered by Balthasar we see one possibility of what the states of heaven and hell might be like. According to Nicolas we are in a constant state of longing, a longing to know the essence of our being. He goes on to say:
"This indestructable streching-forth is either fulfilled by God, and then is eternal blessedness, in which the spirit is ever moved in a most blessed longing, so that it may attain that of whose gracious closeness it never has enough; or it is, if God does not fulfill it, eternal torture: to possess a rational nature and never to attain to reason."

Laws of Man and Laws of God

In our church history class we recently read Pope Leo XII's encyclical "Immortale Dei: On the Christian Constitution of States" (1885). I saw a connection with an incident in the heathcare debate.

Pope Leo in the encyclical decries the view holding that "since the people is declared to contain within itself the spring-head of all rights and of all power, it follows that the State does not consider itself bound by any kind of duty toward God." 25. Rather, the pope asserted, "rulers must ever bear in mind that God is the paramount ruler of the world, and must set Him before themselves as their exemplar and law in the administration of the State." 4.

In other words, human law looks to God's law as its source and formative principle. Legislators in Congress it seems to me acknowledge this in starting each legislative day with a prayer.

The connection with the health care debate? In Tuesday's Chgo Tribune, an article reported that the IL Catholic Prayer Breakfast disinvited Bart Stupak as its intended speaker because of his vote on health care. Here is what Michael Sullivan, president of the organization said, "No one is condemning Bart Stupak. His job in the public square is to stand up for his constituents and the principles that he purports to believe in. . . . He's really turned his back on those principles. Those principles issue from this person we think is God -- Jesus. If our first pope can deny him and be forgiven and be restored, then certainly Bart can as well. We're praying for him."

I'm sure Bart Stupak has a position on the question whether he was following the law of God as he understood it in his legislative vote. My point is that it is refreshing to see an overt reference to divine principles that should be guiding legislative activity. Do our legislators often articulate this dependence? (If they did wouldn't they be condemned by many who adhere to the "error" condemned by Pope Leo: that "the people" hold within themselves the "spring-head of all rights and of all power"?)

I hope our legislators earnestly pray for divine guidance, and that we continue to do the same for them.

Jacques Maritain on Poetry

Jacques Maritain defines poetry as the "divination of the spiritual in the sensible, which will itself express itself in the sensible." "Poetry and Religion," The New Criterion, V (1927), 15.

Nicolas of Cusa

I find myself with time now to begin reading Baltazar again. In volume 5 of the Glory of the Lord he describes some of Nicolas of Cusa's thoughts on the glory of the Lord. I thought them to be meaningful for me in this Lenten season.

"...The view from heaven to earth is one thing: this view sees only order, harmony and beauty .... To the view upwards from below ... the eternal love must make itself accessible by grace in order to be caught site of at all ....

The blessedness of God is grace ... only God's incarnate Word  and his Spirit breathed into our souls draws us into the kingdom of his inner glory. Thus Jesus Christ is the medium without which God's glory cannot be communicated .... Where we acknowledge that we are in need of the grace of redemption and implore it in all humility, there we give God the glory, as is fitting, and the more greatly, we acknowledge our depravity ....

Quoting Nicolas directly:
'He made me man to prove by means of me his great power, by raising me to fellowship with the Angels. He made me frail and weak to prove by means of me his power, by accomplishing his mighty works in me. He allowed  me to sin, to show by means of me the power of his mercifulness and grace, when I am converted to him. He let me go astray to show by means of me the power of his wisdom in which he can raise me up again to knowledge of the true ... life. He let all men sin, so that all might need grace, in order to prove the riches of his grace in Jesus Christ as Savior of all.' "     

The Christian Spirit

The Christian Spirit

St. Therese: On being all she can be

You cannot help but be impressed by the confidence expressed by St. Therese in the following quote from her autobiography. She is certain that despite her failures of charity the aid of the Lord is at her disposal.

'I am, I confess, far from practicing what I know I should, yet the mere desire I have to do so gives me peace.if it happens that I fall and commit a fault against charity, I rise again at once.  For some months I have no longer even had to struggle.  I can say with our Father St. John of the Cross: " My house is entirely at peace," and I attribute this deep peace to a certain battle which I won.  Ever since this victory the hosts of heaven have come to my aid, for they cannot bear to see me wounded after I fought so valiantly...'

Aphorisms

God's face like a countenance beaming forth from the darkness: in order to see it we throw everything we possess into the fire - the world, our joys, our hopes. The flame leaps forth, consumes it all, and in its glow the beloved Face lights up. But the flame dies down, and we feed it with what little remains to us: honor, success, our will, the intellect, our temperament, finally our very self: absume et suscipe - "take and receive". This is not simple self-giving, but, increasingly, the knowledge that I am being taken, that I must surrender. Grace is everything: the moment of God's appearing; grace also the every sacrifice the fire snatches from me.

from The Grain of Wheat - Aphorisms by Hans Urs von Balthasar, Ignatius Press