Man can avert his gaze from God, he can neglect to give his life the "splendor" of Christ's manifest glory; by doing so he will show that his contemplation of the glory was not serious enough to be enduring. On the other hand the Word of God speaks of the Father's world of eternity being open and accessible to the believer, and we must not water this down, as if this world were merely in the future, merely promised, merely spiritual, and not also present , realized and of the body. He it must not be presented merely as something for which we strive (aspiring from nature to super nature, from the earth to heaven), for it is no less true that it is the basis of all our living and loving. Grace, the foundation of everything, is also the foundation of our living at the natural level, at the level of the world. The believer loves the earth because it is bathed in the radiance which comes from a heaven which has already been laid open. He is able to do this because he must.
Prayer, von Balthasar p. 50-51
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