A wealth of Christian thought lies at our disposal, ways in which the believer can approach our creator. Our intimacy with the Lord becomes our earthly spiritual home built on the foundation of our Church. These explorations will shed light on the faith that can feed the childlike and offer a depth of understanding to satisfy the most inquisitive. Presenting the richness of our faith is the purpose of this blog. May it bring its readers an ever growing closeness to Jesus.
Subscribe below.
To follow up on he post of 12/21/2019 we continue with von Balthasar's reflection on being a child.
"... for a child, his parents' concrete love is not at first separable from God [see post of November 22, 2017 here ]; if everything follows an even course, this difference must be tenderly shown to him by his parents' humility and their own dependency on God. If this occurs as it should, the "archetypical; identity" will once again be confirmed for him in expanded form. The child will see clearly that love is realized only in reciprocity, in an oppositeness that is encounter and not opposition, a relationship that is held together in its very difference by the spirit of love and that, far from being endangered by mutuality, is rather strengthened by it. Love, too, is what enables the child to experience its absolute neediness as some thing other than a threat, since it is lived as the situation in which the mother's ever-latent love may be realized always anew.
The "archetypical identity", which we discover in creatures within a clear separation of persons who are held together by love, is a creaturely imago trinitatis ...." Unless You Become Like This Child, Hans Urs von Balthasar, pp. 18-19
Yesterday's Psalm (145: 10-11) response struck me: "Your friends make known, O Lord, the glorious splendor of your kingdom."
What struck me is the idea that living, in friendship, the two great commandments of love of God and neighbor, allows God's Trinitarian nature, his "glorious splendor," to be revealed in the world.
The first great commandment is to love God wholly: "to will or desire his glory." J-P Torrell, "Charity as Friendship," in Christ and Spirituality, at 56. Loving God is only possible because God loves us, and so enables us to love him. Our love for others arises out of God's love for us. "In this is love: not that we have loved God, but that he loved us." (1st letter of John). "You did not choose me, but I chose you." John 15:15.
God makes friendship with him possible by
making us adopted sons and daughters by his love, says Torrell. "'I say, you are god' (Jn 10:34)." "[G]race introduces us into the
family of God and puts us as it were on the divine level, thus making
[the reciprocity of love] possible." Unlike the Greeks who could not accept that there could be a relationship of love between the gods and man, the
Judeo-Christian tradition believes God does love and can be loved. A reciprocity of love between God and man is possible.
It is God's love for us that enables us to love God, ourselves and others in friendship. We love both ourselves and others properly when we love in consideration of God and for God's sake, since it is God that knows each person's true good. God is the ever-present "third" that makes love complete and true. True human love, then, whose model is friendship, is a reflection and image of God's own trinitarian love.
To love myself is properly to want for myself the highest good, which is actually that God's will for me be done. To love myself is not, properly speaking, selfish. "If I want the divine good for this friend of God that I am, it is in order that I might belong to God and be for his sake. He is the ultimate end I have in view, not myself." Ibid, 57.
Likewise, to love my neighbor is to will for him or her what I will for myself: the highest good, that God's will for that person be done. "I desire these goods for my friend, not for his or her sake, in the sense that he or she would be the ultimate end, but rather because of God and in order that he or she might belong to God." Ibid.
According to Torrell (who is expounding St. Thomas Aquinas), even the command to love our enemies makes sense by this way of thinking because we love our enemies for the sake of our friend, God. We don't love an enemy because of the evil he does, but because he is "a friend of a friend," i.e., his is still beloved of God despite his evil deeds. And so we hope, pray and encourage him return to a right relationship with God, his true good.
Lived out, our friendships with God, ourselves and others, reveal in the world the glorious nature of God's love, the point of the responsorial psalm. To my mind, this means the world is not ultimately "secular" or neutral and devoid of the presence of God, but from the beginning full of God's "glorious splendor," which we experience, share, and reveal, through true friendships.
