A wonderful collection, containing much deep insight. The final chapter, My Joy is to Be in Thy Presence, is especially marvellous as it most fully develops the author’s fascinating understanding of time and the eternal.
The things in the book that I particularly want to remember:
From God With Us and God Among Us:
“God looks out from eternity into time”
“God is a God with us and not just a God in himself and for himself.”
From God’s Yes and his Love are Maintained Even in Death:
“In the washing of the disciples’ feet is represented for us what Jesus does and what he is. He, who is Lord, comes down to us; he lays aside the garments of glory and becomes a slave, one who stands at the door and who does for us the slave’s service of washing our feet. This is the meaning of his whole life and Passion: that he bends down to our dirty feet, to the dirt of humanity and that in his greater love he washes us clean...We, who repeatedly find we cannot stand one another...are welcomed and accepted by him...We are washed through our willingness to yield to his love...John’s account shows us that even where God sets no limits, man can sometimes do so. Two such instances appear here (in the 13th Chapter of John’s Gospel). The first becomes apparent in the figure of Judas...This is the No given because we want to make the world for ourselves and are not ready to accept it as a gift from God...I think we all ought to ask ourselves, right now, whether we are not just like those people whose pride and vainglory will not let them be cleansed, let them accept the gift of Jesus Christ’s healing love...there is, however, also the danger of piety, represented by Peter: the false humility that does not want anything so great as God bending down to us; the false humility in which pride is concealed, which dislikes forgiveness and would rather achieve its own purity...that refuses God’s kindness.”
“Jesus’s words at the Last Supper...tear the world free from its unbearable boredom, indifference, sadness and evil.”
“God does not desire human sacrifice...he desires love, which transforms man and through which he becomes capable of relating to God, giving himself up to God...all this vain and eternal striving to bring ourselves up to God can be seen as unnecessary and yet, at the same time, as being like windows that allow us, so to speak, a glimpse of the real thing.”
“Being jealous of salvation is not Christian.”
From The Wellspring of Life:
“Death is the ultimate question.”
From The Presence of the Lord in the Sacrament:
“We live in the sphere of death; we can reach out in thought in the sphere of the Resurrection, try to make approximations. But it remains something different that we never quite comprehend. This is because of the the boundary of death, which closes us in and within which we live.”
“The fundamental error of regarding only what is material, tangible, visible as reality...’Reality’ is not just what we can measure...quantifiable entities...are always only manifestations of the hidden mystery of true being...here, where Christ meets us, we have to do with this true being...substance refers to the profound and fundamental basis of being. Jesus is not there like a piece of meat, not in the realm of what can be measured and quantified.”
“Christ is greater than the bread, other, not of the same order. The transformation happens, which affects the gifts we bring by taking them up into a higher order and changes them, even if we cannot measure what happens...The Lord takes possession of the bread and the wine; he lifts them up, out of the setting of their normal existence into a new order; even if, from a purely physical point of view, they remain the same, they have become profoundly different...This points us back again to the fact that being a Christian...is to be transformed, that it must involve repentance and not just some embellishment added onto the rest of one’s life. It reaches down into our depths and renews us from those very depths.”
“The Eucharist transcends the realm of functionality...The significance of the Eucharist as a sacrament of faith consists precisely in that it takes us out of functionality and reaches the basis of reality...The Eucharist is more real than the things we have to do with every day. Here is the genuine reality. This is the yardstick, the heart of things; here we encounter that reality against which we need to learn to measure every other reality.”
“To receive Christ means: to move toward him, to adore him.”
“Whenever we pray in the eucharistic presence, we are never alone...we are praying within the sphere of God’s gracious hearing, because we are praying with the sphere of death and resurrection.”
From The Immediacy of the Presence of the Lord:
“Only within the breathing space of adoration can the eucharistic celebration indeed be alive; only if the church and thus the whole congregation is constantly imbued with the waiting presence of the Lord, and with our silent readiness to respond, can the invitation to come together bring us into the hospitality of Jesus Christ and of the Church, which is the precondition of the invitation.”
“Love or friendship always carries within it an impulse of reverence, of adoration.”
“When the conscience becomes dulled, this lets in the violence that lays waste the world.”
“The reform of human relationships rests in the first place on a reinforcement of moral strength. Only morality can set limits to violence and selfishness, and wherever it becomes insignificant it is man who is the loser every time, and the weak first of all.”
“We can only understand love by sharing it.”
“People are not shaped merely from within outward; another line of influence runs from without inward, and to overlook this or to deny its existence is a kind of spiritualism that soon takes its toll. Holiness, the Holy One, is there in this world, and whenever the educative effect of his visible expression disappears this leads both people and the world to become more superficial and more barbarous.”
From Standing Before the Lord
“The word progress has acquired an almost magical ring. Yet we know, at the same time, that progress can be a meaningful term only if we know where we want to go.”
From The Church Subsists as Liturgy and in the Liturgy
“The Church is adoration.”
“The world needs more than just itself.”
“People do not need a distraction that will in the end become dreary...; they are asking for mystery even if they do not realise this themselves. They need the sign of the wholly other, the living word of God, entering into this our age in unadulterated trustworthiness and dynamism. That is the great task you (new priests) are taking on ...rooted in the apostolic structure of the Church, to remain steadfast in its word and thus to bring it to fruition: to bring into the world the great and transforming Other, the element without which the world can only sink into grey boredom.”
“When death comes onstage, the game is at an end. Man is set before the truth.”
No comments:
Post a Comment