Do We Model the One Who Walks Along with Us?

Amazing reflection by von Balthasar.  We who follow Girard tend to also find inspiration from von Balthasar.  In this short paragraph you find the model, the double-bind and scandal.

The One Who Walks Along with Us

One of the most difficult things for a believer to do is to help a doubter. Like Moses, when he spoke to the people, we must cover our face so as to dim the radiance of the evidence within us and so, according to Paul's words, mourn with those who mourn, question with those who question, and doubt with those who doubt; for these will overcome their distrust of splendor only in this muted light. At the same time, however, we must let through enough brightness so that the faint-hearted will gather courage and derive strength from the example of faith. In other words, we must be the way and at the same time the goal, which is possible only because Christ became both things for us simultaneously. For his vitality consists in this: that he always stands at the level of the person he is educating and yet always is to be found as well at [as!] the final goal of his education. He walks along with the disciples toward Emmaus; but as they walk they discover that he is already reposing in the assurance of the goal. He is the Way, yet also the Truth, and, for that very reason, the Life.

FATHER HANS URS VON BALTHASAR,

Father von Balthazar (+ 1988) was an eminent Swiss Catholic theologian who wrote prodigiously.

— Magnificat, Vol 13, No. 3, May 2011, Pp. 118-119.

If any man serves me, let him follow me

Two Sisters in the Spirit In response to modern misunderstandings of the contemplative life, which place undue emphasis on “action” and “dialogue” with the world to the exclusion of the hidden life, Balthasar explains how these two holy women understood their lives of total surrender to God in prayer as the most powerful service they could offer for the salvation of mankind.

VOCATION - PART II

Time and Eternity

The concept of one's state of life answers the question of where one is, spatially or spiritually; it presupposes a position or point of view.  But for each Christian, whatever his state of life, this position can only be that of the Lord: "If any man serves me, let him follow me; and where I am, there also shall my servant be: (Jn 12:26).  "Father, I will that where I am they also whom you have given me may be with me: (Jn 17:24)... 

In truth he (the Christian) lives in heaven and is a stranger here below.  But so as to be able to bear this heavenly life without dying, without losing his earthly mission in the abyss of God's mystery, his own life has, so to speak, to be withdrawn from him until his earthly mission is complete: "you have undergone death, and your life is hidden away now with Christ in God." (Col 3"3).  The true saints are those whose ardor in their earthly mission is fed solely by the eternal, heavenly life that they have tasted but that has been so painfully withdrawn.  They do not turn their backs on the world in order to enjoy the rest of heaven in advance.  Rather, they live a life of intense longing and move the world by the strength of that heaven that has first been granted to them and then closed to them.  They hang crucified between this world and the beyond; exiles from earth but not yet in their heavenly home, their position serves as a kind of pulpit, and their whole life is a sermon.  It does not matter whether the preaching takes the form of action or of contemplation - this decision is left to God; in both cases, their position is the same, stretched between earth and heaven. 

- Hans Urs von Balthasar

God’s Repeated Calling and the Soul’s Continued Wariness in Response

Das Herz der Welt (Heart of the World) – Hans Urs von Balthasar 

Soft it approaches, almost inaudible and yet quite unavoidable: a ray of light, an offer of power, a command that is more and less than a command – a wish, a request, an invitation, an enticement: brief as an instant, simple to grasp as the glance of two eyes. It contains a promise: love, delight and a vision extending over an immense and vertiginous distance. Liberation from the unbearable dungeon of my ego. The adventure I had always longed for. The perfect feat of daring in which I am sure to win all only by losing all. The source of life opening up inexhaustibly to me, who am dying of thirst! The gaze is perfectly tranquil, having nothing of magical power or of hypnotic compulsion: a questioning gaze which allows me my freedom. At the bottom of it, the shadows of affliction and of hope alternate. I lower my eyes; I look to one side. I don’t want to say "no" in the face of those eyes. I give them time to turn away.… These “ghostly hours” recur more and more seldom, and the enveloping layers of everyday life grow stronger and thicker around me…. I seal myself off from God and this becomes my usual state – my second nature. Maybe this is the habit of sin, the habit of evil.

Why More Are Not Involved With Contemplation

It is all about choice and this is why more are not involved with contemplation.

Theological reflection (contemplation) on the word without the accompanying readiness for repentance is bound to lead to a heightening of the existenial contradiction; many Christians are aware of this and consequently, if they have decided that they are not going to make any decisive changes for the better in their lives, they are honest (in a way) in leaving contemplation alone.

 - Hans Urs von Balthasar from his book Prayer

Making Room In Ourselves, and the World, For Its Energies To Work

We do not build the kingdom of God on earth by our own efforts (however assisted by grace); the most we can do, through genuine prayer, is to make as much room as possible, in ourselves and in the world, for the kingdom of God, so that its energies can go to work. All that we can show our contemporaries of the reality of God springs from contemplation: Jesus Christ, the Church, our own selves. But it is impossible to put forward the contemplation of Jesus Christ and the Church in a convincing manner unless we ourselves participate in it.

 - Hans Urs von Balthasar from his book Prayer

Seeing the Tragic Divorce Between Doctrine And Practice

On the feast day of St Augustine it seems what von Balthasar felt about a "divorce" within the church continues to separate many of us.

From Christology from Within: Spirituality and the Incarnation in Hans Urs von Balthasar by Mark McIntosh

As von Balthasar worked his way through the classics of Christian thought, the uneasy sensation settled over him that a tragic divorce had occurred between doctirne and practice, between theorlogy and spirituality... He struggled to understand what he saw as the fatal consequences of this separation - the desiccation of dogmatics and the self-absorption of spirituality... The separation has in von Balthasar's mind a more grievously concrete cause: an absence of men and women with the grace to unify theology and spirituality in their own lives.

(Can it be better explained than that?)

Von Balthasar sees the first real impetus for this separation in the church's need to challenge false teaching and schismatic tendencies, and therefore to demarcate the limits of authentic Christian faith.

"... he argues that philosophical ideas, norms, and methods became a rigid structure imposed upon the content of faith.  The result was an increasing isolation of dogmatic and mystical theology from one another, each becoming more inaccessible and unattractive to the practitioners of the other."

He is clearly far from assigning blame only to the scientific theologians.  The saints are more and more called to offer descriptions of their inner states and experiences; they are "required to describe the way in which they experienced God, and the accent is always on experience rather than on God.: for the nature of God is a subject for the theological specialist."  It is as if the taste of spiritually inclined persons becomes so subjective and rarified that the objective mysteries of Christianity only manage to obstruct their view.  The saints, therefore, "are not taken seriously in theology because they themselves did not venture to be theologically minded."

Von Balthasar sees this (the role of the saints) gift of openness and availability to the Word as first a gift of the church, but it often becomes manifest in a saint, whose soul has gazed so long and deeply on the light of God that it has come to hold within itself an almost inexhaustible store of light and love, and so can offer lasting force and sustenance.

In other words, mysticism which is not in some way in the service of the whole church's ever deeper appropriation and understanding of life in Christ is not an appropriate theological matrix.

...it is not experience of a union with God which represents the yardstick of perfection or the highest stage of ascent, but rather obedience, which can be quite as tightly bound to the experience of abandonment by God as to the experience of union with God.

Authentic Christianity spirituality is already communally oriented, for it is a spirituality ordered primarily to obedience, which always involves community.

Difference between joy and suffering becomes tenuous

From “The Grain of Wheat” by Hans Urs von Balthasar

The more we come to know God, the more the difference between joy and suffering becomes tenuous; not only do both things become engulfed in the One Will of the Father, but love itself becomes painful, and this pain becomes an irreplaceable bliss.

Purgatory: perhaps the deepest but also the most blissful kind of suffering. The terrible torture of having to settle now all the things we have dreaded a whole life long. The doors we have frantically held shut are now torn open. But all the while this knowledge: now for the first time I will be able to do it - that ultimate thing in me, that total thing. Now I can feel my wings growing; now I am fully becoming myself...

In some way this reminds me of St Francis and his teaching of perfect joy.

Creating Space is an Act of Obedience

excerpt from the Magnificat

"Christ's act of creating space in himself for God is not self-mastery, but is itself already obedience, an obedience willing to take on whatever task the 'ever greater Father' gives." - Hans Urs von Balthasar

The Human Person comes to be deprivatized & socialized

Raymund Schwager writes on the drama of the Christian Life in his book, Jesus in the Drama of Salvation (pp 218-221)

If an actor plays his part well, he steps with his whole existence into the service of the character he is to represent. This does not make him a puppet, but his own experience with its hopes and sufferings, its dreams and disappointments is expressed in a transformed way in the person who appears on the stage. The actor puts something of his own life into the service of the figure whom he has to play. Certainly, in his performance he always remains in the role, out of which he must regularly step, in order to live his own life with his own responsibilities. But his service in the role has a great symbolic power.

Christian life can be understood from the viewpoint of this parable...

Even if a good actor puts everything into his part, his own life remains more important. It was different with the fate of Jesus. His human life had no aim of its own beside his mission. It was a matter of being the living flesh and dramatic instrumentality for that threefold life which had gripped him. A similar task stands before those who are ready to follow him. Given the spontaneous urge to live, all of us start with our own wishes, aims, and plans, and these, while preserving the person's own imperious will to life, can often be built into collective projects within history without any very great difficulty. Self-will thus appears as service. Christian faith demands, however, a different service and therefore includes a fundamental conversion. The decisive thing is the question of the whole understanding of life and the readiness ultimately not to live one's own life any longer, but Christ's, and to allow oneself to be led by the Spirit. One's own life becomes then a living instrument on which the melody of a higher life can be played. Such a conversion can naturally not be the fruit of one individual decision, but involves a lifelong process.

From the insight that the innermost dimension of human life is the divine life bestowed on humankind, H. U. von Balthasar distinguishes between spirit-subject and person. He ascribes the spiritual individual to the creation, while he defines personal existence by means of the supernatural mission and participation in the trinitarian life of God. In the case of Christ, from whom Balthasar draws the theological concept of person, this distinction can be established fairly easily, even by means of church doctrine (anhypostasis of human nature). However Balthasar tries to understand all human persons from the viewpoint of the supernatural mission, according to the archetype of Christ: "But in Christ there is hope to be no mere individual self, but to become a person of God, with a task likewise defined through Christ." Since the Christian task is always aimed at the others, together with supernatural personal existence, according to Balthasar, there is at the same time implied a community among humans: "The human self, becoming a person theologically through an individual calling and mission, comes to be simultaneously deprivatized and socialized; it is made into a space and bearer of community."

...

In all this, the human person should not be understood as a fixed quantity, closed in on itself, which can be changed only from outside. It is in its whole being oriented toward God and has as a creature something indeterminate in itself. It is of itself not finally self-determining or autonomous, but - despite its subsistence - must at the same time in its innermost being be thought of on the model of "material" which is in need of further determination. By receiving divine life it is, therefore, not alienated from itself. Existence in faith does not mean playing a role which is strange, but being addressed by the role received (mission) in the indeterminacy at the center of one's person and challenged to a new self-determination and freedom made possible by the Holy Spirit.

Bailie - Road Scholar

The Ignatius Insight interview of Gil Bailie is a fine introduction to the life and work of this "Roamin' Catholic" and "Road Scholar" here.

By the way, Bailie will on featured live on EWTN Radio Network this Satuday, 2-4 p.m. EST. Listen and call in your questions.

Our being laid claim to and taken seriously as a PERSON

...Christianity has shed the light of love over humanity and in this light the unique worth of every individual person is made manifest. Without this light the general principles of human rights could not have been formulated, principles that are normative indeed for us, even though in practice they are frequently trodden underfoot... In vain we shall search the world before Christ for this kind of outlook of man on his fellow man... In none of these will we find the kind of respect for the person of one's neighbor that can only be established as a principle for the first time by the Christian revelation. For God, in his boundless involvement, has indeed always the individual in mind (though all in community are just as much his preoccupation); and as he moves toward the individual, so he lights up his unique dignity as a person. But should the source of God's gracious involvement fall into oblivion, then sooner or later the face of the person will become indistinct, and he will sink back once more into mere anonymity.

Because, however, the most significant thing in life that can happen to our neighbor is his being laid claim to and taken seriously as a person, an event that leaves on him the most lasting impression, a state that constitutes for him the source of the greatest happiness he can know on earth, in this above all lies the credibility of the Church, and the success of the mission of Christianity.
-- Hans Urs von Balthasar, pg 54-55.

A Sign of Joy in the Universal Darkness -- Balthasar

The best thing a Christian can do, therefore, is in no way to wish to be the master of his own moods, but simply to allow himself to be led by his living faith into whatever is presented to him in the course of time. Again to be led by faith means to remain in perpetual contact with the source and to have no desire to seek one's own adventure. The greatest adventure after all is God's redeeming action for the world in his Son, and if we follow the Son's course we shall not run the risk of losing ourselves on the slippery paths of self-inverted love. "In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the expiation for our sins." (1 Jn 4:10).

p 102 Engagement with God