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| Abbey Enclosure, Roe Deer-antlers |
August 13 - The old house is full of people.
"But
you are Mine as though you were alone. You give yourself to everyone
and you find Me there. It's only your duty that changes. Your Master
is the same gentle Master. And you have your nights. How well you
know that the evening conversations are the most intimate, when your
thoughts merge with Mine. When you find it difficult to talk about
yourself, the Spirit interprets for you, but you're not aware
of that. You don't know that your humble, childish stammerings become
hymns of glory for Me .Haven't you the intention of glorifying God?
Prolong this intention throughout your whole life .Intensify it."
Quotation, Hans Urs von Balthasear, with thanks from MAGNIFICAT com 15th
August 2013
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| You Have Words of Eternal Life Balthasar |
Graces of the
Assumption
If we think now about Mary, we know that she has
-. a place in God's saving plan,' a' home, where she was "chosen
before the foundation of the world" to be the Saviour's Mother, "to
be holy and blameless before him" (Ep 1:4), Surely she never left that
place as she became a person in time and lived out her entire existence on
earth. When she comes to God on the day of her Assumption, she simply returns
home to the place that was hers from the start, a place so familiar to her (for
it is the revelation of-her real being) that she instantly knows "this is
where I have always been". And this takes place not merely 'as an idea or
divine intention is finally realised; rather, it is because the deepest being
of the Virgin Mother was always identical with this idea, and she thus
experiences in her Assumption: this is where I always was .... '
We are not Mary. We do not yet correspond in this "foreign land"
to God’s conception of us as his child. Yet at the same time something of the
completed mystery of Mary is already present in us. We do not know how deep a
truth lies in the statement that Christ "gave those who received him the
power to become children of God" (In 1:12), not in a vague and figurative
sense but in the fact that we are born by grace with him from God the Father
....
Already here the chosen ones are carried over into the realm of God
through the Word God inserts into their hearts .... Because we are already
children of the Father and members of Christ and have the Holy Spirit in our hearts
calling, "Abba, Father" (Rm 8:15), just as the Son called to
the Father (Mk 14:36), our homecoming to the conception God has of us eternally
is an arrival at the place from which we originated, at the place in which we
have been eternally in our own most intimate truth and reality. Only from that
place can we measure how far away we were while we wandered sinful and
imperfect like the lost son of the parable, who finally set his sights on his
father's house and was received therein by his father.
HANS URS VON BALTHASAR Father von Balthasar (+ 1988) was an eminent Swiss Catholic theologian and
co-founder of a religious community His extensive writings were an important
influence on Blessed John Paulll.
