Risen Lord Salvator Mundi - Leonardo da Vinci

Salvator Mundi Leonardo da Vinci, rediscovered, retored 2012

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To William,
Thank you for the Holy Week greetings.

And now we celebrate the Resurrection.

You rejoice in the glorious Salvator Mundi image by da Vinci rediscovered.

Your account of the art event is described so exciting and alive.

Wishing you the joy of the Risen Lord.

“I am the Alpha and the Omega,
the Beginning and the Ens.
                                  Revelation 21:6.

Yours ...

Donald

--- Forwarded Message -----
From: William Wardle ...
Sent: Thursday, 29 March 2012, 17:13
Subject: Holy Week greetings mailed

Dear Fathers,

I have today posted my Easter cards to you and all the Brethren to unite with you all at the start of Holy Week, but I thought I would write (always afraid that the post might be delayed) to send the photo 'image' [which fascinates me] that I have used on the cards I made, in case you might like to have an 'onine copy' for enlargement or for sharing on the Blog. A significant factor in my choice of this painting for the card was that it will not be illustrated in the books in your library, and thus I am able to present an image for your interest that you might perhaps otherwise not have the opportunity to consider? When I had the photos printed, the lady hesitated for a very long time with the prints in her hand:"It makes my spine tingle", was all she managed to say as she handed them to me. I gave her one of the prints, and left her speechless.

It is entitled Salvator Mundi and is the recently discovered work of Leonardo da Vinci that was lost and only rediscovered and restored in 2011. In France, Leonardo da Vinci painted the subject, Jesus Christ, for Louis XII of France between 1506 and 1513. The recently authenticated work was once owned by King Charles I and recorded in his art collection in 1649 before being auctioned by the son of the Duke of Buckingham in 1763. It next appeared in 1900, damaged from previous restoration attempts and its authorship unclear, when it was purchased by a British collector, Sir Frederick Cook. Cook's descendants sold it at auction in 1958 for £45. The painting was rediscovered, acquired by an American consortium of art dealers in 2005, and authenticated as by Leonardo. It was exhibited by London's National Gallery during 2011. The recent restoration of this picture has revealed many of Leonardo’s characteristic working methods. The hands, which are the best preserved, were readjusted during painting. The face, more damaged, was built up with numerous fine layers of paint. Christ holds a rock crystal orb, which represents the universe. In Leonardo’s day rock crystal (a clear quartz) was considered a miraculous material and no modern tools could shape it, let alone fashion it into a perfect geometric solid.

I would just remark that I too am drawn to the apophatic approach to theology, but I do delight in iconography, and this painting seems to me to be very like to an icon? It is on the Son of Man that my thoughts focus when looking at this image, and then rise up through the iconography present in the painting, through his role as the Son of God to his transformed existence where my thoughts lose themselves. Perhaps this is the journey I relate in my 'jotting' for this holy season...

I attach a copy of my Holy Week / Easter 'jotting' (no one might imagine the emotional and spiritual cost to me of this poem which haunted me from its conception and tore at me until I could ‘adequately’ give it expression). It was whilst I was endeavouring to assure my understanding of the meaning to me of the word ‘ground’, initially from Eckhart’s use of the word, that I alighted on the Spiritual Canticle of St. John of the Cross on the internet (http://www.catecheticsonline.com/Spirituality.php), which I had never previously ‘explored’. His commentary on the first stanza particularly captivated me and enlightened my thoughts in the first verse of my reflection. I quote from his work in the footnote.

I pray for you all as I unite with 'the brothers from whom I am absent' at every Office, and will be doing so especially during Holy Week, and into your Easter celebrations. Health being sufficient, both for Edith (who has had a rough patch recently) and myself, I very much hope to be writing during May to ask if I may come to stay in June.

With my especial greetings as this holy season opens,

with my love in Our Lord,

William

Good Friday - Man of Sorrows

Good Friday - St. Bernadette, Erskine, Scotland

Thanks from Anne Marie---- Forwarded Message -----
From: Anne Marie . . .
To: Donald . . .
Sent: Friday, 6 April 2012, 22:46
Subject: Man of sorrows

This is a picture of our cross in the parish after the service.  I hope that Black Friday has brought you a bit closer the to wonder of the Resurrection.

Anne Marie
Sent from my iPad

The Hours of the Passion
The Eighteenth Hour:
http://luisapiccarreta.com/prayers-of-luisa/the-twenty-four-hours-of-the-passion-of-our-lord-jesus-christ/
From 10 to 11 AM
Jesus takes up the Cross and walks toward Calvary, where He is stripped,
Jesus embraces the Cross

My Jesus, insatiable Love, I see that You give Yourself no peace, I feel Your fidgets of Love, Your pains.  Your Heart beats strongly; and in every heartbeat I feel bursts, tortures, violences of Love; and You, unable to contain the Fire that devours You, You pant, moan, sigh, and in each moan I hear You say, “Cross!”  Each drop of Your Blood repeats, “Cross!”  All Your pains, through which You swim as though in an interminable sea, repeat among themselves, “Cross!”  And You exclaim, “O Cross, beloved and longed for, You alone will save My children, and I concentrate in You all My Love!”

Holy Saturday and Adrienne von Speyr

  http://www.christendom-awake.org/default.html 

 

Von Speyr's life of grace
by Regis Martin

The world's greatest living theologian came to Rome a few months ago to help honor the memory and work of a remarkable woman and mystic. Her life, he said, decisively shaped all that he had written or experienced in more than 40 years.

Hans Urs von Baithasar, Swiss theologian of towering erudition, originality, faith and loyalty to the Church, addressed scholars and students from across Europe and the Americas who were attending a conference at Rome's Pontifical Lateran University on the life and thought of Adrienne von Speyr.

Presented in terms of her "ecclesial mission", the conference attempted to show the immensity of von Speyr's gifts and service to the life of the universal Church. Pope John Paul II and Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger interrupted their own busy schedules to offer powerful and prayerful witness to the character and achievement of this truly extraordinary woman. Yet it can fairly be said that most of the Catholic world knows nothing at all about her.

Who was Adrienne von Speyr and what were the singular graces of her life - graces which, some 18 years after her death in 1967, would move three of the most commanding churchmen of this century to
peak so ardently, so authoritatively, of her legacy?

Born in Switzerland in 1902, amid the loftiest peaks on earth, it became an appropriate setting for someone destined to scale the very horizons of God. And depths, too, into which she would mysteriously fall out of an obedience freely given to Him. Depths which were to plunge her all the way down into hell, there to enact the full measure of our Lord's own dark descent which the Church calls the Mystery of Holy Saturday.

Hers was an endurance which God asked of her from the very beginning. Following her conversion in 1940 at the hands of von Balthasar (while she had no prior knowledge of Catholicism, the outline of it all, he said, was "hollowed out in her like the interior of a mold"), there commenced a lifetime's succession of "passions," culminating in the experience of Christ's own suffering on the cross.

"It is," commented von Balthasar, who was present at these missions. "Christ's final act of obedience toward His Father that He descends into hell." the place into which all the world's sin is finally cast. "In hell He encounters His own work of salvation, nor in Easter triumph, but in the uttermost night of obedience, truly the obedience of a corpse.

"He encounters the horror of sin separated from men. He walks through sin and, traversing its formlessness, He experiences the second chaos. While bereft of any spiritual light emanating from the Father, in sheer obedience, He must seek the Father where He cannot find Him under any circumstances."

And such, in vicarious ways, is precisely the harrowing which von Speyr underwent as a result of giving her consent to whatever God might wish of her; a grace, charism and mission which stands at the very center of her mystical life and of its incomparable importance to the Church.

For here is the deepest and most intimate participation in the Lord's own oblation to the Father, His mysterious self-emptying on behalf of the world and the terrible weight of its sin which he redeemed from within.

"What Adrienne experienced, von Baithasar said, 'is actually more horrible than the hell depicted for us by medieval imagination; it is the knowledge of having lost God forever.... ." So utterly real was it, he added, that for anyone blithely to dismiss the existence of hell would be, at once, both "ridiculous
and blasphemous."

At the heart of her spirituality, the pulsating principle throughout the body of her life, is an attitude of complete transparence before God, of total effacement of self. One must acquire an attitude of obedient letting-it-happen-to-oneself for God. Her mission, therefore, consisted of "continual and complete movement away from oneself, in self-forgetfulness and virginal readiness for the word of God. It is a life, concluded von Balthasar, of "totally childlike existence in God and for God".

Always strive, she would exhort the members of the lay community which she and von Balthasar founded in 1945, to achieve that perfection of "being available" for God, of doing whatever He asks
of us to help advance the glory of the Father.

Her last years, while marked by increased suffering ("Her body, wrote von Balthasar, "was like an organ on which all, and in fact constantly new and unsuspected, stops of suffering had been
pulled out"), saw no abatement of that will, that deep disposition of soul to always avail oneself of His grace. Near the end, knowing it was the end, she exclaimed, "How beautiful it is to die!" For, then, of course, God himself lay ahead, alone in the flesh to await her.

How very different the landscape of the Church might be today if, 20 years ago, publishers in this country had made available to us the works of von Speyr (and von Balthasar too). How fortunate
we are that they are available now.

Regis Martin was studying at the Angelicum in Rome at the time and is currently lecturing at the Franciscan University at Steubenville, Ohio. Many of the works of Adrienne von Speyr and Hans Urs von Balthasar) are available from Ignatius Press /PO. Box 18990, San Francisco, Calif 94118).

December 29, 1985

Article originally in NATIONAL CATHOLIC REGISTER
Writings by Adrienne Von Speyr

[HomePage]

[Von Balthasar]

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Ratzinger on Christ’s Descent into Hell 

http://whosoeverdesires.wordpress.com/2009/09/22/ratzinger-on-christs-descent-into-hell/

Many WD readers will recall the theological skirmish which once, twice, and thrice erupted on the pages of First Things two and a half years ago.  The warring parties were Alyssa Lyra Pitstick and Fr. Edward T. Oakes, S.J.  The point in question was Hans Urs von Balthasar’s controversial Holy Saturday theology, wherein he argues that Christ’s descent into hell was a passive, i.e., suffering, descent.  The traditional Holy Saturday motif is of the triumphant Christ descending in glory. 

ECCE HOMO Good Friday 9 AM

from Missal

 Pilate is astonished, and He hastens to say, “How can this be?  Should I crucify your king?  I find no guilt in Him to condemn Him.”  And the Jews cry out, deafening the air, “We have no other king but Caesar, and if you do not condemn Him, you are not a friend of Caesar.  Insane, insane—crucify Him, crucify Him!”

Not knowing what else to do, for fear of being deposed, Pilate has a bucket of water brought to him, and washing his hands, he says, “I am not responsible for the blood of this just one.”  And he condemns You to death. 

First Station
Jesus is Condemned to Death

The Twenty-Four Hours of the Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ

by Luisa Piccarreta

. . .

Seventeenth Hour: 

 From 9 to 10 AM Jesus is crowned with thorns.  

Presented to the people: 

 “Ecce Homo!”  Jesus is condemned to death.

My Jesus, Infinite Love, the more I look at You, the more I understand how much You suffer.  You are already completely lacerated—there is not one point left whole in You.  The executioners, enraged in seeing that, in so many pains, You look at them with so much Love, and that Your Loving Gaze, forming a Sweet Enchantment, almost like many voices, prays and supplicates for more pains and new pains—though inhuman, yet forced by Your Love, make You stand on Your feet.  Unable to stand Yourself, You fall again into Your own Blood, and, irritated, with kicks and shoves, they make You reach the place where they will crown You with thorns.

My Love, if You do not sustain me with Your Gaze of Love, I cannot go on seeing You suffer.  I feel a shiver in my bones, my heart throbs, I feel I am dying.  Jesus, Jesus—help me!