The Assumption 15th Aug, & 13th Birthday

A preamble of lines from 'HE AND i', (Gabrielle Bossis), leads into a Balthasar depth charge with "Graces of the Assumption"

Abbey Enclosure, Roe Deer-antlers

1948

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 15^th August 2013

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.