Thought for the Day

 "Who can grasp the Lord’s meaning in his creation and beyond it? Who can tie up with a short string the unbounded bouquet of wisdom? Who can tame the jungle of his incomprehensibility? See how man’s spirit and whole being lies, like the bowl of an impetuous fountain, under the downpour of so many mysteries. Let it gush! By letting it gush you will grasp what you can, and what you can is to be a bowl for the flood. Open up heart and brain and do not attempt to clutch tightly. By being washed out you will become purified. The strange thing that flows through you is precisely the meaning you seek. …

Everything must enter this current, like icefloes that crack open under the sun with a roar and lose their own shape and roll out to the sea in a mighty tumble. But this movement is produced by the heartbeat at the Center, and what appeared to be a chaotic impulse is the blood circulating in the Body of the cosmic Christ.

This is the body in which you are to flow, letting yourself be driven ever anew as a drop through red ventricles and throbbing arteries. In this circulation you will experience both the futility of your resistance as you put up a struggle and the power of the muscle that drives you forward. You will experience the anguish of the creature that must humble and lose itself, but also the sheer joy of the divine life, which consists in being a closed circuit of endlessly flowing love. Washed along on the tide of the sacred Blood, you will encounter all things as pebble knocks against pebble in the cataracts of a mountain stream, but also in the way handsome sailboats cross on the gently changing landscape of a royal river. Pushed along in the detachment of dark solitude, you will learn to know that the communion of all beings among themselves is their contact with one another and their selfhood within the flowing channels of that Body. Thus related to all things and all natures, you will at last be able to commune with yourself, and by way of self-forgetfulness—that lengthiest of all detours—you will be brought to the festive Table of Offerings upon which you will find yourself lying as a stranger who is given to himself as a new gift. Expelled from the Heart, out to all the members of that colossal Body, you will undertake a voyage longer than any of Columbus’. But just as the earth rounds itself off into a ball, so, too, do the veins make a return to the Heart and love goes out and comes back eternally. Slowly you will master the rhythm, and you will no longer grow fearful when the Heart drives you out into emptiness and death, for then you will know that that is the shortest route to be admitted again into the fullness of delight. And when it pushes you away from itself, then you should know that this is your mission: being sent away from the Son, you yourself repeat the way of the Son, away from the Father and out to the world. And your way to remote places, where the Father is not, is the way of God himself, who goes out from himself, abandons himself, lets himself fall, leaves himself in the lurch. But this going out of the Son is also the going out of the Spirit from the Father and the Son, and the Spirit is the return of the Son to the Father. At the outermost margin of existence, at the furthest shore, where the Father is invisible and wholly hidden, there the Son breathes out his Spirit, whispers it into the chaos and the darkness, and the Spirit of God hovers over the waters. And hovering in the Spirit, the Son turns back to the Father glorified, and you along with him and in him, and the departure and the return are one and the same. Nothing any longer exists outside of this one and only flowing life."

 -Hans Urs von Balthasar, Heart of the World, 211-214.