It's the End of the World, As I Know It

You alone remain. You are all in all. Even if your love desires us in order to delight in two ones and in order to celebrate with us the mystery of begetting and conceiving, nevertheless it is always your love in both instances, your love which both gives and is given, at once seed and womb, and, again, the child begotten is none other than you. If love needs two feet in order to walk, still the walker is but one person, and the one is you. And if love needs two lovers, a lover and a beloved, still the love is only one, and that one is you.

Everything hearkens back to your throbbing Heart. Time and the seasons still hammer away and create, and your Heart drives the world and all its happenings forward with great painful blows. It is the unrest of the clock, and your Heart is restless until it rests in me. Your Heart is restless until we rest in you, once time and eternity have become interfused.

But: Be at peace! I have overcome the world. The torment of sin has already been submerged in the stillness of love. The experience of what the world is has made love darker, more fiery, more ardent. The shallower abyss of rebellion has been swallowed up in unfathomable mercy, and throbbing majestically reigns serene the Heart of God.

Hans Urs Von Balthasar, Heart of the World, 218-9

Reflection – So this is the end of the book, and the end of this little series on the Sacred Heart for this month of June. I may return to this book another time (maybe next June!), as I have barely mined a small fraction of its wealth.

But here we are: it’s all about love and union, all about mercy and grace. The whole purpose of God, His divine intent, His divine action, is all ordered towards forging an unbreakable union of love with you, with me, with each human being He created. This is why we were created, why we are here. This is, ultimately, why ‘that thing’ is going on in your life right now that you don’t understand and that causes you such pain. This is why this world is not our home, and we experience it as not our home. The love of God is calling us onward, always onward, to our true home, and until we are there, we are not at rest.

And that home is the heart of God. The images of heaven we use—a golden city, a cloud, a banquet hall—are just that, images, and their usefulness ebbs and rises with the seasons of our life. What is not an image is that Heaven is living in the heart of God, at the very heart of the Trinity, at the very heart of the mystery of that love which fashioned the universe and which fashioned us.

That is heaven, and that is the end not only of the book, the blog series, and this post, but of our whole life and being, and the whole life and being of the world. To put it in terms that the simplest child can understand (and indeed that once upon a time we actually used to teach our children, believe it or not!): Who made me? God made me. Why did God make me? To know, to love, to serve Him in this life, and to be happy with Him forever in the next one. Alleluia, and all praise, honor, glory, and worship be to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, the Heart of the world.

We Are So Much Better...

Do what you will, you remain the captive of love. I raised you up, wild one, when you were struggling and weltering in your own blood. I have washed you in the bath of my blood, in the water-bath of baptism and in the Word of Life, and I have fashioned for myself a glorious Church, without blemish or wrinkle, holy and unspotted.

You may behave like a wanton courtesan and daily betray me with another: still, you will never be what you in this way pretend to be. For all eternity you are my pure Body and my chaste Spouse. I am going to clothe your disgrace with such holiness that the aroma of your garments will fill the whole earth, and no one will be able to deny that he has really and bodily sensed your fragrance. I will deposit such love into your hands—love for you to distribute—that you name among the peoples will be called ‘The Loveable” and “Love’s Watchtower.”

And I will put in your heart such concern for the world and for my lost sheep that the dull herd will smell their shepherd and run to you almost against their will. The insults which you are preparing for me will not be as great as the disgrace that I will bestow upon you from the treasury of my Cross. The mockery they will pile upon you will be nothing compared with the mockery I will entrust to you as my precious gift and my priceless wedding present, taken from the storehouse of my divine sufferings.

The inglorious weakness with which, in this century of collapse, you stand before the world unable to transform it: this weakness is already part of the mystery of my own inglorious weakness, for when was I ever strong enough to renew the face of the exterior world? Thus, it is my will to give you a worth which does not properly belong to you, and to fashion you solely form the might of my heart, as Eve was fashioned from Adam’s rib.

The source of your life, O Church, is both a demand and a promise. Live not from yourself; live solely in me and from me.

Hans Urs Von Balthasar, Heart of the World, 197-8

Reflection – Von Balthasar calls us very deep here, in this passage about the Church as Christ sees it, a truly mystical passage, a truly mystical vision.

Mystical, because of course this is not what our human eyes show us, what our human minds judge to be the case. We see the ‘wanton courtesan, daily betraying Christ with another.’ We see the corruption and folly, the compromise and politics, the mediocrity and pettiness. If we are very wise indeed, we see these realities in our own hearts and not just in ‘those bishops’ or ‘those priests’.

Above all we see the inglorious weakness of the Church in our day. I probably needn’t go into all the gory details of this weakness—the declining numbers, the abject failure of catechesis and religious education, the general lack of evangelical zeal, the internal divisions and rancor. We all see ‘all that’, even if we may not all see it exactly the same way or prescribe exactly the same remedies.

But what does Christ see? All that, yes. But, von Balthasar meditates, so much, much, much more. The reference to Christ finding us struggling and weltering in our own blood is from Ezekiel 16, as is the subsequent references to our infidelity and God’s utter fidelity. We are so much better, so much more, so much grander and more glorious, than our actions show. The Church is so much holier and deeper, wiser and more loving, than the sins of her members.

Part of the problem of the Church in our day is that we her children stay on the human level of our eyes, ears, and minds and what they show us. The Holy Spirit wants to show us something that ‘eye has not seen, ear has not heard’ about the Bride and Body of Christ. And no small part of the urgent task of the renewal and reform of the Church is to enter into and make our own this deep spiritual sense of the Church, which is the deepest truth of the Church.

Deeper than the sins of the Curia and the chancery, the rectory and the convent. Deeper than your sins and my sins. Deeper than all our communal and individual failures. This is what the Church is in its essence, and we must get to this essence and live there, even though getting there and staying there will hurt us, will make the failures and corruption in the Church that much more painful to bear. But it is only when we share Christ’s love for His Church and His vision of what the Church in fact is that we will have the zeal, the passion, the flaming courage and strength to preach the Gospel with our lives and pour ourselves out in the Church in an oblation of love and sacrifice for God and for neighbor. Like Christ did.

A Rose Made of Hearts

My kingdom grows in all of you. You do not see this kingdom, or you only have distant inklings of it in bits and pieces. But I am the King and the center of all hearts, and the innermost and best-kept secret of all hearts is to me an open book. You see but the outer wrapping by which men conceal themselves from one another. I look into souls from the inside, from that center to which they stand open, defenselessly.

And there, at their innermost, is where their true face is to be found. There is where their gold glitters; there the hidden pearl lies. There gleam the Image and the Likeness, the signs of nobility imprinted upon them. There is where the eyes are open that perpetually behold the face of the Father. There the lamp keeps watch before the tabernacles, even when the body and the exterior soul slumber.

In that interior chamber there is something pure, something stirring and well-intentioned, which corresponds to what men try to accomplish externally in an awkward, inept and often perverted manner. And when they really love and do good to one another, their inner countenance also beams and smiles upon me, and I receive more than do their human brothers.

The inconceivable beauty of souls, which my father has hidden from them so that they do not become enamored of the creaturely mirror: this beauty, which next to God’s is the most awe-inspiring , stands unveiled before my eyes. Do you not think it wonderful to see all of this, to see how these millions of hearts, which only I can count, open up in a gigantic sphere like a huge rose of sorrows all about my own Heart, laboriously breathing up towards the light? So much struggle, so much exposure, so much blind daring, so much frantic search for help and, always, constant anguish, obstacles, hesitations, stumblings, fallings, getting up again, continuing down the road: and all of it towards me.

Hans Urs Von Balthasar, Heart of the World, 164-6

Reflection – ‘Judge not, lest ye be judged.’ We have all heard that Gospel, that word of our Lord Jesus. In our world today, it is often distorted to mean ‘have no moral clarity’ or ‘deny the moral law.’ In consequence of this distorted reading of the Gospel, some in the Church today react in the other direction and have a lamentable quickness of judgment, a reversion back to a censorious hyper-critical attitude towards their fellow man.

But the Lord says, and says it in more than one place, ‘Do not judge.’ And this beautiful passage from von Balthasar really gets to the heart of the matter. And that heart of the matter is that we simply do not see one another rightly. We see the outer shell of a person—even someone we may think we know intimately well. We see the behavior, the external presentation, the ‘outer wrapping.’ But this is a tiny fragment of who the person is; what is really going on in the depths of the soul of virtually every human being remains utterly hidden from us.

And each person bears within them an inconceivable beauty of soul, a grandeur, a magnificence such that our eyes would be blinded to behold it. There is a greatness in the human person, a nobility, a splendor, a reflection of glory that virtually every one of us has.

And this is why judgment, contempt, dismissal, disrespect, belittlement of the other is so desperately, utterly and wholly wrong. This is why the Lord warned us against it over and over again in the strongest language possible (call your brother a fool, and you will answer for it in hellfire…).

We are not our sin. We are not our ‘awkward, inept and often perverted’ effort to achieve the good. We are not the clumsy oafs, the disordered chumps, the silly gooses that our actions so often show us to be (I speak for myself in this matter!). We are… so very, very much more. This is why abortion is so terrible—the throwing away of this magnificent creature of a human person because his or her existence is not wanted by another human person. This is why fornication is so terrible—what is meant to be a joining of two unfathomably beautiful human beings into a lifelong union of love and life is reduced to a transient exchange of physical please and bodily fluids. And lying and theft and all the other moral laws… all of them pertain to reducing human beings to something so much less than what they are.

Non-judgment and compassionate acceptance of the other does not exist in tension with the moral law. It flows directly from the moral law, or rather, both the moral law and non-judgment flow from the near-infinite value and inestimable beauty and goodness of the human person, made in God’s image, and desired by Him for eternal life and splendor in His kingdom. 

As Morning Mists That Disperse

What can still be called death after I have died my death? Does not every dying from now on receive the meaning and the seal of my death? Is its significance not that of a stretching out of the arms and a perfect sacrifice into the bosom of my Father?

In death the barriers fall away; in death the ever-forbidden lock snaps open; the sluice bursts, the waters pour out freely. All the terrors that hover around death are morning mists that disperse into the blue. Even the slow death of souls when they bitterly shut themselves off from God—when they entrench and wall themselves up, when the world towers up around them like the pit of a grave, and all love becomes as the smell of mold, and hope withers, and a cold defiance rears its head and shows it tongue, a viper up from the dead: have I not suffered my way through all these deaths? And what can their poison do against the deadly antidote of my love? Every horror became for my love a garment in which to conceal itself, a wall through which to walk.

Do not be afraid of death. Death is the liberating flame of the sacrifice, and sacrifice is transformation. But (Eucharistic) transformation is communion in my eternal life. I am Life. Whoever believes in me, whoever eats and drinks me, has life in himself, eternal life, already here and now, and I will raise him up on the last day.

Do you grasp this mystery? You live, work, suffer: and yet, it is not you: it is another who lives, works and suffers in you. You are the ripening fruit, but what brings the ripening about, what ripens: it is I who am that. I am the power, the fullness, that sheds itself into your emptiness, filling it up.

Hans Urs von Balthasar, Heart of the World, 78-9

Reflection – Strong words these, strong meat. Are they true? Do we believe them? Because, you know, I think if they are true and if we do believe them, it should affect our attitude towards life at least a little bit.

Love is stronger than death, stronger than sin, stronger than hell. That appears to be the gist of it. Christ has penetrated to the heart of death, the heart of sin, the heart of hell, and Christ is the love of God, the Sacred Heart of love at the heart of the world. That would also appear to be the gist of it.

And so death—physical, bodily death—is in no measure to be feared. It is wholly and utterly taken up into the mystery of Christ, the mystery of love, of sacrifice, of communion. That which seems to be the ultimate defeat, the ultimate sundering, the ultimate loss, is in fact no such thing, but rather in Christ becomes the ultimate transcending of our separation, our defeat, our lack of communion.

I have noted in the past (although at this early hour of the morning when I do my blogging, I don’t remember if I have done so on this blog or in some other venue), that ‘heaven’ has lost its appeal for us to a large extent today. We rarely hear it preached about, and the mention of it quite often seems to fall flat in terms of actual consolation in the face of death.

And yet… surely it matters, doesn’t it, that after we die we may very well be translated into a different mode of existence which is both endless and utterly joyful? Surely that makes a difference to us, in the face of our own death or the death of one we love? I’m really not quite sure why we think so little of heaven or why it doesn’t seem to cheer us up much. It cheers me up!

Ah, but what about this middle section of this bit of Balthasar? This is where the heresy hunters start gathering wood for the burning with him. He does seem to suggest that even the worst of sin, the worst of defiance and rejection and hatred of God does not pose an insuperable barrier to God’s victorious love and life. This would seem to lead to a universalist stance, whereby we all just go to heaven when we die regardless of how we lived. At the very least, this is somewhat at odds with the main line of orthodox Christian tradition.

Well… that may be what von Balthasar thought. He certainly wrote an entire book about how we can at least hope that all men are saved (it is titled, prosaically enough, Dare We Hope That All Are Saved?). But here in this passage he is not necessarily asserting that. He simply is asserting that, well, that love is stronger.

Love is stronger than death, than sin, than hell. Anyone want to dispute that? And if someone steeped in sin, in hellish defiance and rebellion, somehow in some fashion is taken captive by God’s love and set free from Hell, then surely their very resistance and denial has indeed become that wall Jesus walked through, that garment Jesus wore for us and in his wearing of it, transformed.

Love is stronger than death. A good word for the month of the Sacred Heart, a good word to carry into this day, alleluia.