International Films

Following is a list of most of the international films I've watched, mostly since mid-August, 2009. A few were seen earlier. Not all are necessarily recommended.

Mexican
El Mariachi (February 3, 2010)

Swedish
The Seventh Seal (Bergman) (Dec. 22, 2009)
Babette's Feast (Sept., 2010)

Italian
La Dolce Vita (Fellini)( mid-October, 2009)
8 1/2 (Fellini)
Amarcord (Fellini)
And the Ship Sails On (Fellini)
Caterina in the Big City
Juliet of the Spirits (Fellini)
Night of the Shooting Stars
Planet of the Vampires (made 1965)


Spanish
Eskalofrio (Dec. 17, 2009)
Pan's Labyrinth

Japanese
Ping Pong (watched 10/29/2009)
Welcome Back, Mister McDonald (watched mid-October, 2009)
Andromedia
Aragami: The Raging God of Battle
Cafe Lumiere (one of my favorites)
The Dimension Travelers
The Family Game
King of Beggars
Linda Linda Linda
Paprika
Taste of tea
The Twilight Samurai
Zebraman
Zeiram
Zeiram 2

Chinese (Mainland, Taiwan, Mandarin, Hong Kong)
CJ7
Re-cycle (10/21 - Hong Kong and Thailand)
Stolen life
Mercury Man*

Thai
Chocolate

French
Flight of the Red Balloon (August, 2010)
Mon Oncle


*=presently watching

William Saroyan, The Human Comedy

(The following excerpt is from William Saroyan's 1943 masterpiece, The Human Comedy. An older teacher comments to sixteen year old Homer Macauly on how she views her high
school students.)

'What my children appear to be on the surface is no matter to me. I am fooled neither by gracious manners nor by bad manners. I am interested in what is truly beneath each kind of manners. Whether one of my children is rich or poor, brilliant or slow, genius or simple-minded, is no matter to me, if there is humanity in him -- if he has a heart -- if he loves truth and honor -- if he respects both his inferiors and his superiors. If the children of my classroom are human, I do not want them to be alike in their manner of being human. If they are not corrupt, it does not matter to me how they differ from one another. I want each of my children to be himself. I don't want you to be like somebody else just to please me or to make my work easier. I would soon be weary of a classroom full of perfect little ladies and gentlemen. I want my children to be people-- each one separate -- each one special -- each one a pleasant and exciting variation of all the others.'

Yes

Moved by a soft breeze,
quiet as owl wings,
curtains brush windows
in the wall facing east.
Invading breaches in fabric and glass,
blinding sunlight slips past,
bathing the room with shimmering rays,
moment by moment reveals the day.

Tic Tic Tic
The mantle clock clicks,
marking but not making
the switch from what is
to what has been.
In this time present, one second
slips and descends
into the unreal territory
of petrified time,
act couched in memory.

Regret, sad dry waste days,
poor choices made,
cruel words said
where crafted words failed.
Failure to grasp peace,
to lose objectivity
and detachment from what others think:
dogged by what was, fearing what may be.

But in that pause of time present,
bated breath between seconds,
I hear your “Yes."
"Yes," in silent eloquence.
"Yes," carried in the wind's breath.
"Yes," rises from the pages I read.
Amid pensive, fearful dread
speaks your calming "Yes."
With one "Yes"
What was ends.
'Now' begins."

--by Jeff Henry

Pope St. Leo the Great (4th century) on the Incarnation

Invisible in His own nature, He became visible in ours. Beyond our grasp, He chose to come within our grasp. Existing before time began, He began to exist at a moment in time. Incapable of suffering as God, He did not refuse to be a man, capable of suffering. Immortal, He chose to be subject to the laws of death.

Folds of sedimentary layers - Benicia State Park, CA. Example of plate activity.

An example of tectonic pressure below the Carquinez Strait. Notice how the rock layers run to the left of the person, then behind him they fold at a nearly 45 degree angle.

The List of 200

A few months ago a friend challenged me to come up with a list of 200 books I would be satisfied to keep while letting go of all others. His reasoning was that in our golden years we may find ourselves with very limited living space; a smaller library could be a necessity.

In keeping with my personality, I made a number of smart alecky remarks to him. Can I have 200 Kindles instead? Can I later swap some of my 200 with someone else's 200? I also mentioned that I didn't know what books I'd be interested in reading in the future. Bear in mind I have a multitude of books and have 'culled the herd' a number of times over the years.

After giving it some consideration, I decided to go ahead with the exercise. What I learned astonished me. Following are comments I sent him after I concluded the assignment:


"I have decided to start finding homes for many of the books that did not qualify for my List of 200. For the rest of my life I'd like to read the books I did include, some of which are yet unread or which deserve to be reread.

"I now have the objective of pruning my library significantly (I've already pulled a number of books which I will likely never read again). I want to narrow the scope of my library to topics of greatest interest to me."


Yes, it sounds cruel and heartless. But I am the predator at the top of the 'word pyramid' in my library. I need the optimal number of brain nutrients possible from what I choose to read. To misquote Ludwig Feuerbach, "You are what you read."

This exercise led me to think seriously about why I collected a vast number of books. I asked myself what I expected from my library and where precisely did my literary interests lie. I discovered good reasons for reducing my library to manageable proportions. I also justified to my wife the need for purchasing more books to complete my vision for a "leaner, meaner" collection (we're still in negotiation over that one).

You may wish to take the List of 200 challenge! You gain a sense of freedom and clarity when you scrutinize your library. I am now at the decrepit age of "nearing 50" and my interests in literature are fairly established. But I do allow myself the latitude of cheating on my list should I discover a new topic of interest.

I plan to assemble my List of 200 as nearly as I can. The challenge for me will be to keep my library at this manageable level over the years. Will I cast away one book in favor of another? I hope so. After all, if a book has truly influenced me, I will possess its essence even after I give it away.

Following is my List of 200. The order is not necessarily of ascending preference. Sometimes that is the case. At other times I list the books by the time period in which the writers composed them or by the logical order of themes. Or I just put them where I wanted because it 'felt right.'

I was fairly ambivalent about the Science Fiction in my library; I have so many novels of this genre I didn't bother mentioning all those I'll keep. Easy come, easy go with pulp SF. They, I suppose, are my exception to the List of 200.

Jeff Henry’s List of 200

(Bible and resources)
1 RSV Catholic Bible
2 NKJV Bible
3 ABS Greek NT
4 Septuagint in Greek/Engl.
5 Perschbaher's Analytical Greek Lexicon
6 BAGD Lexicon
7 Concordance of some sort

(Literary)
8 Complete Works of T.S. Eliot
9 Dante's Inferno
10 Dante's Purgatorio
11 Dante's Paradiso
12 Antonio Machado, Times Alone
13 Antonio Machado, Selected Poems
14 Antonio Machado, The Landscape of Castille
15 Flannery O'Conner, The Habit of Being (letters)
16 Sigrid Undset – The Wreath
17 Sigrid Undset, The Wife
18 Sigrid Undset, The Cross
19 Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop
20 Willa Cather, O Pioneers!
21 Willa Cather, Shadows on the Rock
22 Joseph Heller, Picture This
23 Otto Frederick, The End of the World
24 Georges Bernanos, The Diary of a Country Priest
25 Georges, Bernanos, Under Satan's Sun
26 Georges Bernanos, Mouchette
27 Georges Bernanos, The Carmelites
28 Georges Bernanos, The Impostor
29 Georges Bernanos, The Heroic Face of Innocence : Three Stories
30 Georges Bernanos, The Open Mind
31 Charles Péguy, God Speaks;Religious Poetry
32 Julien Green, The Green Paradise
33 Julien Green, The War at Sixteen
34 Julien Green, Love in America
35 Paul Claudel, Coronal
36 Francois Mauriac, Flesh and Blood
37 Francois Mauriac, Viper's Tangle
38 John Breslin, The Substance of Things Hoped For
39 William Saroyan, The Human Comedy
40 E. Nesbitt, Five Children and It
41 E. Nesbit, The Phoenix and the Magic Carpet
42 E. Nesbit, Short Stories
43 E. Nesbit, The Enchanted Castle
44 George MacDonald, Phantastes and Lilith (combined)
45 James Hilton, Lost Horizon
46 Morris West, The Devil's Advocate
47 Maupassant, Selected Short Stories
48 Elsbeth Huxley, Flame Trees of Thika

(Theology/Philosophy, various flavors)
49 NICOT, Genesis 1-17
50 NICOT, Genesis 18-50
51 NIV Commentary, Isaiah
52 Blessed Theophylact, Commentary on St. Matthew
53 F.F. Bruce, Gospel of John
54 NICNT, Book of the Acts
55 Jerome Biblical Commentary
56 Throckmorton, Gospel Parallels
57 NIGTC, Galatians
58 Catholic Catechism
59 Vatican II Docs., vol. 1
60 Vatican II Docs, vol. 2
61 Early Church Fathers
62 Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History
63 Athanasius, Anthony of Egypt
64 Athanasius, On the Incarnation
65 A collection of the Desert Fathers
66 Augustine, Confessions
67 Augustine, Commentary on the Gospel of John and the Epistle of John
68 Augustine, City of God
69 St. Augustine, Select Letters
70 Rule of St. Benedict
71 Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy
72 Maximus Confessor, Select Writings
73 Bede, History of the English Church
74 Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love (short, long versions)
75 A Scholastic Miscellany: Anselm to Ockham
76 Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, Vol. 1, Bk. 1
77 Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, Vol. 1, Bk. 2
78 Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, Vol. 1, Bk. 3
79 Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, Vol. 1, Bk. 4
80 Aquinas' Summa Theologica, vol. 1
81 Aquinas' Summa Theologica, vol. 2
82 Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermons on Conversion
83 William of St. Thierry, The Golden Epistle
84 Catherine of Sienna, Dialogue
85 St. John of the Cross, Dark Night of the Soul
86 St. John of the Cross, Spiritual Canticle
87 St. John of the Cross, Living Flame of Love
88 Angelus Silesius, Cherubinic Wanderer
89 Philokalia, vol. 1
90 Philokalia, vol. 2
91 Philokalia, vol. 3
92 John Henry Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua
93 Etienne Gilson, Christian Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas
94 Etienne Gilson, The Spirit of Mediaeval Philosophy
95 Etienne Gilson, The Mystical Theology of St. Bernard of Clairvaux
96 Joseph Lortz, The Reformation in Germany, vol. 1
97 Joseph Lortz, The Reformation in Germany, vol. 2
98 Karl Barth, Epistle to the Romans
99 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison
100 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Cost of Discipleship
101 Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace
102 Simone Weil, Waiting on God
103 Louis Bouyer, Liturgical Piety
104 Thomas Merton, Seven-story Mountain
105 Vladimir Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church
106 Vladimir Lossky, In the Image and Likeness of God
107 Jaroslav Pelikan, Jesus through the Centuries
108 Jaroslav Pelikan, Mary through the Centuries
109 Alexander Schmemann, Journals
110 Vatican II Docs., vol. 1
111 Vatican II Docs, vol. 2
112 Karl Rahner, Meditations on Hope and Love
113 Karl Rahner, Encounters with Silence
114 Henri de Lubac, History and Spirit: The Understanding of Scripture According to
Origen
115 H. de Lubac, Brief Catechesis on Nature and Grace
116 H. de Lubac, Catholicism: Christ and the Common Destiny of Man
117 H. de Lubac, The Christian Faith
118 H. de Lubac, Christian Resistance to Anti-Semitism: Memories from 1940-1944
119 H. de Lubac, More Paradoxes
120 H. de Lubac, The Motherhood of the Church
121 H. de Lubac, Paradoxes of Faith
122 H. de Lubac, Theology in History
123 Hans Urs Von Balthasar, Bernanos: An Ecclesial Existence
124 Hans Urs Von Balthasar, The Christian and Anxiety
125 Hans Urs Von Balthasar, The Theology of Henri de Lubac
126 Hans Urs von Balthasar, Convergences
127 Hans Urs von Balthasar, Dare We Hope "That All Men Be Saved"?
128 Hans Urs von Balthasar, Elucidations
129 Hans Urs von Balthasar, In the Fullness of Faith: On the Centrality of the
Distinctively Catholic
130 Hans Urs von Balthasar, Mary, The Church at the Source (with Joseph Cardinal
Ratzinger)
131 Hans Urs von Balthasar, New Elucidations
132 Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Office of Peter And the Structure of the Church
133 Hans Urs von Balthasar, Scandal of the Incarnation: Irenaeus Against the
Heresies
134 Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theology of History
135 Hans Urs von Balthasar, Truth Is Symphonic: Aspects of Christian Pluralism
136 Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Realm of Metaphysics in the Modern Age
137 Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Truth of the World
138 Hans Urs von Balthasar, Truth of God
139 Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Spirit of the Truth
140 Benedict XVI, Church Frs., From Clement of Rome to Augustine
141 Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth
142 Benedict XVI, The Spirit of the Liturgy
143 Peter Sewald, God and the Earth
144 Peter Sewald, Salt of the Earth
145 Thomas Santa, Understanding Scrupulosity
146 Ronald Rollheiser, The Holy Longing
147 Heino Kadai, Accents in Lutheran Theology
148 Martin Buber, Eclipse of God
149 Martin Buber, Between Man and Man
150 Martin Buber, I and Thou
151 Martin Buber, Tales of the Hasidim
152 Martin Buber, A Martin Buber Reader
153 Alex Waley (trans.), Monkey
154 Arthur Waley (trans.), The Analects of Confucius
155 Bhagavadgita
156 Epic of Gilgamesh
157 Rahula, What the Buddah Taught
158 R.A. Cram, The Ruined Abbeys of Great Britain
159 Ante Pacem, history/arch. of Church b/f Constantine

(Natural Science related)
160 Elsbeth Huxley, The Mottled Lizard
161 Loren Eisley, The Immense Journey
162 Loren Eiseley, The Unexpected Universe
163 Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac
164 A Golden Guide to Birds of North America
165 Peterson Field Guide to Native Wildflowers

(SF, Fantasy, Mystery and other fun books)

166 Clifford Simak, City
167 Clifford Simak, Time and Again
168 Clifford, Simak, Werewolf Principle
169 Clifford Simak, Highway of Eternity
170 Keith Laumer, Trace of Memory
171 Keith Laumer, Knight of Delusions
172 Paul O. Williams, The Breaking of Northwall (1981)
173 Paul O. Williams, The Ends of the Circle (1981)
174 Paul O. Williams, The Dome in the Forest (1981)
175 Paul O. Williams, The Fall of the Shell (1982)
176 Paul O. Williams, An Ambush of Shadows (1983)
177 Paul O. Williams, Song of the Axe (1984)
178 Paul O. Williams, The Sword of Forbearance (1985)
179 Walter M. Miller, Jr., Canticle for Leibowitz
180 Michael Crichton, Andromeda Strain
181 George O. Smith, The Fourth “R”
182 John Brunner Sand Dropper
183 Terry Bisson, Bears Discover Fire
184 Terry Bisson, Numbers Don't Lie
185 Terry Bisson, The Hole in the Hole
186 Terry Bisson/Walter M. Miller, Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman
187 Terry Bisson, Greetings and Other Stories
188 Algis Budrys, Rogue Moon
189 Algis Budrys, Michaelmas
190 John Wyndham, Trouble with Lichen
191 John Wyndham, Day of the Triffids
192 Jack Vance, Language of Pao
193 Hal Clement, Ice World
194 Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum
195 Colin Dexter, The Last Remorse
196 John Mortimer, various Rumpoles 1
197 John Mortimer, various Rumpoles 2
198 John Mortimer, various Rumpoles 3
199 John Mortimer, various Rumpoles 4
200 John Mortimer, various Rumpoles 5

Reflections on John Coltrane's 'A Love Supreme'

'God is,
God is all,
God is beautiful'
resonates
tunes the soul.

Such Acknowledgement
Psalm of simple descant
vibrates
trains eyes
to see grace
in the commonplace
turning to God,
A Love Supreme.

With Resolution
Brain fires dendrite
fires muscle
drives pencil
over paper
graphite waves
crash over five-lined sheets
of harmonic litany.

Your exuberance
Pursuance
harmonic peace
repeats
in rough ecstatic elegance
the wish of God for all:
A Love Supreme.

Theme flows
from Chinese gong:
vibrating sax
humming bass
thundering drum
piano antiphon
chaotic syncopation
concatenation:
A Love Supreme.

Words, sounds, speech, men, memory, thoughts--
Yours a means among many
consecrated when you chant on tape:
'A Love Supreme.'

Bass hums, 'A Love Supreme'
Drum thunders, 'A Love Supreme'
Saxophone renders 'A Love Supreme.'



(I was inspired to write this poem after listening to jazz artist John Coltrane's opus, "A Love Supreme,' and reading the poem he wrote (http://tinyurl.com/dk6f8g) as the nexus to this musical piece. The words in italics are his. Themes of Acknowledgement, Resolution, Pursuance and Psalm are the four parts of his brilliant work: A Love Supreme. They are capitalized. I have tried to match the rhythm of my poem to the rhythm of his 4-part suite)
.

Gray Corridor

No land
corridor between lands
primeval egrets denizens
of the still place that
ever silent listens.

Fog stretched thin under gray sky
clings to moist ground
water beads slick on train tracks
which crouch just off the dark road
on which he travels.

Fast-paced the
rumbling yellow cyclops
pierces fog with Morning Star light
slicing the in-between world
whose halves weave together again in haze.

Here he is alive
(in or out of the body)
energy subparticulate
gathers and refreshes by
gray sunlight the dry plants.

Under verdant ponds 

gravity is harnessed
between reeds with thick mud
millions of microscopic springs wound tight
to be released in one moment
if he but knew the one liberating word.

Yet unmoving, unmoved
is the corridor
shadow of a place without location or time
where God enthroned
is encircled by angels not egrets.

--Jeff Henry

Economy

In silence
the word vibrates
in elements -
vertebrae
of blood, bone, stone.
Electric nerve,
primal thought,
recursive force
brought
stellar antiphon.

Frail humans
formed by Word
frame by word:
not merely a procretion.
Story,
essay,
song
conceive
enfleshed kingdoms
locked
in mind and breast,
unlocked
by prayer and coffee.
Our heritage.

From minds
words crawl,
distend,
atrophy.
Vaporous
they gather,
shuffle,
press,
coalesce,
stack,
settle in dust:
journal,
novel,
sermon,
song.

Craft with
sound, noun;
experiment with
grammar.
Undefined, unrefined
casts of life arise
as verbal golems,
homunculi
from clay of imagination.

Still, listen.
Brood silent.
One word an aurora.
One word a vested hope.
Recursive the thought
that is offered with economy.
You speak with tongues of angels,
the poem shimmers with 

the causal word 

that the temple builds.

--Jeff Henry

Symone Weil, Gravity and Grace, continuing Chapters

TO ACCEPT THE VOID
To accept a void in ourselves is supernatural. Where is the energy to be found for an act which has nothing to counter-balance it? The energy has to come from elsewhere. Yet first there must be a tearing out, something desperate has to take place, the void must be created. Void: the dark night. (p. 10)

Admiration, pity (most of all a mixture of the two) being real energy. But this we must do without. (p. 11)

The world must be regarded as containing something of a void in order that it may have need of God. That presupposes evil. (p. 11)

DETACHMENT
Affliction in itself is not enough for the attainment of total detachment. Unconsoled affliction is necessary. There must be no consolation - no apparent consolation. Ineffable consolation then comes down.
To forgive debts. To accept the past without asking for future compensation. To stop time at the present instant. This is also the acceptance of death.
'He emptied himself of his divinity.' To empty ourselves of the world. To take the form of a slave. To reduce ourselves to the point we occupy in space and time - that is to say, nothing.
To strip ourselves of the imaginary royalty of the world. Absolute solitude. Then we possess the truth of the world. (p. 12)

[We have difficulty when we seek consolation, which is actually trying to find a 'quick fix' to our troubles and our struggles.']

Always, beyond the particular object whatever it may be, we have to fix our will on the void - to will the void. For the good which we can neither picture nor define is a void for us. But this void is fuller than all fullnesses.
If we get as far as this we shall come through all right, for God fills the void. It has nothing to do with an intellectual process in the present-day sense. The intelligence has nothing to discover, it has only to clear the ground. It is only good for servile tasks.
The good seems to us as a nothingness, since there is no thingthat is good. But this nothingness is not unreal. Compared with it, everything in existence is unreal. (p. 13)

Love is not consolation, it is light. (p. 13)

Attachment is a manufacturer of illusions and whoever wants reality ought to be detached. (p. 14)

All suffering which does not detach us is wasted suffering. Nothing is more frightful, a desolate coldness, a warped soul (Ovid. Slaves in Plautus). p. 14

[re. this last quote, Weil's comments complements 1 Peter 4.1: 'he who has suffered has ceased from sin.']

IMAGINATION WHICH FILLS THE VOID
The imagination is continually at work filling up all the fissures through which grace might pass.' (p. 16)

In not matter what circumstances, if the imagination is stopped from pouring itself out we have a void (the poor in spirit). (p. 17)

We must continually suspend the work of the imagination filling the void within ourselves.
If we accept no matter what void, what stroke of fate can prevent us from loving the universe?
We have the assurance that, come what may, the universe is full. (p. 17)

RENUNCIATION OF TIME
Time is an image of eternity, but it is also a substitute for eternity. (p. 18)

The miser whose treasure has been taken from him. It is some of the frozen past which he as lost. Past and future, man's only riches. (p. 18)

[The Eucharist is all times]

The future is a filler of void places. Sometimes the past also plays this part ('I used to be,' 'I once did this or that...') . But there are other cases when affliction makes the thought of happiness intolerable; then it robs the sufferer of his past (nessun maggior dolore...).

We want the future to be there without ceasing to be future. This is an absurdity of which eternity alone is the cure. (p. 19)

Time and the cave. To come out of the cave, to be detached, means to cease to make the future our objective. (p. 19)

'Gravity and Grace,' Symone Weil, first few chapters

Excerpts and my occasional notes from Gravity and Grace by Simone Weil, Routledge pub., 1992


GRAVITY AND GRACE

All the natural movements of the soul are controlled by laws analogous to those of physical gravity. Grace is the only exception. (p. 1)

What is the reason that as soon as one human being shows he needs another (no matter whether his need be slight or great) the latter draws back from him? Gravity. (p. 1)

I must not forget that at certain times when my headaches were raging I had an intense longing to make another human being suffer by hitting him in exactly the same part of his forehead....When in this state, I have several times succumbed to the temptation at least to say words which cause pain. Obedience to the force of gravity. The greatest sin. Thus we corrupt the function of language, which is to express the relationship between things. (pp. 1,2)

Creation is composed of the descending movement of gravity, the ascending movement of grace and the descending movement of the second degree of grace. (p. 4)

Grace is the law of the descending movement. (p. 4)

To lower oneself is to rise in the domain of moral gravity. Moral graviy makes us fall towards the heights. (p. 4)

VOID AND COMPENSATION

Human mechanics. Whoever suffers tries to communicate his suffering (either by ill-treating someone or calling forth their pity) in order to reduce it, and he does really reduce it in this way. In the case of a man in the uttermost depths, whom no one pities, who is without power to ill-treat anyone (if he has no child or being who loves him), the suffering remains within and poisons him....This is imperative, like gravity. How can one gain deliverance? How gain deliverance from a force which is like gravity? (p. 5)

It is impossible to forgive whoever has done us harm if that harm has lowered us. We have to think that it has not lowered us, but has revealed our true level. (p. 5)

The wish to see others suffer exactly what we are suffering. It is because of this that, except in periods of social instability, the spite of those in misfortune is directed against their fellows.

That is a factor making for social stability. (p. 5)

To harm a person is to receive something form him. What? What have we gained (and what will have to be repaid) when we have done harm? We have gained in importance. We have expanded. We have filled an emptiness in ourselves by creating one in somebody else.

To be able to hurt others with impunity – for instance to pass our anger on to an inferior who is obliged to be silent – is to spare ourselves from an expenditure of energy, an expenditure which the other person will have to make. It is the same in the case of the unlawful satisfaction of any desire. The energy we economise in this way is immediately debased (p. 6)

To forgive. We cannot do this. When we are harmed by someone, reactions are set up within us. The desire for vengeance is a desire for essential equilibrium. We must seek equilibrium on another plane. We have to go as far as this limit by ourselves. There we reach the void....(p. 6)

A situation which is too hard degrades us through the following process: as a general rule the energy supplied by higher emotions is limited. If the situation requires us to go beyond this limit we have to fall back on lower feelings (fear, covetousness, desire to beat the record, love of outward honours) which are richer in energy.

This limitation is the key to many a retrogression. (p. 7)

Energy, freed by the disappearance of the objects which provide motives, always tends to go downwards.

Base feelings (envy, resentment) are degraded energy. (p. 8)

I also am other than what I imagine myself to be. To know this is forgiveness. (p. 9)


TO ACCEPT THE VOID

To accept a void in ourselves is supernatural. Where is the energy to be found for an act which has nothing to counterbalance it? The energy has to come from elsewhere. Yet first ther must be a tearing out, something desperate has to take place, the void must be created. Void: the dark night. (p. 10)

Admiration, pity (most of all a mixture of the two) bring real energy. But this we must do without.

A time has to be gone through without any reward, natural or supernatural. (p. 11)

The world must be regarded as containing something of a void in order that it may have need of God. That presupposes evil. (p. 11)

To love truth means to endure the void and, as a result, to accept death. Truth is on the side of death. (p. 11)

DETACHMENT

'He [Christ] emptied himself of his divinity.' To empty ourselves of the world. To take the form of a slave. To reduce ourselves to the point we occupy in space and time – that is to say, to nothing.

To strip ourselves of the imaginary royalty of the world. Absolute solitude. Then we possess the truth of the world. (p. 12)

To detach our desire from all good things and to wait. Experience proves that this waiting is satisfied. It is then we touch the absolute good. (p. 13)

Always, beyond the particular object whatever it may be, we have to fix our will on the void – to will the void. For the good which we can neither picture nor define is a void for us. But this void is fuller than all fullnesses.

If we get as far as this we shall come through all right, for God fills the void...(p. 13)

To love God through and across the destruction of Troy and of Carthage – and with no consolation. Love is not consolation, it is light. (p. 13)

Attachment is a manufacturer of illusions and whoever wants reality ought to be detached. (p. 14)

pt. 2, The Christian and Anxiety by Hans Urs von Balthasar

(For some reason the the italics font setting would not go off on the previous post. So, here's the remaining few excerpts)

[R]eceptive indifference becomes the all-decisive criterion:in the form of the courage to say Yes in every instance to every word of God that may affect my life. Of all things, defenselessness and, from the natural human perspective, weakness (and, last but not least, anxiety) now become the essential prerequisites for Christian fortitude. Right where I become serious about baring my heart and my life, the real power (which is not mine but God's) radiates most purely.' (p. 154)

Ever-increasing defenselessness is an ever-increasingly open stance toward God and for God, and hence an ever-increasing influx and indwelling of God's power in man. No one is as unarmed and exposed as the saint is toward God, and therefore no one is as ready to be deluged by every anxiety; yet this is the quintessence of courage and armament--by God....And inasmuch as the Church represents God to him--concretely in her office and in her love for these men--his openness to God becomes in him an openness to the Church; it becomes ecclesial obedience. That is the decisive test of whether his courage is Christian, for 'the Mameluke, too, shows courage.' (p. 153)

Christ's 'flock' is never at any time Nietzche's "herd"; being in the Church is based on choice and decision...And God never denies his attributes in those who are his light in the world. They shine like the stars in the cosmos, 'innocent...[and] without blemish in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation' (Phil 2.15), and even their anxiety, if God allows it, bears the marks of their divine destiny.

Excerpts and a few notes from The Christian and Anxiety by Hans Urs von Balthasar, Ignatius Press, 1989

(What follows are either excerpts or notes I marked in the book. They are not reflective of the entire scope of this great book by Balthasar.)

II. The Christian and Anxiety

It cannot be denied that something like vertigo can come over a man, even a believer, in this transitional state between fear and hope; after all, it is a routine fact. But Christianity cannot be blamed for this loss of footing; it has to be laid at the door of the man who does not want to take Christianity seriously. Christianity offers man, not a bottomless pit, but solid ground--grounding in God, of course, and not in self. To place oneself on this solid ground involves relinquishing one's own ground. The sinner wants to stand on his own, not on God. And whoever tries to stand both on God and on his own is sure to fall into the bottomless space in between. The realization, or even just the experience, that one is standing in this bottomless pit presupposes that tone has stopped walking--walking on God's ground or making the passage from one's own ground to Gods. Living, efficacious faith means to walk, to be under way. Everyone who walks has ground under his feet. Faith, love, hope, unceasingly offered to man, are the ground that is constantly being pushed off under his feet. Sin refuses this ground in order to take a stand on one's own; yet even between sin and the repentant return to God, speaking now as a Christian, a momentary loss of footing does not necessarily intervene. Whoever believes, whoever reaches out for faith, takes a real step, and while he steps he cannot simultaneously philosophize about the possibility of stepping, cannot reflect introspectively upon the passage from himself to God and have it in his grasp. In the first place, that would be a contradiction, and the outcome of such reflections could be nothing other than contradictory, merely verbal dialectic. From a Christian perspective, once there is a possibility of passing over to God (and God makes this possible by grace), the job of mastering this passage, still from a Christian point of view, is no longer in man's hands. When a man is really walking, God has already provided for the possibility of walking and solved the problem of continuity, and so all the paradoxes of the mind, about Achilles and the tortoise, are passe'. The uneasy conscience that many Christians have, and the anxiety based on it, do not come about because they are sinners and backsliders but because they have stopped believing in the truth and efficacy of their beliefs; they measure the power of faith by their own weakness, they project God's world into their own psychological makeup instead of letting God measure them. They do something that Christians are forbidden to alll: they observe faith from the outside; they doubt the power of hope; they deprive themselves of the power of love; and they lie down to rest in the chasm between the demands of Christianity and their own failure, in a chasm that, for a Christian, is no place at all. Is it any wonder that anxiety seizes them on account of this placelessness? (pp. 100, 101)

III. The Essence of Anxiety

Indifference means letting go of the sheltering, supporting difference: stepping out without guardrails. Climbing over the gunwale and stepping out on to the water. Transcending, while trusting solely in what lies beyond, from which the power and possibility of transcending come. The attitude in which the act of transcendence takes place is not this power; if that were the case, the power would be finite and differentiated, and by clinging to this attitude, by summoning forth this attitude, by reflecting on this attitude, everything could be bent back out of genuine transcendence into false, philosophical transcendence, into "philosophical faith". The attitude is nothing in the absence of that which makes this attitude possible: God present in Christ. In reflecting on his belief ("How can I be doing this?"), Peter is already back in unbelief and sinks, and within transcendence is uncovered what had been swallowed up and drowned while transcendence was advancing step by step: anxiety. One cannot simultaneously go and cling to the letting go. Faith, love, hope must always be a leap for the finite creature, because only in that way does it correspond to the worth of the infinite God. It must always mean taking a risk, because God is worth staking everything on, and the real gain lies, not in a "reward" for the daring leap, but in the leap itself, which is a gift of God and thus a share in his infinitude. In the daring leap, something of the limitless self-giving of the Divine Persons to each other becomes visible in a flash--at the point where all ground, which is limitation, is relinquished and where man can actually sense that being in the Absolute means--hovering. Lifted up in the arms of grace, carried on the wings of love, he feels a tremor, which, in and of itself, bestows on him precisely the security needed to stand no longer on his own or on the earth but to be able to fly by a new power. (pp. 144, 145)
----------

In standing outside of eternity and entering into time, the Son of Man has known anxiety and therein, as in everything he was, did, and suffered, he has translated something incomprehensible and divine into human language (that is, after all, what revelation is): God's fear and trembling for the world, for his creation, which is on the verge of being lost, Anyone who tried to object that such a thing cannot be reconciled with God's eternal happiness would have a rather narrow concept of God. (p. 146)
----------
In standing outside of everything as to place himself unconditionally at the disposal of God's totality, the believer hands over to God, along with everything else, his emotional disposition as well: faith that loves and hopes is ultimately indifferent even to anxiety and nonanxiety. In and of himself he can presume nothing, hence he must await even this form God. It is God who, as absolute Transcendence, has the creature's anxiety and sense of security at his disposal. If faith is really indifferent, than any anxiety that is placed within it, as well as the complete dispelling of anxiety in a shower of consolation and sensible certainty, can only be a gift granted by God himself. Whatever reasons a man, as a natural-fallen creature or as a Christian (in his detachment from the world and in his solidarity with all others, yet to be redeemed) might have for being anxious are surpassed by another reason:loving and hoping faith, which, as such, is indifference to God. For faith says Yes to every truth of God, seen or unseen (affirming the latter even more); it says Yes to the truths that console and to those that do not, to the truths of divine joy as well as to those of the divine Passion, and waits for God to dispose and differentiate....[O]nly he who has left the anxiety [i.e., fear of God's judgment] of sin behind attains the fullness of faith and thus true indifference, and the entry into the realm of complete is unconditional joy, consolation, overwhelming light. When God bestows Christian suffering, including Christian anxiety, it is, viewed from his perspective, fundamentally an intensification of light and of joy, a "darkness bright as day:, because it is suffering out of joy, anxiety out of exultation: it is a sign of God's ever-greater confidence in the one who believes. (pp. 147, 148)
----------
The actualization of supernatural indifference by God, however, possesses two aspects, just like natural indifference: abstraction (all the way to pure Being) and conversion (to the appearing image, to the phantasma), or, to put it in Christian terms, _detachment from everything (all the way to God) and turning back with a mission to the world)_....Christian detachment must precede Christian mission (logically, psychologically, and temporally), if the resulting mission is to be Christian at all and not merely worldly-religious. (p. 148)

[this detachment does not see God as a means to an end, even when the end is beneficial, e.g., strong families, security, close friends, etc.)
----------
Accordingly, there is Christian anxiety before the mission -- at the point where the soul is being cleaned out -- and, if need be, again while the mission is being carried out (if having anxiety belongs to the mission), but not in the act itself of being sent: here clarity, certainty, and agreement necessarily and unconditionally rule. (p. 149)

[this idea of the soul being cleaned out is common in contemplative teaching such as William of St. Thierry's The Golden Epistle.]
----------
Now God has not only offered man the invisible help of grace to make this leap [of faith], but also, by becoming a visible man and founding he visible Church, he has made accessible to man an abundance of visible helps as found in the organs and functions of the Church: ecclesial office and the men who exercise it; Sacred Scripture as a tangible word; the sacraments as definite forms and vessels of the salvific encounter between man and God; tradition, which enables the believer to align himself with the past; the example of the saints and of all fellow Christians who have a living faith; the firmly established order of the Church year, which takes the believer in and leads him gently from mystery to mystery. These are but so many supports and handrails with which to teach and train him for that one leap away from all handrails. [p. 150]

[the above excerpt is reminiscent of Ephesians 4.7, 11-16:

But to each one of us grace was given according to the measure of Christ’s gift. ⁸ Therefore He says:
“ When He ascended on high,
He led captivity captive,
And gave gifts to men.”

And He Himself gave some to be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, and some pastors and teachers, for the equipping of the saints for the work of ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ, till we all come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to a perfect man, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ; that we should no longer be children, tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the trickery of men, in the cunning craftiness of deceitful plotting, but, speaking the truth in love, may grow up in all things into Him who is the head—Christ— from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by what every joint supplies, according to the effective working by which every part does its share, causes growth of the body for the edifying of itself in love.]

Excerpts and a few notes from The Christian Philosophy of St. Thomas by Etienne Gilson, University of Notre Dame Press, 1956

Chapter VI , The Universe of St. Thomas
These philosophers observed that every corporeal being is formed from two elements, matter and form. Like their predecessors, neither Plato nor Aristotle questioned the origin of matter. So far as they were concerned, it was without cause. As for the forms of things, however, they assigned them an origin. According to Plato, substantial forms came from the Ideas. According to Aristotle, Ideas were not enough to explain the generation of new substances continually observed in experience. (p. 130)

After Plato and Aristotle, then, there remained a last possible advance: to assign the ultimate cause of the total being, of its matter, its form, its accidents. In other words, it is not enough to show why it is this being and why it is such and such a being, but it must also be shown why it is “being.” When we ask why beings exist as such, matter and form and accidents included, there is but one possible answer—God's creative act. When it has arrived at this point, the human reason has exhausted the question to its limit and the problem of the basic root of being is resolved.

This text alone would justify our concluding that in St. Thomas's eyes, Aristotle's doctrine did not completely solve the problem of being. If we only think what an infinite distance lies between a God who is a creator and one who is not a creator, we can conclude that St. Thomas saw his God as very different from Aritsotle's. St. Thomas pointed out this weakness of Aristotelianism as one of the capital errors opposed to the articles of the Christian faith. (p. 131)

To be sure of ourselves, we should have to know to what extent St. Thomas was aware that he was an innovator in disengaging the existential character of being far better than his predecessors had done. We should have to know how conscious he was that he was an innovator in relation to men like St. Augustine and Dionysius the Areopagite whose authority in the Church was so enormous. But we do not know all this. Let us be content, then, at our own risk, to point out a number of differences in doctrine in which St. Thomas himself undoubtedly saw but different formulations of one and the same truth. (p. 132)

Setting out form this principle, Augustine seems to have met no grave difficulty in resolving the problem of the divine names. Whatever unity, order, intelligibility and beauty is to be found in nature provided him with a basis for as many attributes of God. To do this, he had only to carry each positive good to its highest perfection and to attribute it to God under this form, adding that what we learn as a host of distinct attributes are, in God, identical with His being. “God is what He possesses” is St. Augustine's oft-repeated formula, whose implications he worked out on the level of essentia as St. Thomas was to do on the level of the act-of-being. The serious difficulties ahead of him lay somewhere else, namely, at the point where, in seeking to define the relation between beings and Being, he was to come to grips with the problem of creation. (p. 132)

[Augustine's view of understanding God: essentia; Aquinas' view of understanding God: act-of-being]
----------
St. Augustine knows very well that God exists and that the creative act has made the world exist. But just as he can only understand the existence of God conceived as the divine being [essence], so also does he confuse the existence of things [Aq.] with their being [Aug.]. Creation, then, becomes the act in virtue of which “He who is [existence] what He is” makes things be what they are [essence]. (p. 133)
One can speak only about one thing at a time. To be perfectly fair here one would have to say both that St. Augustine knows very well the meaning of creation, that is, of the production of being; and that his Platonism of being leaves him helpless to affirm clearly the act-of-being. So it is, as one of his best interpreters has observed, that all his explanations of creation tend naturally toward the level of participation....In a[n Augustinian] doctrine in which being and immutable being are one and the same thing, creation consists in producing essences, which can only be called beings because their relative stability imitates the perfect immobility of Him Who is. (p. 133)

Thus, however envisaged, the natural theology of St. Augustine seems to be dominated by the Platonic ontology of essence. Puzzled by the mystery of the divine name, he found himself similarly embarrassed when it came to explaining the being of things.... (p. 134)

----------

Whenever St. Augustine finds himself face to face with being, he speaks like one haunted by the restlessness that springs from believing more about it. He is ever turning toward the divine native impulse: “The angel—and in the angel the Lord—said to Moses who was asking his name: 'I am who am. Thou shalt say to the children of Israel: He Who Is hath sent me to you.' The word 'being' means 'to be immutable'....All changing things cease being what they were and begin being save what does not change. He has being, to Whom it has been said: Thou wilt change things and they will be changed, but Thou, thou remainest the same (Psalm CI, 27-28). What is meant by 'I am who am,' if not 'I am eternal'? What is meant by 'I am who am' unless 'I cannot change'?”

By strange paradox, the philosopher who most completely identified God with the transcendent immutability of Essence was the Christian most aware of the immanence of divine efficacy in nature, in the universal history of humanity, in the personal history of the individual conscience. When he speaks of these things as a theologian, St. Augustine seems infallible. Here he is without rival in the history of Christian thought. He has only disciples. His greatness is not the philosopher's but the theologian's whose philosophy lags behind his theology without retarding its progress. (p. 134) [Augustine: philosophy-transcendence; theology-immanence]
But it is better to insist upon the Augustinian immanence of God in the history of the world and of souls because nowhere is the philosophical inadequacy of Christian Platonism more evident. Augustine's entire religion, as it appears in The City of God, is based on a history dominated by the memory of two major events, Creation and Redemption, and upon the expectation of a third, the Last Judgment. In order to make a philosophy of history out of this theology of history Augustine drew but lightly upon his ontology of the Immutable. Instead of having to explain the detail of existences by a supreme Existing Being, he had to explain what is always other through what remains immutably the same. In brief, he could not explain philosophically the relation between history and God save in terms of the opposition between time and Eternity. It is conceivable that time is in eternity, but how is it conceivable, inversely, that Eternity may be in time? Yet it must be, at least if God's presence in history is to be assured. We willingly accord St. Augustine the full measure of success possible here, but we have also to recognize that to justify Christianity as history by means of an ontology in which becoming hardly deserves to be called being was a very difficult undertaking. (p. 135)

Augustine was far better equipped to establish God's transcendence than to justify His immanence in the soul...So it is that all his proofs for the existence of God, which are but so many impassioned searches for the divine presence, always bring Augustine to place God less within the soul than beyond it. Each proof tends to terminate in mystical experience, where the soul finds God only by escaping from its own becoming and rooting itself for the moment in the stability of the Immutable. These short experiences only serve to anticipate in time, by suspending its limitations, the final vicissitude of universal history in which the entire order of becoming will be transformed into the stable peace of eternity. (p. 135)

Augustine knows better than anyone that everything, even becoming, is the work of the Immutable. But it is precisely tat this point that he finds the mystery most obscure. No doubt no one could have cleared it up. But, at least, it was possible to show what latent intelligibility lay locked in the mystery. This was only possible by reducing the antimony of time and Eternity to the analogy of being to Being, that is, by moving from God as Eternity to God as Act-of-Being. “Eternity, it is the very substance of God”: these words of Augustine clearly mark the ultimate limits of his ontology. They explain who his thought had conceived as an antinomy of Eternity and Mutability the relation of man to God which, his experience assured him, resembled the intimacy of a mutual presence. “God is his own act-of-being”: these words of St. Thomas mark clearly the decisive progress attained by his ontology; they explain also the ease with which his thought could bind time to eternity, creature to Creator. For “He Who Is” signifies God's eternal present, and the cause of their being and of their duration: Being is innermost in each thing, and most fundamentally present within all things....Hence it must be that God is in all things, and innermostly.” (ST.I, 8, I) (pp. 135-136).

-------------------

....As we have said, Augustine's philosophy lagged behind his theology, but his theology itself was perfectly sound. Hence St. Thomas could take it as it stood, find therein exactly the same truth, but penetrate it more deeply than Augustine had done.... (p. 136)

[In reference to Dionysius or Denis:] To speak a propos of God, is not to speak of Him but of His effect. Being, of course, always bears the mark of the One, which is its cause. It is even because it is the effect of the One that being only is insofar as it is one. The imperfect, unstable and always divisible unity of beings is nevertheless in them like the causal energy by which they are. Let the transcendent One cease to penetrate a being with its light and it ceases at once to exist. It is in this profound sense that God can be called the being of everything that is: own totius esse. Yet God only appears under the aspect of being as the cause which makes things to be. To be exact, being is but the revealing or manifestation of the One; in a word, its "theophany." As to the One, it remains ante own: it is not entangled in the order of its participations. (p. 138)

----------

For Denis, God was a superesse, because He was 'not yet' the esse which He only becomes in His highest processions. For St. Thomas, God is the superesse because He is superlatively being; the Esse pure and simple, taken in its infinity and perfection. Touched by a magic wand, the doctrine of Denis issues forth transformed. St. Thomas has preserved it in its entirety, but nothing retains its former meaning. God's esse, it is true, still remains unknowable, so far as concerns us. But what no longer is the case is that our knowledge of things is a knowledge of something which God is not. We can now say of everything that is that God is it too. Indeed, we can say that He is it pre-eminently; that its being belongs to Him before it belongs to His creature. It is God's manner of being which completely escapes us. When all the necessary eliminations have been made, this at least remains, that each human concept of each being and of each mode of being authorizes us to conclude: Since that of which I have a concept, is, God is it. In such a doctrine, the invisibilia Dei continue to transcend our knowledge; but they transcend it in being's own line, since all God's attributes, known from created being, only become invisible to us when identified with the perfect simplicity of Esse.

In achieving this decisive progress, St. Thomas finally resolved the fundamental problem of the origin of finite being. From the very beginning, Greek thought had found itself at grips with this difficulty: how to place in the same explanation of the real the gods of religion and the principles of philosophy. In order to understand what things are, there must be principles, but to understand that things are, there must be cause. The Greek gods precisely were such causes....All Plato's myths are existential as all his dialectic is essential....

It is quite different in a natural theology like that of St. Thomas. His God is Esse. Now the act of being is like ther very stuff from which things are made. The real, therefore, is only intelligible by the light of the supreme Act-of-Being, which is God....

Such, indeed, is St. Thomas's God--not only the principle but the creator, not only the Good, but the Father. His providence extends to the least detail of being because His providence is only His causality. To cause an effect is but to propose to Himself its achievement. Moreover, it must be said of everything that is and acts that it depends immediately upon God in both its being and operations.

What God is in His eternal self, He remains as cause of events....But in Him creation and redemption are but His action which, like His power, is one with His act-of-being....I Am is the only God of whom it can be said that He is God of philosophers and scholars, and God, too, of Abraham and of Isaac and of Jacob. (pp. 141-143)

Pope Leo the Great - from a letter

The mystery of man's reconciliation with God

Lowliness is assured by majesty, weakness by power, mortality by eternity. To pay the debt of our sinful state, a nature that was incapable of suffering was joined to one that could suffer. Thus, in keeping with the healing that we needed, one and the same mediator between God and men, the man Jesus Christ, was able to die in one nature, and unable to die in the other. He who is true God was therefore born in the complete and perfect nature of a true man, whole in his own nature, whole in ours. By our nature we mean what the Creator had fashioned in us from the beginning, and took to himself in order to restore it. For in the Saviour there was no trace of what the deceiver introduced and man, being misled, allowed to enter. It does not follow that because he submitted to sharing in our human weakness he therefore shared in our sins. He took the nature of a servant without stain of sin, enlarging our humanity without diminishing his divinity. He emptied himself; though invisible he made himself visible, though Creator and Lord of all things he chose to be one of us mortal men. Yet this was the condescension of compassion, not the loss of omnipotence. So he who in the nature of God had created man, became in the nature of a servant, man himself. Thus the Son of God enters this lowly world. He comes down from the throne of heaven, yet does not separate himself from the Father’s glory. He is born in a new condition, by a new birth. He was born in a new condition, for, invisible in his own nature, he became visible in ours. Beyond our grasp, he chose to come within our grasp. Existing before time began, he began to exist at a moment in time. Lord of the universe, he hid his infinite glory and took the nature of a servant. Incapable of suffering as God, he did not refuse to be a man, capable of suffering. Immortal, he chose to be subject to the laws of death. He who is true God is also true man. There is no falsehood in this unity as long as the lowliness of man and the pre-eminence of God coexist in mutual relationship. As God does not change by his condescension, so man is not swallowed up by being exalted. Each nature exercises its own activity, in communion with the other. The Word does what is proper to the Word, the flesh fulfils what is proper to the flesh. One nature is resplendent with miracles, the other falls victim to injuries. As the Word does not lose equality with the Father’s glory, so the flesh does not leave behind the nature of our race. One and the same person – this must be said over and over again – is truly the Son of God and truly the son of man. He is God in virtue of the fact that in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He is man in virtue of the fact that the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us. from Universalis.com

Pope Leo the Great - sermon on love

In John’s gospel the Lord says: By this love you have for one another, everyone will know you are my disciples. In a letter by John we read: My dear people, let us love one another since love comes from God and everyone who loves is begotten by God and knows God. Anyone who fails to love can never have known God, because God is love. So the faithful should look into themselves and carefully examine their minds and the impulses of their hearts. If they find some of the fruits of love stored in their hearts then they must not doubt God’s presence within them, but to make themselves more and more able to receive so great a guest they should do more and more works of durable mercy and kindness. After all, if God is love, charity should know no limit, for God himself cannot be confined within limits. What is the appropriate time for performing works of charity? My beloved children, any time is the right time, but these days of Lent provide a special encouragement. Those who want to be present at the Lord’s Passover in holiness of mind and body should seek above all to win this grace. Charity contains all other virtues and covers a multitude of sins. As we prepare to celebrate that greatest of all mysteries, by which the blood of Jesus Christ destroyed our sins, let us first of all make ready the sacrificial offerings — that is, our works of mercy. What God in his goodness has already given to us, let us give it to those who have sinned against us. And to the poor also, and to those who are afflicted in various ways, let us show a more open-handed generosity so that God may be thanked through many voices and the needy may be fed as a result of our fasting. No act of devotion on the part of the faithful gives God more pleasure than the support that is lavished on his poor. Where God finds charity with its loving concern, there he recognises the reflection of his own fatherly care. Do not be put off giving by a lack of resources. A generous spirit is itself great wealth, and there can be no shortage of material for generosity where it is Christ who feeds and Christ who is fed. His hand is present in all this activity: his hand, which multiplies the bread by breaking it and increases it by giving it away. When you give alms, do not be anxious but full of happiness. The greatest treasure will go to the one who has kept the least for himself. The holy apostle Paul tells us: He who provides seed for the sower will give bread for food, provide you with more seed, and increase the harvest of your goodness, in Christ Jesus our Lord, who lives and reigns with the Father and the Holy Spirit for ever and ever. Amen.

Ambrose on John 9.1-41

The blind man went off and washed himself and came away with his sight restored.

You have heard that story in the gospel where we are told that the Lord Jesus, as he was passing by, caught sight of a man who had been blind from birth.

Since the Lord did not overlook him, neither ought we to overlook this story of a man whom the Lord considered worthy of his attention. In particular we should notice the fact that he had been blind from birth. This is an important point.

There is, indeed, a kind of blindness, usually brought on by serious illness, which obscures one’s vision, but which can be cured, given time; and there is another sort of blindness, caused by cataract, that can be remedied by a surgeon: he can remove the cause and so the blindness is dispelled. Draw your own conclusion: this man, who was actually born blind, was not cured by surgical skill, but by the power of God.

When nature is defective the Creator, who is the author of nature, has the power to restore it. This is why Jesus also said. As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world, meaning: all who are blind are able to see, so long as I am the light they are looking for. Come, then, and receive the light, so that you may be able to see.

What is he trying to tell us, he who brought human beings back to life, who restored them to health by a word of command, who said to a corpse. Come out! and Lazarus came out from the tomb; who said to a paralytic. Arise and pick up your stretcher, and the sick man rose and picked up the very bed on which he used to be carried as a helpless cripple?

Again, I ask you, what is he trying to convey to us by spitting on the ground, mixing his spittle with clay and putting it on the eyes of a blind man, saying: Go and wash yourself in the pool of Siloam (a name that means “sent”)? What is the meaning of the Lord’s action in this? Surely one of great significance, since the person whom Jesus touches receives more than just his sight.

In one instant we see both the power of his divinity and the strength of his holiness. As the divine light, he touched this man and enlightened him; as priest, by an action symbolizing baptism he wrought in him his work of redemption.

The only reason for his mixing clay with the spittle and smearing it on the eyes of the blind man was to remind you that he who restored the man to health by anointing his eyes with clay is the very one who fashioned the first man out of clay, and that this clay that is our flesh can receive the light of eternal life through the sacrament of baptism.

You, too, should come to Siloam, that is, to him who was sent by the Father (as he says in the gospel. My teaching is not my own, it comes from him who sent me). Let Christ wash you and you will then see.

Come and be baptized, it is time; come quickly, and you too will be able to say, I went and washed; you will be able to say, I was blind, and now I can see, and as the blind man said when his eyes began to receive the light. The night is almost over and the day is at hand.

(Letter 80, 1-5: PL 16, 1326-1327)

Ambrose (339-397) was born in Trier, the son of a praetorian prefect of Gaul. On the death of Auxentius, the Arian bishop of Milan, Ambrose, while still a catechumen, was elected to the see by acclamation.

We know from Saint Augustine that as bishop he was accessible to everyone. Although Ambrose was influenced by the Greek Fathers, especially Origen, his preaching had the practical bent characteristic of Western theological writers.

Excerpts from 'Bernanos: An Ecclesiastical Existence,' by Hans Urs von Balthasar, Ignatius Press, 1996

'For, to tell the truth, man is indeed the being who walks between two abysses, and he is delivered from hell through Christ's abandonment by God, and God's grace has assumed this frightful, hard-as-steel, graceless form, and God has really given his Church and her sacraments and his chosen saints a participation in his battle with hell. None of these things should be forgotten or made to lose its bite. (p. 50)'

'"We must either get to the point where we feel we are right or we must resign ourselves to having eternal discussions with ourselves, as the poor damned souls in hell must have with the greatest logician of them all, whose name is the devil. Every comprehensive judgment is a risk, a wager. But the superstition, or rather the idolatry called Technology, closes our eyes to the divinatory character of Reason, which must either make a choice at the right moment or resign itself to a perpetual condition of doing without.' (quote from Bernanos, p. 93)."'

'"By what right...would you so insist on knowing what you are? This has no importance whatever. Do I, for one, know what I am? There are no duties to be fulfilled, sorrows to be suffered, injustices to embrace. Above all, there are illusions to be lost....A desire for self-knowledge, I swear to you, is the itch of imbeciles. Your sweet genius consists in being what you are without knowing it and without thinking about it, with that exquisite naturalness I so love and which is a grace of God. Yes, God's sweet mercy is within you. Don't ask her to explain herself , to justify herself. Don't bore her with endless chatter and discussions. Close the window, close the door, don't let anyone in. Allow his mercy to smile and pray within you. And when she weeps, say nothing." (quote from Bernanos, pp. 159, 160).'

'What remained unheard of, unimaginable, until the coming of Jesus is that God should have wanted to be poor along with his creatures, that in his heaven he should have wanted to suffer because of his world and did in fact make that suffering a reality, that through his Incarnation he put himself in a position of demonstrating to his creatures this his suffering out of love. And, if the suffering of man points only to that of the Son of Man behind him, then the Son through his suffering points to the wounded Heart of the Father. This is the final goal aimed at through all of Bernanos' work. (p. 191)'

'"If only he could become a saint, what bishop would not give up his ring, miter, and crozier? What cardinal would not give up his purple? What pope would not give up his white robe, his chamberlains, his Swiss guards, and all his temporal power? Who would not desire to have the strength to dare this admirable adventure? For sanctity is an adventure, we might even say the only adventure. Once you have understood this, you have reached the very heart of Catholic faith, you have felt the thrill in your mortal flesh of a terror different from that of death--the terror of a superhuman hope. Our Church is the Church of the saints.But who worries about the saints? We would like them to be venerable old men full of experience and politics, but in fact most of them are children. And children stand alone against all others. The clever shrug their shoulders and smile, saying: "What saint owed much to the churchmen?" Ha! Why bring in the churchmen? Why should this or that person, who is sure that the Kingdom of Heaven can be acquired like a seat in the French Academy or by cultivating connections with everybody--have access to the most heroic of men? God did not create the Church so that the saints would prosper but for the Church to transmit their memory, lest a whole torrent of honor and poetry should be lost along with the divine miracle....Into whose care would you put this flock of angels? History would, all by itself, have shattered them with its summary method and its narrow and harsh realism. But our Catholic tradition bears them along, without wounding them , in its universal rhythm....Do we really wish that all of these would have been placed, during their lifetime, in golden shrines and decked out with bombastic epithets, then to be lauded with genuflections and incense? Such niceties are only good for cathedrals canons! The saints lived and suffered like us. They were tempted like us. They carried their full load, and more than one of them, without letting go of this burden, lay down under it to die there....All of the Church's tremendous superstructure--her wisdom, force, supple discipline, magnificence, majesty--is nothing of itself unless charity animates it....We have great respect for administrative officers, the military police, surgeon-majors and cartographers, but our heart is with the men of the vanguard, our heart is with those who get themselves killed" (quote from Bernanos, pp. 261, 261).'

'"The Lord always did live and still continues to live among us like a poor man, and the moment always arrives when he decides to make us poor like himself. He does this that he might be welcomed and honored by the poor, in the manner of the poor, and that he might thus again enjoy what he had experienced so frequently back then, on the roads of Galilee: the hospitality of the destitute, their simple welcome" (quote from Bernanos, p. 263).'

'Holy is the person to whom a mysterious grace gives the force to pass beyond the boundaries of mediocrity (and, hence, beyond every mean and average) to enter a unique destiny that becomes the norm by which to measure mediocrity. This crossing of boundaries occurs by virtue of a call from God and thus is an act of obedience. At this level, the way leads into a wholly untrodden and pathless territory, all the more so as this way is, to the end, a following of the suffering Christ, whose abandonment by God and descent into the hour and place of darkness was a sheer treading in the pathless, or better, a being trodden and being dragged through the pathless. the more this way adheres to Christ, the more sightless it becomes.

'Such transcending, however, cannot lead outside the Church but only deeper into her. Thus, obedience to God can only be ever-deeper ecclesial obedience. It may indeed be that, when the average Christian obeys the Church, he does so in an average manner: that is, he adheres to her when she explicitly demands something of him, and for all the rest he lives his life and makes his decisions according to his own feelings and with a free responsibility all his own. Things stand very differently with the saint. His act of crossing over into "the sightless and pathless" largely robs him of this supposed average freedom in order to give him a different and higher freedom in God. The saint, then, by contrast to the average Christian, will cling to the injunctions and instructions of ecclesial authority, which for him becomes most concrete in his father confessor and his spiritual director. It belongs to the essence of this obedience that the one giving injunctions cannot himself accompany the one obeying on his way. It remains an absolutely solitary way shrouded in unseeing night.' [p. 267]

The mystic is the Christian who is given to experience subjectively something of the mystery of that sphere by whose life and truth every believer objectively lives his Christian life. This means, therefore, that every believer has fundamentally and objectively died both to the world and to his self and that he is given to live by virtue of a superworldly grace into whose sphere he has been transferred: henceforth, he lives on the basis of a "mystery" whose essence transcends all his natural capabilities and limitations, a "mystery" into which he must lose himself in total trust. The mystic has only one privilege: somehow to "see" what the ordinary Christian can "only" believe. This "seeing" of the reality of God-become-man, and for Bernanos it became (mysterium, sacramentum)the central criterion insofar as he, as a writer, had to be intent on rendering truth--even supernatural truth--perceivable by the senses. It was neither curiosity nor a kind of churchly aristocratism that urged him to explore the mystical domain but rather the strictest requirements of a "Catholic aesthetics". [p. 283]

'For modern man, who suffers from such nervous exhaustion, evil is not a revolt but an escape, a way for man to to rest by "distracting" himself (from distrahere: "to disperse" or 'squander"), a way for him to get out of himself and into the open, a method, alss, for man to strip himself of his person, just as a snake sheds its skin.' [quote from Bernanos, p. 407]

It is equally clear that this same Christ is also the Master of all who revolt against him and that no one has the competence or the possibility to know in advance what the final verdict of the Crucified over his executioners will be, that is, to affirm how far the grace of redemption will extend. [p. 454]

The retreat of the spiritual into self-sufficiency and self-satisfaction is a phenomenon that necessarily corresponds to the secularization of society. One consequence of such a retreat is that the spiritual itself becomes more and more worldly within its own realm: it is as if the spirit itself were becoming materialized out of the inability to perform its task of being the form of the matter of the world. The end result is that the alleged domain of the "spiritual" itself becomes politicized, and a whole 'casuistry' must be elaborated to justify this transformation. [p. 552]

Christendom can be produced only from the fullness of the Gospel and not from the clever mixture of equal parts God's Word and the demands of the times. [p. 587]

'The meek shall inherit the earth simply because only they will not have lost the habit of hoping in a world full of people in despair.' [quote from Bernanos, p. 605]

From 'Flight from the World' by Saint Ambrose

Hold fast to God, the one true good
Where a man’s heart is, there is his treasure also. God is not accustomed to refusing a good gift to those who ask for one. Since he is good, and especially to those who are faithful to him, let us hold fast to him with all our soul, our heart, our strength, and so enjoy his light and see his glory and possess the grace of supernatural joy. Let us reach out with our hearts to possess that good, let us exist in it and live in it, let us hold fast to it, that good which is beyond all we can know or see and is marked by perpetual peace and tranquillity, a peace which is beyond all we can know or understand. This is the good that permeates creation. In it we all live, on it we all depend. It has nothing above it; it is divine. No one is good but God alone. What is good is therefore divine, what is divine is therefore good. Scripture says: When you open your hand all things will be filled with goodness. It is through God’s goodness that all that is truly good is given us, and in it there is no admixture of evil. These good things are promised by Scripture to those who are faithful: The good things of the land will be your food. We have died with Christ. We carry about in our bodies the sign of his death, so that the living Christ may also be revealed in us. The life we live is not now our ordinary life but the life of Christ: a life of sinlessness, of chastity, of simplicity and every other virtue. We have risen with Christ. Let us live in Christ, let us ascend in Christ, so that the serpent may not have the power here below to wound us in the heel. Let us take refuge from this world. You can do this in spirit, even if you are kept here in the body. You can at the same time be here and present to the Lord. Your soul must hold fast to him, you must follow after him in your thoughts, you must tread his ways by faith, not in outward show. You must take refuge in him. He is your refuge and your strength. David addresses him in these words: I fled to you for refuge, and I was not disappointed. Since God is our refuge, God who is in heaven and above the heavens, we must take refuge from this world in that place where there is peace, where there is rest from toil, where we can celebrate the great sabbath, as Moses said: The sabbaths of the land will provide you with food. To rest in the Lord and to see his joy is like a banquet, and full of gladness and tranquillity. Let us take refuge like deer beside the fountain of waters. Let our soul thirst, as David thirsted, for the fountain. What is that fountain? Listen to David: With you is the fountain of life. Let my soul say to this fountain: When shall I come and see you face to face? For the fountain is God himself.