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Nov
10
Humanity needs eternity; every other hope is too short for it. And it is not true that eternity robs humanity of time, impoverishes it, and makes it unimportant. On the contrary, only eternity can give man time. If a person’s death is worthless, then his life is worthless too. If man is ultimately jettisoned in death, if he becomes as so much refuse, then he is, even beforehand, one of the things that humanity can jettison and can treat as such. But if man never becomes refuse, if his value is called eternity, then this value is always his and marks his whole life.
A psychologist pointed out recently that the embezzled heaven is the crucial sickness of earth: because people forget heaven, the earth becomes empty and men become ill. If we promise paradise to later generations but only nothingness, only death, to each individual, then we have promised nothing to anyone. It comes down to this: a future that is just future and not also present has nothing to offer humanity: every day is too long to wait for it. A present that is only present and has no future has no hope. The nothingness that follows it also pollutes the present and makes it unbearable.
Only eternity can unite present and future. It always transcends the moment, is always more than we presently have, but it is not limited just to the future, it always extends even now into all our days. Those who have talked us out of our belief in heaven, or would like to talk to us out of it, have not given us the earth in exchange but have made it desolate and empty, have covered it with darkness. We must find once more the courage to believe in eternal life with all our heart. Then we shall also have the courage to love the earth and to work at building its future. Let us dare to believe once more in eternal life, to live for eternal life. We shall see how life automatically becomes richer, greater, more free and less cramped.
From: Ordinariatskorrespondenz, January 4, 1979
Nov
5
Christian Tradition uses the word “heaven”, a word linked to the natural symbolic context of “above” or “high”, to designate the definitive fulfillment of human existence through the fulfillment of love, toward which faith is oriented. For the Christian, such fulfillment is not just some music of the future but the genuine description of what happens in the encounter with Christ and is already essentially present in its fundamental components.
To speak about “heaven”, therefore, does not mean to lapse into rapturous fantasy but rather to learn to know more deeply that hidden presence that lets us truly live and that we continually allow to be masked and withdrawn from us by whatever is in the foreground of our awareness. Heaven, consequently, is above all christological. It is not an extra-historical place “into which” we go. The very existence of “heaven” depends on the fact that Jesus Christ, as God, is man and has given human existence a place in the existence of God himself (cf.Rahner, Schrifften II, p.221).
One is in heaven when and to the degree that one is in Christ, where one finds the true location of one’s existence as a human being in the existence of God himself. Heaven is, then, primarily a personal reality. It remains forever stamped by its historical origin in the Easter mystery of death and ressurection.
From: Eschatologie - Tod und ewiges Leben, pp. 190-91
Oct
31
What direction does a person choose for his existence if he has decided to tune the instrument of his life to the keynote of “faith”? This question is not an easy one to answer because it obviously reaches down to the deeper levels of human nature, to attributes that are not always visible on the surface but that penetrate and leave their imprint on the whole, yet without being anywhere measureable. All the important fundamental decisions of human existence that go beyond our ordinary concern about the details of everyday living can be understood if we ourselves make some small effort to enter into the movement from which they flow - whether it is a question of a great love, of the passion of the inventor, or of a renunciation required of those who devote their lives to a revolutionary idea; whether it is a question of the attitude expressed in the smile of a Buddha or the faith of a Christian…We can explain what faith really means for an individual only by pointing to the lives of those who have lived it in its fullness: Francis of Assisi, Francis Xavier, IGnatius Loyola, Teresa of Avila, Therese of Lisieux, Vincent de Paul, John XXIII; in such persons, and basically only in them, can we come to know what kind of decision faith is. As we can see in the lives of such individuals, faith is a kind of passion, or, more correctly, a love that seizes an individual and shows him the direction he must go, however fatiguing it may be - the spiritual equivalent, perhaps, of a mountain to climb, which to the ordinary Christian would seem foolish indeed but to one who has committed himself to the venture is clearly the only direction to take - a direction he would not exchange for any conceivably more comfortable one.
From: Glaube und Zukunft, pp.39-40
Oct
30
Speaking with God must be a progression in and for ourselves - a progression in the literal sense of the word, that brings us forward, that moves us toward God and away from ourselves. When we neither convert into action nor simply carry around in ourselves all that oppresses us, smothers us in anxiety, deprives us of freedom and happiness, all that we wish for, desire, intend, demand, when we convert them into prayer, express and discuss them in God’s presence, then our prayer enters into a value system, confronts a criterion, by which it can be measured, directed, purified. For petitions to God are challenges to ourselves. The petitions of the Our Father point out the way we must: “Forgive us as we have forgiven” - how often have we fallen silent and blushed at this petition! “Hallowed be thy name” - for which of us is this petition about the defiled and reviled name of God a matter of personal concern? The next to the last petition (”Lead us not into temptation…”) always reminds me of Augustine’s admission in the Confessions that he prayed constantly for chastity even in his Sturm und Drang days, but always with reservation: “But please don’t give it to me yet.” And the last petition: “Deliver us from evil, from malum“. What, exactly, is bad, “evil”, for us? And what is the salutary exigency that must remain? Perhaps the truth of the matter is often the opposite of our wishes. What pleases us can be the product of evil and what hurts us can become our salvation. There are other prayers, too, that can become models for us, can discipline us, can force us to examine our conscience, can purify us. I shall mention here only the simple, yet great, prayer of Nicholas of Flue: “My Lord and my God, take from me all that keeps me from you; give me all that brings me to you.” What a purification of our wishes an honest recitation of this petition presumes!
From:Doma und Verkundigung, pp.125ff
Oct
28
The so-called Didache of the Apostles, a book that dates from about 90 or 100 AD., records a tradition that had long been accepted as a matter of course: “Assemble together on the Lord’s Day, break bread, and give thanks, having first confessed your sins so that your offering will be pure” (Did 14:1). We can be certain of this, then: it is not the role of the Church or of any individual Christian to decide whether or when we should celebrate the divine liturgy or what we should decide to do with our Sunday.
Someone may object: But I dislike the bad air in the church and the worn-out hymns. It bothers me to kneel crowded together with all kinds of people whom I do not know and to hear the priest recite prayers that I cannot understand. I prefer to go up into the mountains, into the woods, or on the water, and I am more pious in God’s free nature than in a congregation that has nothing to offer me.
In reply one might say: “It cannot be that we choose for ourselves whether or how we shall worship God: what is important is that we respond to him in the place where he gives himself to us. We cannot decide on our own terms where God is to meet us, and we should not stive to reach him by our own efforts. He can come to us and let us find him wherever he chooses. What matters is not just some pious feeling of ours that relegates religion to the realm of the nonobligatory and private but the obedience that hears God’s call and accepts it. The Lord does not want our private feelings; he wants to form us into a community and to build the new community of the Church on faith. The body must share in the divine worship as must the community with its hardships and discomforts. That is why it is false to ask: “What do I get out of this?”
From: Zeit fur Gott: Zeit fur den Menschen, 1981
Oct
23
An indulgence is, by its very nature, an invitation to make a pilgrimage, to approach the sacraments, to pray. It invites us to go to those places designated by the Church and so to escape from our daily routine, from our own will, into a relationship with God, into the place of his forgiveness. It invites us to approach the sacraments because one cannot absolve oneself.
There are many forms of pscychoanalysis and psychotherapy today that can be very helpful to us, but they cannot satisfy the deepest longing of the human soul - the longing for absolution. Only the fullness of power that resides in Someone greater can bestow that. We have been redeemed; that means that we have access also to the all-powerful word of absolution, of forgiveness. An indulgence invites us to all this as well as to the sacrament of Communion with the Lord and with the whole Church.
A third point should be added here: when absolution has been given, one should accept the new melody of life and let oneself really be re-turned to the new rhythm of God. The first indication of this new melody in our lives is prayer, for the new life is above all also a turning to God. Reciting the prayers required for the gaining of an indulgence is, first of all, an expression of the changed melody of our life, of the new direction of our existence. What is unique about it is that we immediately, as it were, waive our right to this prayer, that we, so to speak, let it be expropriated.
“To pray for the intentions of the Holy Father” means to place one’s prayer into the safekeeping of the Church. When we do this, we know that, vice versa, the whole prayer of the Church becomes ours. By thus joining our prayer to the prayer of the whole Church, we open ourselves, so to speak, to the surplus of all the good that is in this world, in which we usually experience primarily only a surplus of misery, guilt, and evil. By joining our own prayer to that of the Church, we call upon this surplus to counteract our weakness. That gives us the courage to offer our own paltry good so that it may rest in God’s hands and become effective in this world according to his will.
From: Roman homilies, May 24, 1983
Oct
22
In so far as we can trace its history at all, pilgrimage is one of the primordial impulses of humanity. Man sets out again and again to find escape from the customary daily humdrum, to gain distance from it, to become free. This impulse is still active today in the more recent profane brother of pilgrimage, namely, tourism. Its continued existence accounts for the hordes of wanderers who incessantly make their way through our continent, feeling that they are not completely at home there. But pilgrimage must be more than tourism. I mean: it must realize more truly, more fundamentally, and more entirely what the tourist only hopes to experience.
On the one hand, this requires a greater simplicity; on the other, a greater purposefulness. Essential to the concept of pilgrimage is the simplicity to accept one’s pilgrim state. For it we want to enjoy everywhere the same standard and style of living that we enjoy at home, then we can travel as far as we choose in this world and still be, as it were, “back home”. We can experience what is truly “different” only if we ourselves are different and live differently; only if, in the simplicity of faith, we become pilgrims in our hearts. For this we need also the purposefulness of faith.
Pilgrimage is not a question of sightseeing or of new experiences that take us out of ourselves and into something wholly new. The purpose of pilgrimage is ultimately, not an object of interest, but a breaking through to the living God. We attempt to reach this goal by seeking out the scenes of salvation history. Its interior and exterior ways do not follow the direction of our whims. We enter, as it were, into the geography of God’s history, where he himself has set up his directional signs. We journey toward a goal that has been designated beforehand, not toward one that we invent for ourselves. By entering into his history and turning toward the signs the Church gives us our of the fulllness of her faith, we go toward one another.
By becoming pilgrims, we are better able to attain what tourism seeks: otherness, distance, freedom, and a deeper encounter. For that reason, I beseech you from my heart that we make this pilgrimage truly a pilgrimage, not let it become just any trip. It should not be just an outing but an entrance into the history that God has made with us; into the signs of salvation that he has established for us; into the simplicity that is one of the essential signs of faith. Only then will this pilgrimage become for us a great and lasting experience.
From: Roman homilies, May 24, 1983
Oct
20
We learn what a man thinks, who he is, from that for which he has time. To observe the Christian Sunday is to have time for God, to acknowledge him publicly and privately by reserving a piece of our time for him. It follows, then, that our Sunday outings should be planned so that there is always time for divine worship. Far from diminishing the effectiveness of our recreational excursions, this will animate them. To have time for God means to have time for one another. Sunday should be a day for conversation, a day on which we are present to one another and learn anew to understand one another. Because Sunday is God’s day, it is also humanity’s day; it should offer the possibility of a broad range of common undertakings: play together, cultivation of common interests, music in the home, observance of local customs, hospitality, neighborliness - many other suggestions could be made here. Integral to the observance of Sunday should always be a festive and religion-oriented meal that recalls the communal participation in the Eucharist and that, precisely by its religious form, by its turning to the Giver of all good things, will also be the surest defense against a meaningless arrogance that is often an attempt to compensate for one’s spiritual hunger and spiritual emptiness. The way we order our time is dependent on the way we order our Sunday. The rediscovery of Sunday is of crucial importance for our future-the future of the individual, of the family, and of society.
From:Zeit fur Gott: Zeit fur den Menschen, 1981
Oct
20
Christians are Sunday people, Ignatius says. What does that mean? Before we ask ourselves how we “observe Sunday”, we have to consider what we Christians actually celebrate on Sunday. The real and first reason for celebrating Sunday lies in the fact that on this day Christ rose from the dead. In doing so, he inaugurated a new age. For the first time someone returns fromt the dead and will not die again. For the first time someone has broken the bonds of time that hold us all in captivity. But Jesus did not pass quickly into heaven. He did not simply shed time as one might shed a worn-out garment; on the contrary, he remains with us. He has returned and will never leave us again.
The feast of Sunday is, therefore, above all a profession of faith in the Ressurection. It is a profession of faith that love remains and therefore a profession of faith that life is good. Very early in the history of the Church Christian asked themselves: “Why did the Lord choose this day? What meaning did he intend to convey thereby?” According to Jewish reckoning, Sunday was the first day of the week. It was, therefore, the day on which God created the world. It was the day on which God ended his rest and spoke: “Let there be light” (Gen 1:3).
Sunday is the first day of the week, the day of creation. That means, then, that Sunday is also the day on which we give thanks for creation. In our technological world, this has acquired a special meaning. Creation has been given us by God as our living space, as the scene of our labor and our leisure, in which we find both the necessities and the superfluities of life, the beauty of images and sounds, which we need precisely as much as we need food and clothing.
From Zeit fur GottL Zeit fur den Menschen, 1981
Oct
17
The Christian is a person who does not count the cost but does even more than is required of him - a loving person, who does not ask “How far can I actually go within the limits of venial sin while keeping clear of mortal sin?” The Christian is one who does not calculate but seeks only what is good. A person who is merely good, who is concerned only about behaving correctly, is a Pharisee; only the person whose behavior is not merely correct has begun to be a Christian.
That does not mean that the Christian is beyond reproach and never commits a fault. On the contrary, he is one who knows that he is imperfect and who is generous with God and man because he knows how dependent he himself is on their superabundant generosity. His is the generosity of one who knows that he is indebted to everyone, who can no longer attempt any action just because it will prove advantageous to himself - such generosity is the guiding star of the ethos that Jesus preached (cf.Mt 18:13-35).
The fundamental structure that we considered in speaking about generosity is, at the same time, the divine trademark of creation: the miracle of Cana, the miracle of the multiplication of the loaves are signs of God’s superabundant generosity, which is the essential mark of his activity, of that activity that squanders millions of seeds in order to save one living thing; that activity that squanders a whole universe in order to prepare a place on earth for the mysterious creature that is man; that activity that, in a last unheard-of generosity, goes himself to save that “thinking reed”, man, and to lead him to his goal.
From: Vom Sinn des Christeins, pp. 64-65
