Feast of Corpus Christi

This is Father Steve Sinn, SJ, of the Catholic Parish of St. Canice, Elizabeth Bay, Australia.  It is his first video, and I’m certainly looking forward to many more. 

Excerpt from Heart of the World, by Hans Urs von Balthasar, pgs. 80-81:

I am the vine, you are the branches. You have blossomed forth from me. Are you then surprised if a drop of my Heart’s blood trickles into your every thought and deed? Are you surprised if the thoughts of my Heart quietly infiltrate your worldly heart? If a whispering takes wing in you and day and night you perceive a low, beckoning call? To a love that wants to suffer, to a love that, together with mine, redeems? Are you surprised if the desire comes upon you to risk your life and all your strength and put them in jeopardy for your brothers? And to complete in your own body what is still lacking to my sufferings, what must still lack as long as I have not suffered my Passion in all my branches and members?  For, to be sure, none of you is redeemed by anyone save myself; but I am the total Redeemer only united with each of you. Do you want to accomplish the great change with me and build up the Father’s Kingdom? Do you want to live my mind, the resolve of one who did not hold on to his form of God convulsively and clutchingly, but who broke it and emptied it out so that it began to flow as the courage to serve and as lowliness, became obedient even unto death on the Cross? Are you willing? For my work must be perfected in you and it will be brought to term only when my Heart beats in yours, only when all hearts, now submissive and docile, beat for the Father together in my Heart. Are you willing?

The Triumph of the Cross

Struggle ensues from this union of his love with us. For him alone, without us, there would be no struggle, for he loves the Father and human beings; he is Love. We, however, are not-love, with which his love burdens itself in order to overcome it. This overcoming does not take place in eternity; the battle is fought on earth, unto the death on the Cross, within the measurable time of the Son’s life that is depicted for us in Scripture, that we see as a limited period within our time, but that belongs so much to eternity that his years on earth cannot be subtracted from the eternity of the Son. Suffering in our time unto death, the Son makes known to us that the time of suffering is transitory, that his triumph in the Resurrection is a victory of heaven over earth, a proof of the Father’s power in the Son of Man, and that we share in this victory and our present time will be conquered by imperishable time.

[The Gates of Eternal Life, Adrienne von Speyr, pgs. 24-25]

After His Heart