Between heaven and earth

Rembrandt - Christ
To depict Christ, Rembrandt chose his models in the Jewish community of Amsterdam

A week of retreat, in silence, at a monastery: a good time to make oneself more vulnerable, more receptive to the light, more open to what is given. It also means free time to pray, to read, to reflect. This year, for the fourth or fifth time I returned to reading what I have always considered a masterpiece of spiritual literature, The Heart of the World, by Hans Urs von Balthasar, a great Swiss theologian. His poetic power, his sober lyricism, his spiritual musicality, all contribute to making a work that is very original and moving.

Here is a passage that really touched me this time. It is found in the first part of the book, in chapter two, entitled, “He Came into the World”, which refers to the incarnation of the Word, his kenosis and his glory.

            “The divine ocean forced into the tiny wellspring of a human Heart! The mighty oak tree of divinity planted in the small fragile pot of an earthly Heart! God, sublime on the throne of his majesty and the Servant --- toiling with sweat and kneeling in the dust of adoration --- no longer to be distinguished from one another! The eternal God’s awareness of his kingship pressed into the nescience of human abasement! All the treasures of God’s wisdom and knowledge stored in the chamber of human poverty! The vision of the eternal Father shrouded in the intuitions of faith’s obscurity! The rock of divine certainty floating on the tides of an earthly hope !The triangle of the Trinity balanced by one tip upon a human Heart!

            Thus does this heart hover between heaven and earth like the narrow passage in an hourglass, and incessantly the sand of grace trickles from the upper compartment down to the earthly bottom. Then again, through that tight duct, a weak aroma rises from below to the upper spheres, a scent foreign to the heavens, and no portion of the infinite Godhead remains untouched by this new perfume. Softly and steadily a reddish vapor begins to tint the white region of the angels, and the unapproachable love of Father and Son acquires the color of heartfelt affection. All of God’s mysteries, which until now had hidden their countenance under six wings, disclose themselves and smile down at men. For in the mirror of the earthly region God’s mysteries unexpectedly see their own countenance reflected, as if they now had a double.

            Everything that had been one becomes double and everything double becomes one. It is not a pale image of heavenly truth that is acted out on earth; it is the heavenly reality itself, translated into earthly language. When the Servant here below falls to the ground tired and spent from the burden of his day’s labor, when his head touches the earth to adore his God, this poor gesture captures in itself all of the uncreated Son’s homage before his Father’s throne. And the gesture forever adds to this eternal perfection the laborious, painful, inconspicuous, lusterless perfection of a human being’s humility. But never had the Father loved the Son with such ultimacy as when he beheld him collapse to his knees in exhaustion. At that moment he swore to himself that he would raise this Child, even to the paternal Heart --- this Son of Man who was also his Son --- and that, for the sake of this One, he would raise up also all of the others who resembled him, his greatly Beloved – all of those in whom he could discern the traits of his Son, even in their distortion and concealment.”^(*)

This is worth many a dry treatise of speculative theology, isn’t it?

Fiodor

(*) Hans Urs von Balthasar, Heart of the World, San Francisco, Ignatius Press, 1980, pp. 49-51.