Nugget for Reflection

Notes from Nancy:

This quote from Catholic theologian Hans urs von Balthasar has been appropriately challenging and liberating for me at various times during my healing/faith journey.  At other times, it has felt like it led to negative thinking and beating myself up.  It is not my intention for this quote to apply to all who are victims or to every stage of the healing process.  I share it today because it fits for me today.

Note:  Von Balthasar's meditation The Heart of God is written mostly, including in this passage, in the "voice" of Jesus.

"You naturally believe you see more clearly than the others.  You have proofs in hand.  You see yourself—your old man—black and white, and everything in you cries out:  “Impossible!”  You see the distance and can measure with accuracy the gap between misdeeds and atonement, the gap between you and me.  Who could struggle against such evidence?  You withdraw into your sorrow; this, at least, is yours.  In the experience of your woes you feel yourself alive.  And if someone should lay a hand to your sorrows and attempt to tear them up by the root, surely he would tear your whole heart out of your breast—so intertwined have you and your sufferings become.  Nevertheless, I have risen.  And your wise pain, your senile pain, into which you gladly plunge, by which you think you show me fidelity, through which you believe you are united to me:  your pain is an anachronism.  For today I am young and utterly happy.  And what you call your fidelity is nothing but obstinacy.  Do you have the standard in your hand?  Is your soul the arbiter of what might be possible for God?  Is your heart, swollen with experiences, the clock from which you tell what God’s decree for you might be?  What you take to be profundity is but unbelief.  But since you are so wounded and the open torment of your heart has opened up to the abyss of your very self, put out your hand to me and, with it, feel the pulse of another Heart:  through this new experience your soul will surrender and heave up the dark gall which it has long collected.  I must overpower you.  I cannot spare exacting from you your melancholy—your most-loved possession.  Give it to me, even if it costs you your soul and your inner self thinks it must die.  Give me this idol, this cold stony clot in your breast, and in its place I will give you a new heart of flesh that will beat to the pulse of my own Heart.  Give me this self of yours, which lives on its not being able to live, which is sick because it cannot die.  Let it perish, and you will finally begin to live.  You are enamored of the sad puzzle of your incomprehensible ego.  But you have already been seen through and comprehended, for look:  if your heart accuses you, I am nevertheless greater than this your heart, and I know everything.  Dare to make the leap into the Light!  Do not take the world to be more profound than God!  Do not think that I cannot make short work of you!  Your city is besieged, your provisions are exhausted:  you must capitulate.  What could be simpler and sweeter than opening the door to love?  What could be easier than falling to one’s knees and saying:  “My Lord, and my God!?”"

Hans urs von Balthasar, Heart of the World, pp. 164-165