Tuesday, 3 August 2010
Drink Offering
Life in Christ is not about the 'here' of inner musings, but the 'there' of social existing. It is made complete in a movement of ekstasis or even kenosis; a journey away from ourselves towards the other. I must abandon the project that is 'self-realization' or 'self-discovery' and see myself poured out onto the pavement for the sake of the other; the droplets of my life refreshing the thirsty.
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... and transforms it into something new?
ReplyDelete"Not for here, but for there, with the lost and the lonely...
ReplyDeletenot for here, but for there, with the broken and the hungry." (David Gate, Bones (2008))
The structure of Christian faith found in the form Jesus Christ, according to Hans Urs von Balthasar:
ReplyDelete... calls, in the first place, for a radical objectivity: in the subject himself the light of faith is truly a light only if man looks away from himself and, renouncing his own evidence, entrusts himself to the Source that, as a result of grace, stands wide-open before him (...) Interior self-renunciation (Entselbstung, literally ‘unselving’) has not only its effect, but its basis and constant verification in self-renunciation for the purpose of serving the world. (...) This objectivism ..., is the result of taking seriously the ekstasis of love, its going out of itself: only in this way way can [a human person] achieve an act of serious love which corresponds to God’s own act of taking love seriously -- the act of the divine Eros which goes out of itself in order to become man and die on the Cross for the world (Denys, Div. Nom., IV, 13).’ (Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, Vol. 1, p 216.)