Saturday, October 03, 2009

Endurance

As I have said many times from the podium, however determined the "world" might be to expel Christianity it can never succeed, for every attempt to expel it reenacts the drama (of Christ's expulsion) which reveals it.

As a result, as Hans Urs von Balthasar puts it:
Christianity has received from on high so much power to endure and to be renewed constantly that it cannot cease to remain a continuous thorn in the flesh even of a humanity that has sunk totally into what is earthly.

3 comments:

Jeff Wild said...

Could you provide the source of the von Balthasar quote?
Thanks,
Jeff

Gil Bailie said...

Jeff,
It's from "Retrieving the Tradition: On the tasks of Catholic philosophy in our time," from Communio: International Catholic Review, Spring, 1993. I don't have the page number because the volume is out of print and I have it only in xerox, and the page numbers are cropped out of the xerox copy I have. It's about half way through the article.
Cheers, Gil

matt tavares said...

Endurance indeed. When I step aside to think what it may be like for someone outside of the faith to be presented with the center of this thorn, the resurrection, I can't help but think that this understanding must require endurance. Like you said before, even the apostles weren't ready for it. I just read a comment from Archbishop Dolan saying that the presentation of our faith must be delivered in a crock pot rather than a microwave.

Although our hope points to something that is not of this earth, I pray each one of us takes the time to stick around for the better meal. He's given us 2,000 years to taste it :)