[cruciform-solidarity]

A Hidden Life (dir. Terrence Malick)

[cruciform-solidarity]

O Jesus, meek and humble of heart, make our heart conform to Your Heart.

Titus Brandsma

[llovinghome]

[cruciform-solidarity]

[gildedmouths]

“To die for God is not a proof of faith in God. To die for an unknown and repulsive convict who is a victim of injustice, that is a proof of faith in God.”

— Simone Weil

[cruciform-solidarity]

Christ’s Church shows herself to the world as a sign of humiliation, persecution, and death. Her rising again is indeed real but hidden. The world will always wonder why the Church is not finished and done for. And the Church cannot precede herself with a triumphantly proclaimed Cross. The Cross she preaches says only one thing: it is something to die upon. The Church can proclaim only one Christ, the one for whom one loses one’s soul in order to gain it by virtue of losing.

Hans Urs von Balthasar, You Have Words of Eternal Life

[cruciform-solidarity]

“No other sign”, Jesus says. It is as if he thereby sweeps away all his healings and exorcisms, all his multiplication of loaves and calming of storms, as if all these “works” were invalid as signs, as if in the ultimate decision he was confining himself to himself, who surpasses Jonah in signification. He transcends Jonah’s sign through the insignificance (“even to death on the Cross”) of his three days spent hidden in the bosom of the earth. Those demanding a sign receive nothing but the character of the (incarnate Divine) Word in its mundane, humiliated form. This, and only this, is believable—every ostentatious sign would be incredible and would point only to a power opposed to God (Rev 13:3-4, 13-15).

Hans Urs von Balthasar, You Have Words of Eternal Life

[cruciform-solidarity]

God must be identical with his action if he is not merely to have love, like the creature, but really is love.

Hans Urs von Balthasar, You Have Words of Eternal Life

[cruciform-solidarity]

In a Christian view, nothing in any height or depth of contemplation surpasses the limits of simple Christian faith: the faith that God and man are one person in Christ, the faith that the Persons of Father, Son, and Spirit are not three gods but a single God. Contemplation simply realizes what was always present in Christian faith (which itself is a gift from God).

Hans Urs von Balthasar, You Have Words of Eternal Life

[cruciform-solidarity]

It is no rational conclusion that leads from the Son to the Father but rather faith in God’s perfect unity, in which Image and Imagelessness, Birth and Birth-giver are simply integrated. The Son is so much a pure expression of the Father that one cannot encounter him without being addressed by the Father. His human, and thereby divine, love is purely and simply the Father’s word of love spoken to us.

Hans Urs von Balthasar, You Have Words of Eternal Life

[cruciform-solidarity]

We know about this fullness in God only because the eternal Image has entered the multiplicity of our world of images, portraying and explicating the imageless Father, immersing us in the Divine Spirit so that we gain access to the divine world of love.

Hans Urs von Balthasar, You Have Words of Eternal Life

[cruciform-solidarity]

[cruciform-solidarity]

[cruciform-solidarity]

[cruciform-solidarity]

Will we dare to welcome as being the proper divine mission of Jesus and his will for us this folly that the Kingdom truly belongs to the poor and the little ones? *** If the Good News is proclaimed to the poor, it is because the Messiah is among us. *** The more men are poor or wounded, the easier their access to the sacraments, because a sacrament is simple and they have been simplified in their poverty. *** Today it is the poor who reveal this face of the Lord. We must learn from the poor what Christ is saying to the Church today. The poor are members of a people on the march towards holiness. *** For us, we will tremble with joy and gladness in an outpouring of the Holy Spirit that will come from the heart, from the very hands of the poorest among us. They are the ones who will communicate the Holy Spirit to us.... They are the ones who hold the key to the Kingdom. It is they, the poor, the little ones who are the key.

Fragments from the Pain de Vie community on the poor.

[cruciform-solidarity]

The poor are the ones who hold the key to the Kingdom, they are the key.

[mioritic]

Illustration of the Archangel Michael, artist not credited ("Nic"?)

Horia Filip (ed.), Falanga. Săptămânal scris în duhul omului nou (Bucharest), 4 November 1940

Biblioteca Centrală Universitară "Lucian Blaga", Cluj-Napoca

[gleanling]

A truth window (or truth wall) is an opening in a wall surface, created to reveal the layers or components within the wall. In a strawbale house, a truth window is often used to show the walls are actually made from straw bales.