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Hans Urs von Balthasar QUOTES

Hans Urs von Balthasar QUOTES

1 " What you are is God's gift to you, what you become is your gift to God. "

― Hans Urs von Balthasar , Prayer

2 " To be a child means to owe one's existence to another, and even in our adult life we never quite reach the point where we no longer have to give thanks for being the person we are. "

― Hans Urs von Balthasar , Unless You Become Like This Child

3 " The Church does not dispense the sacrament of baptism in order to acquire for herself an increase in membership but in order to consecrate a human being to God and to communicate to that person the divine gift of birth from God. "

― Hans Urs von Balthasar , Unless You Become Like This Child

4 " What the Father gives is the capacity to be a self, freedom, and thus autonomy, but an autonomy which can be understood only as a surrender of self to the other. "

― Hans Urs von Balthasar , Unless You Become Like This Child

5 " In Christ, for the first time, we see that in God himself there exists--within his inseparable unity--the distinction between the Father who gives and the Gift which is given (the Son), but only in the unity of the Holy Spirit. "

― Hans Urs von Balthasar , Unless You Become Like This Child

6 " Her (Mary's) Son first had to be the Child of the Father in order then to become man and be capable of taking up on his shoulders the burden of a guilty world. "

― Hans Urs von Balthasar , Unless You Become Like This Child

7 " Mary thus learns that the Most High has ever borne a Son in his bosom, and that this Son has now chosen her bosom as dwelling-place. "

― Hans Urs von Balthasar , Unless You Become Like This Child

8 " It would be unjust toward children to introduce them to Christian teaching and existence only as little pagans and catechumens, in order to leave it up to them to choose the Faith on their own responsibility at a point in time difficult to determine. "

― Hans Urs von Balthasar , Unless You Become Like This Child

9 " Perfection lies in fullness of journey. For this reason, never think you have arrived. Forget what lies behind you, reach out for what lies before you. Through the very change in which you lose what you have snatched up you will at last be transformed into what you crave for with such longing. "

― Hans Urs von Balthasar , Heart of the World

10 " It is to the Cross that the Christian is challenged to follow his Master: no path of redemption can make a detour around it. "

― Hans Urs von Balthasar , Unless You Become Like This Child

11 " Only the Christian religion, which in its essence is communicated by the eternal child of God, keeps alive in its believers the lifelong awareness of their being children, and therefore of having to ask and give thanks for things. "

― Hans Urs von Balthasar , Unless You Become Like This Child

12 " Once a person learns to read the signs of love and thus to believe it, love leads him into the open field wherein he himself can love. If the prodigal son had not believed that the father's love was already waiting for him, he would not have been able to make the journey home - even if his father's love welcomes him in a way he never would have dreamed of. The decisive thing is that the sinner has heard of a love that could be, and really is, there for him; he is not the one who has to bring himself into line with God; God has always already seen in him, the loveless sinner, a beloved child and has looked upon him and conferred dignity upon him in the light of this love. "

― Hans Urs von Balthasar , Love Alone is Credible

13 " The first thing the Cross does is cross out the world's word by a Wholly-Other Word, a Word that the world does not want to hear at any price. For the world wants to live and rise again before it dies, while the love of Christ wants to die in order to rise again in the form of God on the other side of death, indeed, IN death. "

― Hans Urs von Balthasar , Love Alone is Credible

14 " Every mystery of life has its origin in the heart. "

― Hans Urs von Balthasar , Heart of the World

15 " Unavoidably, the life of contemplation is an everyday life, a life of fidelity in small matters, small services rendered in the spirit of warmth and love which lightens every burden. The sun’s brightness can from time to time (and perhaps often) be hidden in mist and cloud, but that is no reason for laying aside one’s daily work. Contemplation is work, and it goes on working even when the person praying derives no apparent satisfaction from it. Contemplation is a conversation in which I am at pains not to be boring, not to say and think the same thing every day; I use my imagination and creativity to offer God at least something of myself. "

― Hans Urs von Balthasar , Prayer

16 " It is impossible to contemplate the word without the serious intention of doing justice to it in practical behavior. It demands love for God and our neighbor, and does so with such immediacy and unmistakable urgency that it is pointless even to pause before this demand unless we are willing to respond. "

― Hans Urs von Balthasar

17 " The person who prays and who wants to gain a deeper understanding of the word he desires to worship (in order to be more single-mindedly at the word’s disposal) will select with great care basic works for his studies which will observe the so-called exactitude of scholarship without losing sight of the most important exactitude, namely, the ordering of all thought toward prayer. "

― Hans Urs von Balthasar , Prayer

18 " We do not build the kingdom of God on earth by our own efforts (however assisted by grace); the most we can do through genuine prayer, is to make as much room as possible, in ourselves and in the world, for the kingdom of God, so that its energies can go to work. All that we can show our contemporaries of the reality of God springs from contemplation: Jesus Christ, the Church, our own selves. "

― Hans Urs von Balthasar , Prayer

19 " Instead, it is the reality that the God-forsaken one experienced in an eminent way because no one can even approximately experience the abandonment by God as horribly as the Son, who shares the same essence with the Father for all eternity. "

― Hans Urs von Balthasar , Love Alone is Credible

20 " Nevertheless, in a passage that is very often commented upon because it summarizes the entire salvific economy of faith, the Apostle calls Christ the 'pioneer and perfecter of our faith' (Heb. 12:2), because he has to accomplish the same act as the Christian, only in the opposite direction, as it were. Whereas by venturing to let go of everything the Christian takes a stand beyond finitude and comes into the limitlessness of God, Christ, in order to make this act possible and to be its source, has dared to emerge from the infinitude of the 'form of God' and 'did not think equality with God a thing to be grasped,' has dared to set out into the limitation and emptiness of time. This involved a transcendence and a boundary crossing no less fundamental than that of the Christian, and Christ undertook it so as to entrust himself henceforth within time, with no guarantee or mitigation from eternity, to the Father's will, which is always given to him in the present moment. "

― Hans Urs von Balthasar , The Christian and Anxiety