Thursday, February 02, 2006

Quote: Karl Rahner

When the angels of death have swept all the worthless rubbish that we call our history out of the rooms of our consciousness (though of course the true reality of our actions in freedom will remain);

when all the stars of our ideals, with which we ourselves in our own presumption have draped the heaven of our own lived lives, have burned out and are now extinguished;

when death has built a monstrous, silent void, and we have silently accepted this in faith and hope as our true identity;

when then our life so far, however long it has been, appears only as a single, short explosion of our freedom that previously presented itself to us stretched out in slow motion, an explosion in which question has become answer, possibility reality, time eternity, and freedom offered freedom accomplished;

when then we are shown in the monstrous shock of a joy beyond saying that this monstrous, silent void, which we experience as death, is in truth filled with the originating mystery we call God, with God's light and with God's love that received all things and gives all things;

and when then out of this pathless mystery the face of Jesus, the blessed one, appears to us and this specific reality is the divine surpassing of all that we truly assume regarding the past-all-graspness of the pathless God

-then, then I don't want actually to describe anything like this, but nevertheless, I do want to stammer some hint of how a person can for the moment expect what is to come: by experiencing the very submergence that is death as already the rising of what is coming.
Karl Rahner (who else writes 280 word sentences?)

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