But the final and decisive reason for the passion [Christ's] lay in man's sinfulness.  In His body Christ had to pay the price for the sin of men by submitting to death.  "What the law could not do, in that the flesh rendered it powerless, God sending His own Son, with a flesh like to that of sin, and in view of sin, has condemned sin in the flesh" (Rom., 8:3). The flesh of Christ was like to the flesh of sinful man precisely because it was not yet within the sanctuary; it was unglorified, subject to death; and death, of the body as well as of the soul, is the consequence of sin.  The obedience of Christ's will had to be expressed in His flesh, accepting death, the penalty of sin, if men were to be released from sin.  The moment on Calvary was the supreme moment only because then the full implications of interior sacrifice in the context of sinful humanity were accepted and fulfilled.  When Christ's body is raised from death mankind has the certainty that death has been overcome, that the power of sin has been broken.  And yet, as St. Thomas does not fail to insist, man's sin could have been absolved in other ways.  Without violating the law of justice, God could have condoned man's offence by an act of mercy.  In any event His mercy stands behind Christ's reparation for it was He who sent His Son, and this implies a basic condonation of sin.  The true sense of Christ's sufferings, the need for His death, are to be sought in man.  It was because God respects the dignity of the creature whom He has made to His own image that He sent His Son to die as man.  It was man who was overcome by Satan and man, if he is to bear the responsibilities of his freedom, must pay in full the consequence of his fault.  Because Christ suffered man can claim that humanity has met the debt of justice incurred by sin, an offence against God.

-- excerpted from Colman O'Neill's Meeting Christ in the Sacraments (p.34)

My bottom line: Thus, God is not a wrathful God who demands the death of His own Son in order to appease His own justice!

"In truth - one thing is certain: there exists a night into whose solitude no voice reaches; there is a door through which we can only walk alone - the door of death.  In the last analysis all the fear in the world is the fear of this loneliness.  From this point of view it is possible to understand why the Old Testament has only one word for hell and death, the word scheol; in the last resort it regards both as identical.  Death is absolute loneliness.  But the loneliness into which love can no longer reach is hell."

-- Ratzinger's Introduction, p. 229

Thus, hell is already here for some of us!
Not a place, geographically speaking, but the isolation
of the categorical refusal to let oneself be penetrated by Love,
the rejection of Love's desire to establish communion and to link up
with oneself, and the determination to be self-sufficient. This loneliness
should lead to suicide as a logical conclusion.

"Excess is God's trademark in His creation; as the [Early Church] Fathers put it, 'God does not reckon His gifts by the measure'.  At the same time excess is also the real foundation and form of the history of salvation, which in the last analysis is nothing other than the truly breathtaking fact that God, in an incredible outpouring of Himself, expends not only a universe but His own self in order to lead man, a speck of dust, to salvation.  So excess or superfluity - let us repeat - is the real definition or mark of the history of salvation.  The purely calculating mind will always find it absurd that for man God Himself should be expended.  Only the love can understand the folly of a love to which prodigality is a law and excess alone is sufficient.  Yet if it is true that the creation lives from excess or superfluity, that man is a being for whom excess is necessity, how can we wonder that revelation is the superfluous and for that very reason the necessary, the divine, the love in which the meaning of the universe is fulfilled?"

-- Ratzinger's Intro., pp. 197-8.

I can go to bed tonight, knowing that my puny existence is not outside of the embrace of God's excess love -- me and all my petty concerns!  Deo gratias!

"So Jesus did not call Himself unequivocally the Messiah (Christ); the man who gave Him this name was Pilate, who for his part associated himself with the accusation of the Jews by yielding to this accusation and proclaiming Jesus on the cross, in an execution notice drawn up in all the international languages of the day, as the executed king (=Messiah, Christus) of the Jews.  This execution notice, the death sentence of history, became with paradoxical unity the 'confession of faith', the real starting-point and rooting-point of the Christian faith, which holds Jesus to be the Christ: as the crucified criminal this Jesus is the Christ, the king.  His crucifixion is His coronation; His coronation or kingship is His surrender of Himself to men, the identification of word, mission, and existence in the yielding up of this very existence.  His existence is thus His word.  He is word because He is love.  From the cross faith understands in increasing measure that this Jesus did not just do or say something; that in Him message and person are identical, that He always already is what He says.  John needed only to draw the final straightforward inference: if that is so -- and this is the christological basis of his gospel -- then this Jesus Christ is 'word'; but a person who not only has words but is his word and his word is the logos (the 'Word', meaning, mind) itself; that person has always existed and will always exist; He is the ground on which the world stands -- if we ever meet such a person, then he is the meaning which sustains us all and by which we are all sustained."  

-- Ratzinger's Intro., pp 151-2

I think this is the most difficult passage of the entire book, which is among the most profound books I have ever come across!  Jesus as Word=Jesus as Love=Jesus as Original Meaning of the entire created world=Jesus as the Eternal One!  It requires much mediation, reflections, prayers, and fasting to grasp the profundity of what the pope wrote here!

"For the time being, let us note that alongside the union of the God of faith and the God of the philosophers, which we recognize in the first article as the basic assumption and structural form of the Christian faith, a second, no less decisive alliance appears, namely that of the logos and sarx, of word and flesh, of faith and history.  The historical man Jesus is the Son of God, and the Son of God is the man Jesus.  God comes to pass for man through man, nay, even more concretely, through the man in whom the quintessence of humanity appears and who for that very reason is at the same time God Himself."


--  Ratzinger's Introduction to Christianity, p. 142. 

"At each crisis in the growth of our human affections there should be a corresponding discovery of a new aspect of our friendship for Christ."


"At each temptation . . . realize that this is normal.  At this time ask God to help you decide and know that Jesus asks you simply to choose Him, once more, as the single object of your love."


-- by Father Voillaume in "Au Coeur des masses"

"Thus today we often see in the faces of young people a remarkable bitterness, a resignation that is far removed from the enthusiasm of youthful ventures into the unknown.  The deepest root of this sorrow is the lack of any great hope and the unattainability of any great love: everything one can hope for is known, and all love becomes the disappointment of finiteness in a world whose monstrous surrogates are only a pitiful disguise for profound despair.  And in this way the truth becomes ever more tangible that the sorrow of this world leads to death: it is only flirting with death, the ghastly business of playing with power and violence, that is still exciting enough to create an appearance of satisfaction.  "If you eat it you must die" -- for a long time this has no longer been just a saying from mythology (Gen. 3:3)."

-- Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger's "To Look On Christ", published by Crossroad, 1991, pp. 69-70.

Isn't it true that we keep bumping up against our limitations, our finiteness, our finitude, even as we yearn for eternity in the very enjoyment of earthly delights?  This feeling of constant frustration over our inability to ever achieve lasting joy and love and happiness in this life should drive us all to despair, if it had not been for our faith and our hope, which has been guaranteed by Christ's resurrection.

"This [the last post] also clarifies the root of the conception of creation: the model from which creation must be understood is not the craftsman but the creative mind, creative thinking.  At the same time it becomes evident that the idea of freedom is the characteristic mark of the Christian belief in God as opposed to any kind of monism.  At the beginning of all being it puts not just some kind of consciousness but a creative freedom which creates further freedoms.  To this  extent one could very well describe Christianity as a philosophy of freedom.  For Christianity, the explanation of reality as a whole is not an all-embracing consciousness or one single materiality;  on the contrary, at the summit stands a freedom that thinks and, thinking, creates freedom, thus making freedom the structural form of all being."


-- Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger's Introduction to Christianity,
   Ignatius Press, San Francisco, 1992, p. 110.

And so, in the end, love alone matters!

"The Christian belief in God is not completely identical with either of these two solutions [matter or mind].  To be sure, it too will say, being is being-thought.  Matter itself points beyond itself to thinking as the earlier and more original factor.  But in opposition to idealism, which makes all being into moments of an all-embracing consciousness, the Christian belief in God will say: Being is being thought - yet not in such a way that it remains only thought and that the appearance of independence discloses itself to him who looks more closely as mere appearance.  On the contrary, Christian belief in God means that things are the being-thought of a creative consciousness, of a creative freedom, and that the creative consciousness that bears up all things has released what has been thought into the freedom of its own, independent existence.  In this it goes beyond any mere idealism.  While the latter, as we have just established, explains everything real as the content of a single consciousness, in the Christian view what supports it all is a creative freedom that sets what has been thought in the freedom of its own being, so that on the one hand it is the being-thought of a consciousness and yet on the other true self-being."


--- Ibid. p. 110


This is most important: "Creative Freedom", God, is so magnanimous, so generous, so selfless, so overflowing with Charity, that It has created creatures that are also free beings!  Thus, creation points to an utterly, absolutely, and sovereignly free Creator, who does not feel at all threatened to allow His creatures to participate in His freedom, so that they may indeed be acting as truly free agents, who in their own right can think, create, decide, choose, make!  Thus, the Original Freedom is also Love!  Thus, we have this "equation": Logos=Consciousness=Creative=Freedom=Love!
Amen!  Deo Gratias!

"Loneliness is indubitably one of the basic roots from which man's encounter with God grew up.  Where man experiences his solitariness, he experiences at the same time how much his existence is a cry for the 'You' and how ill-adpated he is to be only an 'I' in himself.  This loneliness can become apparent to man on various levels.  To start with it can be comforted by the discovery of a human 'You'.  But then there is the paradox that, as Claudel says, every 'You' found by man finally turns out to be an unfulfilled and unfulfillable promise; that every 'You" is at bottom another disappointment and that there comes a point when no encounter can surmount the final loneliness: the very process of finding and having found thus becomes a pointer back to the loneliness, a call to the absolute 'You' that really descends into the depths of one's own 'I'.  But even here it remains true that it is not only the need born of loneliness, the experience that no sense of community fills up all our longing, which leads to the experience of God; it can just as well proceed from the joy of security.  The very fulfillment of love, of finding one another, can cause man to experience the gift of what he could neither call up nor create and make him recognize that in it he receives more than either of the two could contribute.  The brightness and joy of of finding one another can point to the proximity of absolute joy and of the simple fact of being found which stands behind every human encounter."

-- Ibid.

"Thus faith is the finding of a 'You' that bears me up and amid all the unfulfilled -- and in the last resort unfulfillable -- hope of human encounters gives the promise of an indestructible love which not only longs for eternity but guarantees it.  Christian faith lives on the discovery that not only is there such a thing as objective meaning, but this meaning knows me and loves me, I can entrust myself to it like a child that knows all its questions answered in the 'You' of its mother.  Thus in the last analysis believing, trusting and loving are one, and all the theses around which belief revolves are only concrete expressions of the all-embracing about-turn, of the assertion 'I believe in You' -- of the discovery of God in the countenance of the man Jesus of Nazareth."

--  Ibid.


This is Ratzinger's unique Christian existentialism!  This is how he has successfully demonstrated the perfect correspondence between object of the Christian faith and the deepest desires of the human heart -- it is an encounter with a Person, who alone can fill it.  This is why faith matters, even in the day-to-day living -- it bears our existence up and keeps it from sinking into despair (especially in this dreadful weather!!!).

"Let us return after this little detour to ask once again and more comprehensively: what is belief really?  We can now reply like this: it is a way of taking up a stand in the totality of reality, a way that cannot be reduced to knowledge and is incommensurable by knowledge;  it is the bestowal of meaning with which the totality of man would remain homeless, on which man's calculations and actions are based, and without which in the last resort he could not calculate and act, because he can only do this in the context of a meaning that bears him up.  For in fact man does  not live on the bread of practicality alone;  he lives as man and, precisely in the intrinsically human part of his being, on the word, on love, on meaning.  Meaning is the bread on which man, in the intrinsically human part of his being, subsists.  Without word, without meaning, without love he falls into the situation of no-longer-being-able-to-live, even when earthly comfort is present in abundance.  Everyone knows how sharply this situation of "not being able to go on any more" can arise in the midst of outward abundance.  But meaning is not derived from knowledge.  To try to manufacture it in this way, that is, out of the provable knowledge of what can be made, would resemble Baron Munchhausen's absurd attempt to pull himself up out of the bog by his own hair.  I believe that the absurdity of this story mirrors very accurately the basic situation of man.  No one can pull himself up out of the bog of uncertainty, of not-being-able-to-live, by his own exertions;  nor can we pull ourselves up, as Descartes still thought we could, by a 'cogito ergo sum', by a series of intellectual deductions.  Meaning that is self-made is in the last analysis no meaning.  Meaning, that is, the ground on which our existence as a totality can stand and live, cannot be made but only received."


-- Ibid., pp 42-43


At this moment, I am thinking of Christopher Hitchens, . . . 

". . . belief signifies the decision that at the very core of human existence there is a point which cannot be nourished and supported on the visible and tangible, which encounters and comes into contact with what cannot be seen and finds that it is a necessity for its own existence."

-- Ibid.


Belief remains a decision to go beyond feelings, beyond the sensible world - Always!  And yet, it is also a personal decision resulted from an encounter with a Person . . . .

Thought for the day . . .

"Man's natural center of gravity draws him to the visible, to what he can take in his hand and hold as his own.  He has to turn round inwardly in order to see how badly he is neglecting his own interests by letting himself be drawn along in this way by his natural center of gravity.  He must turn round to recognize how blind he is if he trusts only what he sees with his eyes.  Without this change of direction, without this resistance to the natural center of gravity, there can be no belief."

-- Ratzinger's Introduction to Christianity (published by Ignatius Press, 1992)

Exactly!  Even for believers, there must be this on-going "turning round" if
faith is to remain.

This is a test