Monday, March 12, 2007

Balthasar's Liturgical Aesthetic: Beauty and Glory in the Liturgy













3 comments:

Matt of CG said...

"The worthiness of the liturgy increases in proportion to participants' awareness of their own unworthiness."

This reminded me of an indulgence renewed by Pope Pius IX in 1876 concerning holy water.

Did he know about it? Did he ever make the connection between his statement and that indulgence? I said to myself, "Sorry Hans, somebody beat you to it."

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The sense in which you used the word "culmination" to describe the Eucharist is the same way I meant it in that e-mail I sent you in December of 2006 after watching your touching YouTube video about discernment.

I was immediately terrified. I thought, "Two different guys from two different walks of life, arriving at the same conclusion within the same age of reason, within the same span of time. Both through prayer, sufferage and contemplation. One by academics and one without...Man oh man, it's just as I suspected! The singular voice of the Holy Spirit whispers One Truth to us all. And we like prisms filter and refract the Light - each to the limits of his own transcendental facets always offering some original nuance of the face of Christ to those who have the eyes to see it!...Didn't I just get through saying I have no business here? What a difference half an hour of good reading makes." Do I belong here Jeff? (You notice I'm running out of excuses not to be where you once were? That's what scares me. God sure is cute like that.) I'm hoping you'll tell me somebody beat me to this. ;)

Jeff said...

You're being incomprehensible again.

Matt of CG said...

Ha ha ha! The first part was about the idea of the contrite heart being the key to true participation in the liturgy. And how I prefer precedence over novelty because we Catholics "test everything" to a degree that demands we measure the span of our 'organic development' in centuries as opposed to years.

I know you understood the One Truth bit. I used white light being refracted by a prism as example for our relationship to God. I didn't elaborate well enough.

I saw two traingular prisms of the exact same design, one used to refract white light into a rainbow on a flat surface while the other prism was inverted and placed parallel to the first prism. The second prism collects the refracted light from the first prism and the beam exits the second prism as white light.

The white light is Light with a capital "L." (the Glory Be prayer sums it up.) The first prism is life and the second is death. The rainbow in the middle is our temporal existence in relation to the Light.
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I read your paper with a heavy (guilt laden) heart after looking at Adam's blog once more with greater patience.

I was hoping you'ld be able to find some past writings of significance to help support my ideas.

I don't care about being first to arrive at The Wedding Feast, but I like to be re-assured that my manner of dress is appropriate by looking at those who got there before me.

The bit about "excuses" is in reference to end of the afformentioned e-mail I sent you last December.