But the word that has reached its highest point in the cry [on the Cross], and so is no longer articulated, breaks through and demolishes the last wall of separation, the heart of Jesus himself, and—as in a parable—externally, the curtain between God and man: blood and water flow outwards, God himself pours himself out….Where the word falls silent, the true message is proclaimed loudly: the message of the heart of God, broken open. And if the real ‘place’ of the Christian event at first lets man hear no word, since the place lies in man’s death, yet it more importantly makes visible an event of God (in the most literal sense of the word: ‘the look on him whom they have pierced’). In this death, the ‘heart of God’ breaks open, the last realities in God’s heart, beyond which there is nothing more, so that in death, and only in death, that which remains unutterable in life becomes speech...—Hans Urs von Balthasar, Glory of the Lord, Vol. 7: The New Covenant (1969)
Thursday, March 24, 2011
The Revelation of God
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I see similar language in Whitman. In "Recorders Ages Hence," he instructs his future biographers to write that he was not proud of his poems "but of the measureless ocean of love within him, and freely pour'd it forth."
ReplyDeleteAnd, slightly more eroticized, in "A Woman Waits for Me": "Through you I drain the pent-up rivers of myself, / ... / I shall demand perfect men and women out of my love-spendings, / I shall expect them to interpenetrate with others, as I and you interpenetrate now, / I shall count on the fruits of the gushing showers of them, as I count on the fruits of the gushing showers I give now, / I shall look for loving crops from the birth, life, death, immortality, I plant so lovingly now."