Thursday 2 December 2010

"... you took upon yourself our kind of life, just as it is. You let it slip away from you, Just as ours vanishes from us. You held onto it carefully, so that not a single drop of it's torments would be spilled. You hoarded it's every fleeting moment, so you could suffer through it all, right to the bitter end.
... You were supposed to come to redeem us from ourselves, and yet you, who alone are absolutely free and unbounded, were "made" even as we are. Of course I know that you remained what you always were, but still, didn't our mortality make you shudder, you the immortal God Didn't you, the broad and limitless Being, shrink back in horror from our narrowness? Weren't you, absolute Truth, revolted at our pretense?
Didn't you nail yourself to the cross of creation, when you took as your own life something which you had drawn out of nothing, when you assumed as your very own the darkness that you had previously spread out in the eternal distance as the background to your own inaccessible light? Isn't the cross of Golgotha only the visible form of the cross you have prepared for yourself, which towers throughout the spaces of eternity?
...is my surrender to the crushing narrowness of earthly existence the beginning of my liberation from it, precisely because this surrender is my "Amen" to your human life, my way of saying yes to your human coming, which happens in a manner so contrary to my expectations?
...Slowly a light is beginning to dawn. I've begun to understand something I have known for a long time: You are still in the process of your coming. Your appearance in the form of a slave was only the beginning of your coming, a beginning in which you chose to redeem men by embracing the very slavery from which you were freeing them. And you can really acchieve your purpose in this paradoxical way, becasue the paths that you tread have a real ending, the narrow passes which you enter soon open out into broad liberty, the cross that you carry ineveitable becomes a brilliant banner of triumph."
(Karl Rahner)