Aj Baalman > Aj's Quotes

“We no longer dare to believe in beauty and we make of it a mere appearance in order the more easily to dispose of it. Our situation today shows that beauty demands for itself at least as much courage and decision as do truth and goodness, and she will not allow herself to be separated and banned from her two sisters without taking them along with herself in an act of mysterious vengeance. We can be sure that whoever sneers at her name as if she were the ornament of a bourgeois past -- whether he admits it or not -- can no longer pray and soon will no longer be able to love.”
― Hans Urs von Balthasar, Seeing the Form

“What you are is God's gift to you, what you become is your gift to God.”
― Hans Urs von Balthasar, Prayer

“To be a child means to owe one's existence to another, and even in our adult life we never quite reach the point where we no longer have to give thanks for being the person we are.”
― Hans Urs von Balthasar, Unless You Become Like This Child

“It is to the Cross that the Christian is challenged to follow his Master: no path of redemption can make a detour around it.”
― Hans Urs von Balthasar, Unless You Become Like This Child

“Only the Christian religion, which in its essence is communicated by the eternal child of God, keeps alive in its believers the lifelong awareness of their being children, and therefore of having to ask and give thanks for things.”
― Hans Urs von Balthasar, Unless You Become Like This Child

“The Church does not dispense the sacrament of baptism in order to acquire for herself an increase in membership but in order to consecrate a human being to God and to communicate to that person the divine gift of birth from God.”
― Hans Urs von Balthasar, Unless You Become Like This Child

“Above all we must not wish to cling to our suffering. Suffering surely deepens us and enhances our person, but we must not desire to become a deeper self than God wills. To suffer no longer can be a beautiful, perhaps the ultimate sacrifice.”
― Hans Urs von Balthasar

“What the Father gives is the capacity to be a self, freedom, and thus autonomy, but an autonomy which can be understood only as a surrender of self to the other.”
― Hans Urs von Balthasar, Unless You Become Like This Child

“In Christ, for the first time, we see that in God himself there exists--within his inseparable unity--the distinction between the Father who gives and the Gift which is given (the Son), but only in the unity of the Holy Spirit.”
― Hans Urs von Balthasar, Unless You Become Like This Child

“God defines himself as "I am who I am", which also means: My being is such that I shall always be present in every moment of becoming.”
― Hans Urs von Balthasar, Unless You Become Like This Child

“When everything is blocked off,' I was told by a dear friend who lives in Erfurt, "one must try to live in the interstices.' Apparently, the Christians of the Apocalypse, though they did not bear the sign of the beast, had discovered or created such spaces. From islands like these, true culture, Christian culture, may spread across the earth. Many people are athirst for it.”
― Hans Urs von Balthasar, Test Everything; Hold Fast to What Is Good

“Mary thus learns that the Most High has ever borne a Son in his bosom, and that this Son has now chosen her bosom as dwelling-place.”
― Hans Urs von Balthasar, Unless You Become Like This Child

“Her (Mary's) Son first had to be the Child of the Father in order then to become man and be capable of taking up on his shoulders the burden of a guilty world.”
― Hans Urs von Balthasar, Unless You Become Like This Child

“It would be unjust toward children to introduce them to Christian teaching and existence only as little pagans and catechumens, in order to leave it up to them to choose the Faith on their own responsibility at a point in time difficult to determine.”
― Hans Urs von Balthasar, Unless You Become Like This Child