Status Updates From Fire of Mercy, Heart of the...

I'm always amazed at the depths Leiva-Merikakis can plumb in a single verse!

On Matthew 9:26: "The glory of the deed and the voice of the Bride go out and fill the earth as resounding epithalamion, because all of creation is by rights the nuptial chamber of the Word and longs to vibrate with his wedding song."

"He transforms a place of death into a bridal chamber. His everlasting gesture as Word is to lead his creaturely bride by the hand, graciously and mightily, out of inescapable death into a joy of indestructible life in a communion of love. In this dark solitude, suddenly transfigured by the presence of Jesus and his act of bright love, the girl has nothing to do but awaken to contemplate the beauty of Jesus' face"

Bought this to read for lent. Didn’t realize it was 700+ pages 😵‍💫

"The deepest meaning of Christian discipleship is not to work for Jesus but to be with Jesus....The work of the apostle then becomes nothing other than the overflowing of the joy, wisdom, and nourishment he has himself partaken of during the intimate banquet at his Lord's table."

"The heart of Christian living is the contemplation of the unfathomable Person of Christ, a contemplation that spontaneously bursts into the hymn of glory that flows from us as we behold how near God has come, and how unendingly."

"The divine act of intervention in the most intimate regions of our being both communicates the radiance of his Face and drowns the unclean, swinelike ferociousness that makes us refuse the approach of his healing love."

"....the centurion utters the second half of his prayer, which has been immortalized by the Roman liturgy as the exclamation before receiving Holy Communion. Such liturgical use, in fact, is the Church's way of molding every generation of Christians according to the mind of the centurion. Few other characters in Scripture have received such an honor."

Have we sufficiently reflected on the fact that, after the Incarnation, the Father and the Spirit relate to the Son in a new way; that is, no longer to the Word as divine only, but also and necessarily to the Word as incarnate Man? It seems that God's freely chosen dependency on the mediation of humans derives from the unfathomable design that his Son should become incarnate. (89)

On the flight to Egypt:

"The wonder is that the eternal God would have chosen this way of weakness and hiddenness to accomplish his designs for the world. At least here, all the efficacy of human effort in the service of God rests exclusively on obedience to his will and, after that, on perfect hiddenness and silence." (87)

After all the human comedy has been played out on earth, there will abide only God, the wise, and the stars. (75)

The Child, while present only in Bethlehem by his poverty and weakness, is already present in the pattern of the constellations by his splendor and his glory. What a petty monarch of a land subject to the Romans refuses to see, the eternal language of the heavens proclaims. (75)

In Christ, the distance between the prophet [lit. "to speak ahead of/before"] and the Lord disappears, because he who has come is Emmanuel, "God with-us". (71)

God, like a good physician, comes when he is most needed: somehow, to be fully rejuvenated, the world first had to grow old utterly and come to the limit of its own foolish hopes. Christ is sent by the Father into the world "to liberate the human race from its state of decrepitude." (60)

"If I had the mind of God, I would forgive all which means I would sustain rather than judge, or, better still, my very judgement would consist of forgiveness, because it would judge the misery and plight that underlies most human actions."

"To abandon myself to his love would constitute the supreme act of my freedom for it would be nothing less than soaring in the heaven of his providence, a life of permanent flight in celebration of the sheer beauty of space. The bird, which in its airborne existence is the universal symbol of freedom from constraint and care, is here made by Jesus to be the privileged symbol of divine filiation and trust."