The Vertical Church of the Live Grenade

Speaking of wounded Gods, I was thinking the other day of how mankind's blows to Jesus are like the last word in... jewjitsu, in that they ultimately miss him and instead redound upon the assailant. Ouch!

Actually, Balthasar says something similar in Heart of the World... which I can't find at the moment, but I see that there's a chapter called A Wound has Blossomed, so maybe this is just a roundabout way of getting there.

Ah. I see that it has a kind of double meaning. We wound Jesus out of the most wounded parts of our depraved selves, and somehow this backfires... in a good way: "Men wounded your Heart; water and blood flowed out. Men drank and became healthy; they washed themselves and became pure."

This goes even -- or perhaps especially -- for the man who murdered love. Which is all of us.

"Just as the first creation arose ever anew out of sheer nothingness, so, too, this second world... will have its sole origin in this wound, which is never to close again."

It's as if the church -- which is to say, the body of Christ -- is One Giant Wound.

In the margin, I wrote a note to myself: "He is the live grenade and the one who dives on it."

I just picked up Prayer, and there is this: the "'opening' to heaven which he is, is like a gaping rent going right through humanity, and the rent is the Church."

Which is sort of what I was driving at on page 252, where it says that the rend is now redeemable on your mirromortal garment.

If it makes no sense, don't worry, it's still perfect nonsense, for "it is as if God is not particularly interested in our attaining any kind of systematic grasp of his revelation."

Indeed, if we could completely comprehend it, it would be closer to Islam or Buddhism than to the Live Grenade (Islam explodes only dead ones).

By the way, God only supplies the grenade. We still have to pull the ring.

Referring back to what Balthasar says about God not being interested in a s. grasp of his r., another book of his helped motivate me to get back to blogging.

Recall that I was a tad frustrated over being unable to assemble it all into a Grand Synthesis, but think of the example of Jesus. Not only was there no Grand Synthesis, he didn't leave a single written word. Rather, he had the absolute faith to leave it to the Holy Spirit to take care of that. He doesn't even bother to try to be his own theologian.

"As for us, we try, for as long as we can, to finish our finite works ourselves; Jesus does not need to interpret the infinite work that he has begun and also completed and offer it in bite-sized pieces to the world; he can leave this to the divine Spirit for a perpetual interpretation. This is the ultimate Christian serenity" (emphasis mine).

"The only time Jesus wrote, he wrote on drifting dust.... Christ himself did not want, nor was he able, to manage the entirety of his work and suffering on earth with all its immanent meaning, but rather, handed it over to into the invisible hands of the Father."

So now I serenely type away and let God sort it out. To the extent that I have a mission -- even if just for myself -- submission must be prior to transmission. It's as if we can't give ourselves slack, but rather, can only surrender to it. And some disassembly is required, which is where the live grenade comes in.

Go ahead. Pull the ring. The wound only lasts forever.