We finish up today Marko Rupnik’s In the Fire of the Burning Bush. The last sections we cover deal with a number of topics and I thought I’d just lay out a few potent statements he makes:
“After all, it is not so important to reach a psychological tranquility [he’s speaking here of what we often call happiness and its pursuit]. Even that can be an idol and so should not be mythologized. What counts and what is really healthy is discovering that our lives are gathered and hidden with Christ in God” (53).
Intercession is giving things to God — surrendering them to God — surrendering them to God is the cross life.
“Love means complete unity, a living organism in contact with every part of the whole … To love oneself means to see the meaning of each thing in relation to the entire person” (57).
“Love needs matter…. The measure of the spiritual life, therefore, is the spiritual concreteness of daily lived experience” (59).
“True culture, therefore, is the environment that allows us to love our neighbor” (65).
“Living one’s vocation means living according to the agapic principle and therefore continually dying to every attachment, self-assertion, and selfishness” (67).
“Whoever thinks according to formal logic believes that the spiritual life is an ideal to be accomplished. Instead… it is a process that does not have to do with a formally reachable goal but rather with a living, personal organism that cannot be made abstract. It consists of a dynamism that, the more radical it is, the more perfect it is” (68). This is the notion of an intensive morality rather than a moral morality.
Next week we begin with Telford Work, Ain’t Too Proud to Beg.