My Kingdom is
Invisible, but I want to establish you, my Bride, before the eyes of men so
visibly that no one will be able to overlook you. I want to raise you up like
the brazen serpent in the desert, like the rock against which hell itself is
dashed to pieces, like Mount Tabor over whose peak the shining cloud hovers,
and like the Cross that casts its shadow over all lands - the blazon of my
victory in failure.
I want to establish
you upon iron foundations, and your structure is to be a true and distinctive
sign that I am setting up a memorial to myself upon the earth. You will be my
witness to the very edge of the world, a witness that I was in the world, and I
will not forsake you until the end of time. You will be a sign of contradiction
among the peoples, and no one will even as much as whisper your name, 0 my
Church, without shuddering.
Over you men will
have to part their ways, for many will love you and squander everything for
you, but very many will hate you, and these will swear an oath not to rest
until they have exterminated you from the land of men. And you will be despised
like no man or thing, except myself, has ever been despised on earth. They will
stand in line for the privilege of spitting in your face, of wiping off on your
garments the mud from their shoes.
On all walls they
will scrawl caricatures of your mystery, and in the bars, writhing with
laughter, they will sing obscene songs about you. They will set you in the
pillory and, after they have bound and gagged you, they will accuse you of
every vulgarity and demand that you wash yourself clean.
No means will be
left untried to bring you under suspicion and every one of your shortcomings
will be inflated to monstrous proportions. You will know hard times, nor will
there be any assigned place for you. Wherever the path seemed to lie open
before you, you will, before long, find a landslide and a roadblock, or perhaps
a wall.
"Impossible!",
you will say. You will have to live on earth, yet without possessing a home.
You will have to acquaint yourself with both the good and the evil customs of
every people and with all of men's distresses. But, although you will be in
their midst, men will make sure to exclude you from both their trust and their
confidence.
They will let you
feel that you remain the foreigner in the house, at best tolerated, never truly
loved. No matter what you may attempt in order to make yourself of service,
they will not be satisfied. If you make yourself one of them, they will scorn
you; and, if you keep to yourself, they will say: "You see, she knows
herself where she belongs. Let's then put an end to the affair and drive her
out once and for all."
For a time it will
seem as though you have attained to well-being and success among them. They
will rally around your banner and make themselves at home in the great shadow
of your cathedrals. Your word will be their nourishment and your blessing will
transfigure their lives.
But then it will
be as if your children had outgrown the milk of your breasts. The more clever
among them will shake themselves loose of your heavenly bonds, and the
avalanche of their apostasy will gain momentum through the centuries, until the
masses, inexorably dragged along by this irresistible pull towards the earth,
will also desert your fold.
You who wanted to
gather up humanity in order to present it to me as the one fruit in the
libation-cup of your prayer: See how you now stand leafless like a tree in the
autumn. No harvest has been brought in, and the commandment to go forth which
burns within your heart is today still less fulfilled than on the first day
when you set out. At that time everything was still possible, even in the midst
of the heathen's immense darkness.
A light had gone
up, and all faces turned automatically towards this New Thing. But now it seems
as though your song is becoming a hurdy-gurdy. Whenever you appear in a street
all windows are shut, and the little which people's ears nonetheless still
unwillingly perceive excites in them nothing but disgust and infinite boredom.
You can no longer
conceal the disgrace of having failed totally, of having lost the game for
good. People's distress may still fill a couple of your bombed-out churches...
But just wait for the day of prosperity to return and you will be more
forgotten than a corpse of a thousand years. You have not recognized the signs
of the time. The rushing stream of love that you once released over a thirsty
world (the slave raised up a hopeless eye, women lifted their veils, all the
disinherited felt the breath of a more-than-earthly mercy): this rushing
stream, I say, is now dammed up.
Your
administrators stingily dole out through well-run pipe-systems and institutions
the precious liquid of my grace. The bark of the tree which once blossomed in
the wild has now turned to cork. You have become such an established household
that even the catastrophic storms of the times, and persecution rattling at
your gates and windows, can hardly awaken you from sleep, and a slap in your
face can elicit from you but an embarrassed smile. Disgrace covers the length
of you, all the more poignantly as you try to deny it, pretending nothing is
amiss.
So there you
stand, my Bride, truly a sign over the peoples at which fingers point, a widely
known but little loved sign. Your failure redounds to me, since on your account
my name, too, is blasphemed among the heathen.
Many a man who
sought me with a sincere heart came to a terrified halt on his way as he
suddenly caught sight of you, and he turned away. And many a one who saw how
troublesome is the life of your faithful, how little redeemed they appear to
be, how pitifully the glow of their hearts smothers under the ashes, how
strictly they judge the world while being themselves secretly full of the
world; has turned resolutely to the innocence of the heathen.
It is not your
love -- that overcomes the world - which is a scandal to them; for that is a
scandal which you should give! Their scandal, rather, is your luke-warmness and
your unbridled lack of love.
You were meant to
be for men an image of the unity between me and the Father, and it was for this
that I sent you our Holy Spirit, the bond of unifying love; for this it was
that I established you on the all-embracing unity of baptism, doctrine, and the
uninterrupted succession from Peter to John Paul II. Your very essence is
unity, and each of the tokens by which you are recognized and by which you can
prove your identity is founded on unity.
have entered into
you with my Spirit and, as your one heart, I move you towards unity from
within.
But you are always
in a state of revolt against yourself. No people is more torn asunder than
yours, none so pervaded by discord down to the very foundations. Every person
within you who holds an office, everyone who has charge of a mission or who
administers a task I have given him, constantly tends to consider the part that
he is as if it were the whole. He sees the small wheel he turns as if it were
the power that moves everything else, or the worthless service he performs as
if it were indispensable.
All of you are
members, and as members all of you should serve so as to complete one another,
thankful that your brothers possess what you yourself do not have. in the love
which does not seek its own you would possess the whole. For I am the whole, I
who am the Head of the Body and the soul which unifies it.
But no! Down the
centuries you quarrel over the better places, forever tearing up and mangling
my Body to the bone. And when you do not succeed in tearing a whole member, a
whole land, away from the community of the Church, when you, blinded by spite,
do not set up a new - the thousandth! - sect alongside my real house, then you
strive, insatiable and agitating burrowers that you are, to hollow out like
mice the walls within the house, and like moles to shake the foundations.
Your priests'
enviousness has become proverbial, and the fights among your Orders, the
rivalries among your organizations, make them the subject of derision. Each
individual thinks his own limited program is the best and only valid one, and
so the members become detached from one another and my holy, life-giving Blood
can no longer flow through them. Long before a new part of your house caves in,
long before an external schism is sealed, the sap of love has already become
stagnant within; stealthy heresy and omnivorous sin have already made the
terrible events inevitable.
It is with you, my
Body, that I am forever fighting the great, apocalyptic battle. Whatever
remains far from me and my heart is nothing but hollow flesh, lost in itself.
But I do not find it difficult to save such flesh: it puts up no resistance and
lets itself in due time be brought into the fold.
Whoever stands
closer to me, however, has been initiated into my mystery and, belonging to my
Body, perceives the throbbing of my Heart as it resounds throughout the Body's
internal vaulting: this person has received the Spirit and is, therefore, awake
and able to choose freely. Only he truly knows the meaning of sin.
Thus, I am
endangered within my own Body; it is within me that my deadly enemy lies in
wait. I have suckled a snake at my breast, a worm that does not die. In this,
too, have I become like you: just as temptation rises within you from your own
flesh, so, too, does the deepest threat leap up against me from my own flesh.
The spirit is willing and strong, but the flesh is weak, and where the spirit
borders on the flesh it is vulnerable, having come to terms with weakness. That
is a borderline where the spirit has always betrayed itself, giving itself
away.
For, if the spirit
had nothing of flesh, how could it come to form one being with the flesh? In
the same way, I, the strong God, have betrayed myself to you - my Body, my
Church - and in the place where I did this I became weak: there alone could I
be wounded to the death.
In that place I
yielded, I surrendered to the temptation of loving a body within my own Body
(for who can hate his own flesh?); the temptation of delivering myself up to
the obscure chaos of a body, of plunging below the shiny surface of the flesh;
the temptation of passing over into this world - this simmering darkness,
opposed to the Father's light; the temptation, I say, of passing over into this
adventure of the senses, into this unknown virgin forest called Mankind.
Just as you,
passionately, with throbbing pulse, cross over temptation's boundary, so, too,
have I crossed over the boundary of the flesh with a quivering heart, fully
conscious of the danger. I dared to enter the body of my Church, the deadly body
which you are. For the spirit is mortal only within its own body.
And so, from now
on, we are no longer two but, together, only one flesh which loves itself and
which struggles and wages battle with itself even to the point of death. For
your sake I became weak, since I could experience your being only in weakness.
No wonder you
realized your advantage over me and took my nakedness by storm! But I have
defeated you through weakness and my Spirit has overpowered my unruly and
recalcitrant flesh. (Never has woman made more desperate resistance!) In order
to put a seal on my victory and exploit my triumph, I have engraved a mark upon
you, 0 my flesh: on your carnal weakness I have engraved the mark of my own
carnal weakness, and on your sin the mark of my love.
Never again will
your sinful battle against me be anything other than the long wrestling of
love. This is the meaning I confer upon it, and now it can have no other
meaning. Precisely because you, 0 wretched one, knowingly sin against love,
precisely for that reason is your sin enfolded by my love. And because I, who
am at once Spirit and Love, am myself the battlefield between God and the
world, the battle is already and eternally won in me. Our wrecked covenant --
our blood-wedding, the red wedding of the Lamb -- is already, here and now, the
white bridal bed of divine love.
Do what you will,
you remain the captive of love. I raised you up, wild one, when you were
struggling and weltering in your own blood. I have washed you in the bath of my
Blood, in the water-bath of my baptism and in the Word of Life, and I have
fashioned for myself a glorious Church, without blemish or wrinkle, holy and
unspotted.
You may behave
like a wanton courtesan and daily betray me with another: still, you will never
be what you in this way pretend to be. For all eternity you are my pure Body
and my chaste Spouse. I am going to clothe your disgrace with such holiness
that the aroma of your garments will fill the whole earth, and no one will be
able to deny that he has really and bodily sensed your fragrance.
I will deposit
such love into your hands - love for you to distribute - that your name among
the peoples will be called "The Lovable" and "Love's
Watchtower." And I will put in your heart such concern for the world and
for my lost sheep that the dull herd will smell their shepherd and run to you
almost against their will. The insults which you are preparing for me will not
be as great as the disgrace that I will bestow upon you from the treasury of my
Cross. The mockery they will pile upon you will be nothing compared with the
mockery I will entrust to you as my precious gift and my priceless wedding
present, taken from the storehouse of my divine sufferings.
The inglorious
weakness with which, in this century of collapse, you stand before the world
unable to transform it: this weakness is already a part of the mystery of my
own inglorious weakness, for when was I ever strong enough to renew the face of
this exterior world? Thus, it is my will to give you a worth which does not
properly belong to you, and to fashion you solely from the might of my heart,
as Eve was fashioned from Adam's rib.
The source of your
life, 0 Church, is both a demand and a promise. Live not from yourself: live
solely in me and from me. Think of yourself no longer as of the one you used to
be. Think no longer of your heart, but rather let my Heart alone be sufficient
for you - the heart which I have planted in the center of your body.
You ought, in this
way, to be my Bride and my Body, and it is my will to redeem the whole world in
you, exclusively in you. Be my handmaid. Renounce your will and nestle, like
Ruth, at my feet. Become obedient even to death.
Be for the world
my embodied obedience, shown forth visibly and sensibly throughout all ages. Be
so obedient that to say "Church" will be to say
"obedience"; for redemption is found in obedience, and whoever
proclaims me must depict my obedience even to the death on the cross. Thus it
is that I want to exalt you to be Queen of the World, and all peoples and ages
will have to bow before you. You, however, yourself obeying, are to exact
obedience in my name, for it is my will to rule the world in none other than
you, and in no other body but yours does my Heart throb. This is the demand and
this the promise.
Bind yourself to
me so irrevocably that I will be able to descend to hell with you; and then I
will bind you to myself so irrevocably that, with me, you will be able to
ascend to very heaven. Empty yourself out into me so completely that I can fill
you with myself. I will spare you no extremity - not the heights and not the
depths--for I wish to have no secret from you. Where I am, there you too are to
be. What I do, that are you to do in me.
So it is that I
wish to teach you my obedience: a blind obedience leading you to abandon your
every insight, your every love, your every faith, and through this obedience
they will recognize who has my Spirit and who belongs to my Body. But this
obedience will be but the pledge of my love for you and of your love for me,
and in the midst of your slavish service you will experience the freedom of the
children of God coming upon you like the ray of a light from above.
You will
experience how greatly servitude follows the coercion of love. In all of this
you will fare as I did when I, by being my Father's slave, was only bound the
more intimately to his love, and every creaturely distance from my Father
revealed itself as a means and a detour and a more cunning ruse leading towards
unification.
I now repeat with
you the same game which the Father played with me. I dismiss you, out into the
world; I leave you behind on earth, widowed, only in order to unite myself to
you from heaven in a more interior, more spiritual, more divine manner.
I leave you as if
bereft of soul in the grave of the world, with your spirit wandering among the
shades of the underworld, only to deliver you from death suddenly, abruptly,
thus again proving to the world that you live and that I live in you. For your
existence in the world is an incessant miracle, and no one can ignore the fact
that you drink from an alien spring, that a table other than theirs nourishes
you.
And so, in spite
of everything, you will be my sign among the nations. To them you will remain a
very implausible thing, so much so that they will daily prophesy your death.
And you will indeed die after a fashion. But see: we live, you and I, for I
have died once, and whoever eats of my death will live eternally and I will
awaken him on the Last Day -- and each day is the last.
I have died once,
and only once does my Body, my Church, pass over from death to life. This is
the one turning. Each of your members must make it a reality in union with me,
each in his own place, in his own century, but in the unity of the one change,
in the transubstantiation of this world into the other world (they are the
same).
There is but one
turning wherein earth becomes heaven, and this turning point is the Church.
Here the occluded (closed up) world opens up and awaits the promised grace.
Here man confesses his guilt and recognizes his truth. By the very act of
becoming exposed, man's truth is effaced and in its place he receives the truth
of God.
Here the old man
is replaced by the new. Here the world dies and another world rises. Here the
two eons intersect. Here every ending becomes a be ginning, every impasse
becomes the pledge of a hope. Here springs forth out of the hardest rock the
water of eternal life. Here ends the road of reason and faith sprouts wings.
Here the puzzle of the world is solved through the mystery of God. Here is
bridged the chasm between heaven and earth, because your faithful live in both
realms at once.
Blessedness is no
longer a distant promise: this, rather, is eternal life - that in love they
have come to know you, Father, and also me, whom you have sent. And no human
flinching concerning salvation will constitute such shaky ground that the Rock
of Faith will not outdo instability with firmness. "For my sheep hear my
voice and I know them, and they follow after me, and I give them eternal life,
and they will not in all eternity be lost, and no one will snatch them from my
hand. My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all others, and no
one can steal from the Father's hand. I and the Father are one."
This is why I
myself am the Resurrection and the Life, and whoever believes in me, whoever
drinks from the source that flows from my open side, from him a new source will
spring forth which will be inexhaustible, for it flows from eternal life into
eternal life. And, Martha, it will not be on the Last Day that I will awaken
him, for whoever believes in me has already passed over from death to life. His
grave has already burst open and he has risen to eternal life. This is eternal
life, that believing, loving and hoping, they come to know you, Father, and
also me, whom you have sent.
To you, my Church,
have I entrusted this fountainhead. Out of you, who are my Body, out of your
open side does it flow forth to refresh all peoples. Just as you, as the new Eve,
have sprung forth from my sleep, so do I, who am divine life itself, spring
forth from you. Your hands distribute me as the Bread of the World.
For, to be sure,
the woman derives from the man, but the man is then born of the woman.
Everything, however, derives from God. Being God, I am the Source and am before
every being, and for this reason the man is the glory of God and the source of
the woman, and God-become-human is the man, while the Church is a woman, since
the woman is the glory of the man.
But, because I
became the Son of Man, I have been born from human beings and am your child, 0
Church. For everyone who does the will of my Father is not only my brother and
my sister, but my mother as well. You have sprung forth from my Heart and I
have rested under your heart. You, to whom I gave birth with much suffering at
the Cross, will be prostrate in painful labor with me until the end of the
world.
Your image
mysteriously blurs to merge with the image of my virginal Mother. She is an
individual woman, but in you she becomes the cosmic Mother. For in you my
individual Heart, too, widens to become the Heart of the World.
You yourself are
the holy heart of the nations, holy because of me, but unifying the world for
me, making my Blood circulate throughout the body of history. In you my
redemption ripens, I myself grow to my full stature, until I, two-in-one with
you, and in the bond of the two-in-one flesh - you, my Bride and my Body - will
place at the feet of the Father the Kingdom which we are. The bond of our love
is the meaning of the world. In it all things reach fulfillment. For the
meaning of the world is love.