Thus it is that you sense Time, and it initiates you into its highest mystery. You come to feel Time’s rhythm, now rushing on, now withdrawing. Under the form of the future it approaches you, overwhelms you, bestows on you an immeasurable bounty; but it also robs you and demands that you give everything. It wants you to be at once rich and poor, ever richer and ever poorer. It wants you to be more loving. And if you were once to follow wholeheartedly the law and imperative of your being, if you were once fully yourself, you would live solely on this gift that flows out to you (this gift which you yourself are), and you would do this by giving it away in turn, in holiness without having defiled it through possessiveness. Your life would be like breath itself, like the lungs’ calm and unconscious double movement. And you yourself would be the air, drawn in and exhaled with the changing measure of the tides. You would be the blood in the pulse of a Heart that takes you in and expels you and keeps you captive in the circulation and spell of its veins.
You sense Time and yet have not sensed this Heart? You feel the stream of grace which rushes into you, warm and red, and yet have not felt how you are loved? You seek for proof, and yet you are yourself are that proof. You seek to entrap him, the Unknown One, in the mesh of your knowledge, and yet you yourself are entrapped in the inescapable net of his might. You would like to grasp, but you yourself are already grasped. You would like to overpower and are yourself being overpowered. You pretend to be seeking, but you have long (and for all time) been found. Through a thousand garments you feel your way to a living body, and yet you insist you cannot feel the hand that nakedly touches your bare soul? You jerk about in the haste of your unquiet heart and call it religion, when in truth these are the convulsions of a fish struggling on shipboard. You would like to find God even though it be with a thousand sorrows: what humiliation that your efforts were but an empty fuss, since he has long held you in his hand. Put your finger to the living pulse of Being. Feel the throbbing that in one single act of creation at once claims you and leaves you free.
…
But the meaning of creation remains unexplainable so long as the veil covers the eternal Image. This life would be nothing but destiny, this time only sorrow, all love but decay, if the pulse of Being did not throb in the eternal, triune Life. Only then does the spring of life begin to leap up also in us: it speaks in us of the Word, becomes itself Word and Language, and communicates to us–as a greeting from God–the task of proclaiming the Father in the world. Only then is the curse of solitude also resolved: for, to-be-over-against is itself divine, and all beings–man and woman and animal and stone–are not, by their particular existence, excluded from the common life, rather are they oriented to one another in their very form. They are not locked up in a dark dungeon from which their oppressed yearning seeks to escape out into the unbounded: rather, as God’s messengers accomplishing a resplendent work of completion, they are rounded out into the one Body whose Head rests in the bosom of the Father.
– Hans Urs von Balthasar (The Heart of the World)
Denna Jesu hjärta-dag kan man även t.ex. läsa om denna fromhets medeltida rötter hos t.ex. Mectild av Helfta eller i kartusiansk andlighet.
Så vackert att hjärtat brister!