Even if a unity of faith is not possible, a unity of love is.
Hans Urs Von BalthasarRead
The Holy Spirit knows what a particular age's most pressing need is far better than men with their programs.
Interpretation
The Holy Spirit understands the true needs of each generation better than human planning can.
This quote emphasizes the belief that divine insight, represented by the Holy Spirit, surpasses human understanding and societal programs in identifying what is most needed during specific times. It suggests that while humans may create strategies and plans, it is ultimately the spiritual guidance that reveals the deeper, pressing needs of society.
In practice
In a sermon discussing the importance of spiritual guidance in leadership.
Even if a unity of faith is not possible, a unity of love is.
It is to the Cross that the Christian is challenged to follow his Master: no path of redemption can make a detour around it.
A truth that is merely handed on, without being thought anew from its very foundations, has lost its vital power.
The first attempt at a response: there must have been a fall, a decline, and the road to salvation can only be the return of the sensible finite into the intelligible infinite.
But the saints are never the kind of killjoy spinster aunts who go in for faultfinding and lack all sense of humor. (Nor should the Karl Barth who so loved and understood Mozart be regarded as such.)For humor is a mysterious but unmistakable charism inseparable from Catholic faith, and neither the "progressives" nor the "integralists" seem to possess it - the latter even less than the former.
Beauty is the disinterested one, without which the ancient world refused to understand itself, a word which both imperceptibly and yet unmistakably has bid farewell to our new world, a world of interests, leaving it to its own avarice and sadness.
Maybe as times get worse we get better. Our pain makes us feel other people's too; our fear lets us practice valor; we are tense, and tender as well. And among the things we can no longer afford are things we never really wanted anyway.
It is not the skills we actually have that determine how we feel but the ones we think we have.
Through imagination, we can visualize the uncredited worlds of potential that lie within us.
There is giant untapped potential in disagreement, especially if the disagreement is between two or more thoughtful people
...maybe a damned good night's sleep will bring me back to a gentle sanity. But at the moment, I look about this room and, like myself, it's all in disarray: things fallen out of place, cluttered, jumbled, lost, knocked over and I can't put it straight, don't want to. Perhaps living through these petty days will get us ready for the dangerous ones.
Criticism does not make you smarter or better than the one you are criticizing. In fact, the stuff you are critical of in others is the same stuff you don't like about yourself.
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