Heart of the World – Conference 4 – Meditations on the Paschal Mystery with Dr. Anthony Lilles and Kris McGregor

Join Dr. Anthony Lilles and Kris McGregor as they offer a type of “online retreat” based on the spiritual work Heart of the World written by Fr. Hans Urs von Balthasar.

In fourth “conference” talk, Dr. Lilles reflects upon “Love – A Wilderness”

Here is the excerpt that is read in the conference:

We fall down and adore you. In the end, only you remain, O Heart at the Center! We are not. Whatever is good in us is you. What we ourselves are is negligible. We pass by before you and aspire to be nothing more than mirrors and windows for our brothers. Our setting before you is your rising over us: our merging into you and your entry into us. For still does our decline before you bear the figure of your own decline, and still does our guilty distance from you belong not to ourselves, since you have made it into a distance of your own, Sin has the form of redemption.

And so in the end you remain alone, all in all. You are one with yourself, and without losing yourself you pour yourself out into the many. By remaining in the multiplicity of the members, you bring them all home into the unity of the Body. your self-emptying, even unto uttermost weakness and the renouncing of love, is your deed of uttermost strength and immutable love , and when you are weakest and they all trample you like a worm, it is then you are the Hero and have trampled the serpent. For what is emptiness? What fullness?  Which of them is real privation?  When you are empty and thirst for fullness, the we, the Church, are your fulfillment. But you are always the fullness and we are the void, always, even when you are fatigued and spent with exhaustion, even then do we all receive from your fullness grace upon grace. Your Church is but a vessel, she is only your organ. You are the leaping fountain. And even if out of us also there springs up a stream into life everlasting, this is a draft which you gave, for only from you do streams of living water flow. And when you go through the world poor and gray, cloaked in the garments of the lowly and the disinherited, concealing yourself behind sinners and tax-collectors, and we absent-mindedly perform on you the eight works of mercy, even then you alone are the giver who has made love possible for us from both within and without.

You alone remain. You are all in all. Even if your love desires us in order to delight in twoness and in order to celebrate with us the mystery of begetting and conceiving, nevertheless it is always YOUR love in both instances, your love which both gives and is given, at once seed and womb, and, again, the child begotten is none other than you. If love needs two feet in order to walk, still the walker is but one person, and that one is you. And if love needs two lovers, a lover and a beloved, still the love is only one, and that one is you.

Everything hearkens back to your throbbing Heart. Time and the seasons still hammer away and create, and your Heart drives the world and all its happenings forward with great painful blows. It is the unrest of the clock, and your Heart is restless until it rests in me. Your Heart is restless until we rest in you, once time and eternity have become interfused. But: Be at peace! I have overcome the world. The torment of sin has already been submerged in the stillness of love. The experience of what the world is has made love darker, more fiery, more ardent. The shallower abyss of rebellion has been swallowed up in unfathomable mercy, and throbbing majestically reigns serene the Heart of God.

Hans Urs von Balthasar, Heart of the World (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1979), 217-219.

Here is the link to the Divine Mercy Prayer that Dr.