Saturday, June 9, 2007

The resurrection


This is a quote by karl Raner that I liked:


To do justice to the mystery of Easter joy with the stale words of human speech is rather difficult. This is so not only because every mystery of the Gospel penetrates only wih difficulty into the narrow confines of human life---thereby making it even harder for our words to grasp and contain and express these mysteries---but because the Easter message is the most human tidings of Christianity. That is why we find it the most difficult message to understand. For what is most true, most obvious, and most easy, is the most difficult to be, to do, and to believe. That is to say, modern people base life on the unexpressed and therefore all the more self-evident, prejudice that anything 'religious' is merely an affair of the most interior heart and of the loftiest spirit--something that we must bring about by ourselves, something, therefore, that involves the difficulties and unreality of the heart's thoughts and moods.

But Easter tells us that God has done something. God himself. And this action has not merely gently touched the heart of a person here and there, so that they tremble slightly from an ineffable and nameless someone. God has raised the Son from the dead. God has quickened the flesh. God has conquered death. God has done this--he has conquered--not merely in the realm of inwardness, in the realm of thought, but in the realm where we, the glory of the human mind notwithstanding, are most really ourselves: in the actuality of this world, far from all 'mere' thoughts and 'mere' sentiments. He has conquered in the realm where we experience practically what we are in essence; children of the earth, who die.

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