The Mystery of Christ reflected in the Sacrament of Confession

...Divinity and humanity are not separate spheres within the Son. Everywhere we try to penetrate into his humanity, we encounter the mystery of his being more than a man, that is, his divine sonship. He is not beyond all understanding, and yet precisely in our understanding, the incomprehensible overwhelms us; rather than being able to see him in his entirety, it is we who find ourselves seen by him and drawn into his ever greater dimensions. Because we are incorporated in this way, we lose any overview of our own situation. It is he who contains us in his perfect openness both to the Father and to the world.

    Whenever we confess according to his will, we must consider his double attitude so that we, too, may learn the correct attitude. He shows us who he is by opening himself to us: he is the one open to the Father, who in disclosing himself to us, also shows us the Father, also glorifies the Father.

...confession is the fruit of the divine human life. The Lord's turning to us, the form bequeathed to the Church, would be the...legacy that in some way is comprehensible in itself, and the turning to the Father would be the unsurveyable sphere of inspiration. We can understand a great deal about confession, just as we could about miracles. We know, for example, that before, the woman was hemorrhaging, and now, she is healthy. Only the nexus between these two facts remains incomprehensible. Or we understand that our Lord was dead and now lives, but we do not understand how that is possible. We do understand, however, that the things extending into the sphere of understanding are related in the sphere of the incomprehensible and are its manifestation. We understand a great deal about confession in the same way: for example, that there must be penance, that it is advisable for a person to admit his errors, and that there must also be an an authority and  a judgment upon good and evil on earth. We also more or less understand many things about faith: that the God-man did penance for our sins on the cross and for that reason the penance we accept for our guilt acquires somehow a symbolic character. Yet all the comprehensible elements are integrated into a whole which as such remains beyond our vision. In the course of the centuries the Church may acquire an increased understanding both of many individual elements and of the incomprehensibility of the whole, and with both of these an understanding of the mystery of Christ, the way he wished to remain alive for us in the vitality of the Father.

  Confession    Adrienne von Speyr   pp 148, 149

Christ:God and Man

Colossians 2:9 "For in him the whole fulness of the deity dwells bodily."

...Christ is God and man, but in such a way that this meeting of the divine and the human in him does not impose the slightest limitation anywhere. God is not in the least restricted by the Incarnation; it neither hinders nor weakens him; it does not put him in a state of unconsciousness; nothing is lacking to him of his divinity, his eternal life and omniscience. But nothing is lacking to Christ the man, either, as a result of his being God; he does not run up against his divinity as though encountering an obstacle to his genuine, full humanity; it is not as though he skipped right over finite human feelings, knowledge and experience and rushed like a stream into his divinity, finding therein a support for his existence that is unavailable as such to any other man. Rather, he is God and man in a union that leaves both natures intact and binds them together in their perfection, not making them merely run side by side. Only such a union can bring it about that in him the whole fulness of the deity dwells bodily, that deity actually accompanies this human life and has a share in this genuine human experience...Divinity and humanity are so intimately bound together in his being that they interpenetrate, with the exception of only those places where the fulness of one would constrain the fulness of the other and would cause harm to it. Aside from that, the two live in one another in a perfect vitality; God takes on perfectly the man united with him, and he who was made man is permitted to live in God.  

Letter to the Colossians,  commentary by Adrienne von Speyr   pp 77. 78

The Christ Witness of the Priest

......What is the first condition for bringing Christ to others? Bringing a real man or a real woman. Bringing Christ to others implies bearing witness to them that, in my experience, he responds to my humanity: Christ is the response to the needs of our humanity.

     For the priest, a lived belonging to Christ as the one Sent by the Father (John 20:21) is the exhaustive definition of his own personality (Galatians 2:20). "[The priest's ] life and ministry" - I said in a communique of the 1995 international symposium of the Congregation for the Clergy in Rome - "are thus a response to a real, historical, and existential Event: he is consumed  by the love of Christ, crucified and risen (2 Cor 5:41 ff.)." This consuming love makes us participate in the mission for which he came, died and rose again: that everyone who lives no longer lives for himself, but for him who died and was raised for them. This urgency of Christ's love, that ensures the memory of God's love for human persons, is the goal toward which all our desire and all our activity tend. 

   quoted from the "Afterword", by Luigi Giussani, in Together on the Road, by Massimo Camisasca,  pp. 118,9

Christ's Conception of Life.

"Jesus Christ did not come into the world as a substitute for human effort, for human freedom, or to eliminate human trial - the existential condition of freedom. He came into the world to call man back to the depths of all questions, to his own fundamental structure, and to his own real situation. If certain human values are not safeguarded, all the problems man is called to resolve in the trial of life do not dissolve, but rather become more complicated. Jesus Christ came to call man back to true religiosity, without which every claim to a solution of those problems is a lie. The problem of the knowledge of the meaning of things (truth), making use of things (work), human awareness (love), human co-existence (society and politics), lack a proper formulation, and so, to the extent that religiosity is not at the foundation of the search for their solution, they generate ever greater confusion in the history of the individual and humanity as a whole."

At the Origin of the Christian Claim, Luigi Giussani, p. 97

Christ Happens to Me Now!

      The following is a running reflection on two paragraphs from an address by Fr. Julian Carron entitled "Christ Is Something That Is Happening To Me Now". It was published in TRACES  magazine, and first delivered at the presentation Fr. Luigi Giussani's book At The Origin of The Christian Claim in Milan on Jan. 25, 2012. The address in its entirety can be found  on the Communion and Liberation website, in English and Spanish. I read the whole article twice, slowly, before it began to sink in, and the two short paragraphs below several times more before their depths started to unfold. You might benefit from reading the bold print only,  before reading my thoughts on the text, which are in italics. How does Christ happen to you?


     "In order for man to be able to grasp fully what Jesus Christ means, he has to stand before Him with all his humanity. That means me, of course, and you. I have to stand before Him with "all of my humanity". How in the world do I do that when I scarcely know myself and am far from fully aware of myself? 

Without this humanity, without this attentive, tender, and impassioned awareness of myself, I will not be able to recognize Christ. Why? Why won't I be able to recognize Him? Why must I have this "attentive, tender. and impassioned awareness of myself"? Why isn't my normal, distracted, strung out, rough, unfeeling self enough for recognizing Him?

The reason is simple - because Christ presents Himself as an answer to what I am. I like that. He is the answer to what I am. I am a human being. But as a human being I am not fully alive. Nor can I say that I am totally  fulfilled, in spite of all the help psychology and technology give me. I  am a puzzle to myself,  a question that I cannot answer, an unknown. So my temptation naturally is to think there is no answer, instead of thinking that He is the answer.

Without this awareness, even the name of Jesus Christ ends up becoming merely being a name. I end up reducing Him when I  approach Him as if  my humanity were the measure of Him, instead of acknowledging Him as the full measure of me.
     
        It's hard to find a higher estimation of the person than that offered by Christianity. Hard? That word isn't strong enough. 'Impossible' would be better. I defy you to find a 'estimation of the person' anywhere that is 'higher' than Christ's.

Christ does not mean to secretly enter into a person's life, as if taking advantage of a distraction. He is not going to slip in on me when I'm not looking, or take me over in a moment of weakness when I let my guard down.

He wants to enter a man's life through the main door, passing through his humanity, a fully conscious humanity, made of reason and freedom. Wow! a humanity, a human being, (me, you) that doesn't use reason and freedom to become as conscious as it can is less than human, is subhuman!

Christ submits Himself to scrutiny by man's inborn criterion, his heart. Okay, now think I see where he is going: to the heart of the matter, the human heart, my core, what is deepest in me, where my reason, freedom, and His Grace meet in my yes and become one, or where I say no and we separate. Coming into me any other way would be an invasion, an intrusion, or a takeover.

Without this scrutiny, there is no Christian experience, and Christianity would have no chance of succeeding. If I do not scrutinize Him, examine, question, and explore, ask and seek and knock, ponder and wonder, with all that is in me, I am doing Him and me and injustice, treating both of us as less than we are, and giving Him less than his due.

The American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr pointed out the reason clearly:'Nothing is more unbelievable than the answer to a question that is not asked'. Proposing Him as the answer to humanity makes Him an irrelevant, preposterous, transcendental cliche, if He is not happening to me now. If  I am  not reaching out to Him with all the reason and freedom of my head and heart, then He is only a historical footnote from the past, an abstract value I try to live by, but not really my Lord. I show his irrelevancy to me when the empty way I mouth His name reveals He has no place in my life.

Quotation: Giussani

       "The human being is a relationship with the eternal mystery of the Trinity, which we know as the humanity of Christ. The humanity of Christ is what allows us to keep our eyes, hearts, and minds open, directed to the true goal for which our parents conceived us and gave birth to us. Our relationship is with the infinite." The Risk of Education, p.107