Tag: cardhansurvonbalthasaronlove

Thought for the Day – 18 December – Monday of Gaudete Week and the Memorial of Bl Giulia Nemesia Valle (1847-1916) – Called “the Angel of Charity”

Try to gather together more frequently to give thanks to God and to praise Him.   For when you come together frequently, Satan’s powers are undermined and the destruction that he threatens is done away with in the unanimity of your faith.   Nothing is better than peace, in which all warfare between heaven and earth is brought to an end.

None of this will escape you if you have perfect faith and love toward Jesus Christ.  These are the beginning and the end of life:  faith the beginning, love the end.  When these two are found together, there is God and everything else concerning right living follows from them.   No one professing faith sins: no one possessing love hates.   A tree is known by its fruit.   So those who profess to belong to Christ will be known by what they do. For the work we are about is not a matter of words here and now but depends on the power of faith and on being found faithful to the end.

…Nothing is hidden from the Lord but even our secrets are close to Him.   Let us then do everything in the knowledge that He is dwelling within us that we may be His temples, and He, God within us.   He is and will reveal Himself, in our sight, according to the love we bear Him in holiness.

St Ignatius of Antioch (35-108)

(excerpt from a letter to the Ephesians by Saint Ignatius of Antioch, Bishop, Martyr, Father of the Church)

Faith means the fundamental response
to the love that has offered itself up for me.
It thus becomes clear that faith is ordered primarily
to the inconceivability of God’s love,
which surpasses us and anticipates us.
Love alone is credible;
nothing else can be believed
and nothing else ought to be believed.
This is the achievement, the ‘work’ of faith:
to recognise this absolute prius,
which nothing else can surpass;
to believe that there is such a thing as love, absolute love
and that there is nothing higher or greater than it.

Cardinal Hans Urs Von Balthasar (1905-1988)