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Summary The Wellspring of Worship by Jean CorbonnbspOP
Summary The Wellspring of Worship by Jean CorbonnbspOP
Corbon, O.P.
prodigalcatholic.com/2016/09/03/summary-the-wellspring-of-worship-by-jean-corbon-o-p
Preface
Central Question:
Do our celebrations, lively though they may be, change the lives of
Christians? Where is the vital link — or, possibly, the divorce —
between liturgy and life? (13).
Central Purpose:
Central Symbol:
The river of life (Rev 22:1f) will serve to light the way for our
gradual discovery (14). The wellspring is ever the same, but the
living water that flows from it is ever new (14).
“Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the
throne of God and of the Lamb 2 through the middle of the street of the city. On either side of
the river is the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit each month; and the
leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations”. ~ Revelation 22:1–2
1/35
Jesus is the supreme embodiment of the synergy that will give life
to everything, for in him there is no longer a divine action on the
one side and a human on the other, but the single action of the one
Christ (40).
In this covenant between his two energies, the divine and the
human, the risen Christ is the inexhaustible wellspring of the
liturgy 55.
Ch.1: “The Mystery Kept Hidden through All the Ages” (Eph 3:9)
2/35
The second phase is “the time of God’s venture in history and his
preparation of man for the full truth; it is the time of reciprocal
searching and of the fidelity of the Holy One that is maintained
despite the infidelities of his sinful people” (35).
The third phase is the Word Becomes Flesh: The Kenosis of the Son
–> The entire energy of the gift, patiently poured out at the heart of
Jerusalem, ends here in a fountain whose entire vital energy takes
the form of acceptance (37).
* Mary has been fashioned by the Spirit and sees without realizing
it that the most fruitful activity of the human person is to be “able
to receive” God (37).
The age of the mysterious “synergy” between the river of life and
the world of the flesh has begun (38).
When the river of life joins the energy of acceptance, it acquires a
name: JESUS.
Jesus is the supreme embodiment of the synergy that will give life
to everything, for in him there is no longer a divine action on the
one side and a human on the other, but the single action of the one
Christ (40).
Ch.3: The Hour of Jesus or the Mystery as Event
3/35
If the coming of God as a man did not reach to these depths [the
disastrous tragedy of death], he would be simply poking fun at us
(45).
The coming of the river of life into our history is the only truly
important event because it confronts the death that lies in wait for
us.
Jesus conquers death by his death and thereby bestows his life on
us – that is the most important event in all of history: his Cross and
his Resurrection. These are not two events, but two phases or
moments of the same mystery (46).
At the moment when the kenosis is complete, the nonviolence of
love is omnipotent 49.
At the core of every human event, at the bottom of every human
heart, there is a night of death and rupture, of nonmeaning and
absence 50.
The Cross is the first theophany of the wellspring 52.
On this day of birth the river of life becomes LITURGY as it spreads
out from the tomb and reaches us in the incorruptible body of
Christ. Its wellspring is no longer the Father alone but also the
body of his Son, since this is henceforth wholly permeated by his
glory. If it be true that the drama of history is the interplay of God’s
gift and man’s acceptance of it, then the drama reaches its climax,
and its eternal beginning, on this day, because these two energies
are now joined together forever (54-5).
In this covenant between his two energies, the divine and the
human, the risen Christ is the inexhaustible wellspring of the
liturgy 55.
The river of life can now flow forth from the throne of
God and from the throne of the Lamb. The liturgy has been born;
the Resurrection of Jesus is its first manifestation 55.
4/35
The event that is the Cross and the Resurrection is the only true
event in all of history. All other events are dead and will always be
dead; this one alone remains 56.
Henceforth the economy of salvation takes the form of liturgy 56.
When seen in this perspective, the question of the relation between
celebration and life becomes secondary. The important thing is the
relation of both to the paschal event that wells up at the heart of
every event. In the living Christ who “is not here” but is risen and
who fills all things and holds the keys of death, the heart and God
and the heart of man are as it were the two heartbeats of the heart
of history. There the wellspring flows (57).
Ch.4: The Ascension and the Eternal Liturgy
Just as the hour of Jesus has his Cross and Resurrection are
inseparable phases, so too the “moment” or “date” that begins the
“last times” has the Lord’s Ascension and the outpouring of his
Spirit as inseparable phases (58). There is but a single Passover,
but its mighty energy is displayed in a continual ascension and
Pentecost (59).
The Ascension is a decisive turning point. It does indeed mark the
end of something that is not simply to be cast aside: the end of a
relationship to Jesus that is still wholly external. Above all,
however, it marks the beginning of an entirely new relationship of
faith and of a new time: the liturgy of the last times (59-60).
In His Ascension, then, Christ did not at all disappear; on the
contrary, he began to appear and to come (61).
The Ascension is progressive “until we all…form the perfect Man
fully mature with the fullness of Christ himself” (Eph 4:13). The
movement of the Ascension will be complete only when all the
members of his body have been drawn to the Father and brought to
the life by his Spirit (61-2).
5/35
The work that the Father and the risen Son “still go on working”
(Jn 5:17) is the heavenly liturgy – the fontal liturgy in which the
life-giving humanity of the incarnate Word joins with the Father to
send forth the river of life (62).
Only when the life that burst from the tomb had become liturgy
could the liturgy finally be celebrated – only when the river
returned to its fountainhead, the Father. The liturgy begins in this
movement of return. 64-5.
The liturgy is this vast reflux of love in which everything turns into
life. 65.
The liturgy is the celebration of the Father’s joy. 65.
The joy we give to the Father by letting him find us inspires the
exultation that keeps the liturgy ever alive. How could he, the
wellspring, not be filled with wonder when he sees men becoming a
wellspring in their turn and responding to his eternal thirst? 65.
The Ascension of Jesus is the reflux of the river of life to its
fountainhead. 67.
The heavenly liturgy celebrates the ongoing event of the return of
the Son – and of all others in him – to the Father’s house 67.
6/35
Pentecost marks the beginning of the Church. The Spirit of the
Risen Lord becomes the river that makes the Church apostolic, a
visible, present, accessible fountainhead allowing the mystery of
the liturgy to become incarnate by rousing faith in the hearts of the
disciples and uniting them to the body of Christ (74-5). “Through
the Holy Spirit the liturgy finds “embodiment” in the Church” (74).
“People do not invent the liturgy and therefore do no invent the
Church; they come to birth in it and experience it as a reality” (75).
“The Church is the manifestation of the Spirit of Christ in a new
community of men and women who have entered into life because
the Spirit has brought them into communion with the living body
of the Son of God” (75).
“The Church as it were the human face of the heavenly liturgy, the
radiant and transforming presence of the heavenly liturgy in our
present time” (76).
The “Last Times”, in which the fullness of time has entered into our
mortal time places history in a new and paradoxical situation (77).
Jesus has conquered death, yet death is still influential. Since
“the mysterious suffering of the Father [has] determined the entire
economy of salvation, (80) at the heart of the last times is the
compassion of the Blessed Trinity to permeate the suffering of each
man (80).
7/35
These “Last Times” are filled by the hour of Jesus: not only the
Cross and Resurrection, but also the sabbath, the great Holy
Saturday.
It is the time of silence before the Lamb opens the final seal of
history, the time of hope and groaning, in short, the time of
meeting.
The last times, then, are the time of this dramatic and jubilant
meeting. In the last times history has entered into the great
sabbath of the Christ, the long Holy Saturday during which the
Living One communicates his life to the depths… Yes, we are
still wounded by death, but the wound no longer leads to
corruption; it is the wound left in the gaping earth, and from it
the river of life will flow (82).
The liturgy’s “point of insertion into our history is precisely
this death, this cry of shed blood that mounts up to its
Redeemer” (79).
Now the final vision of the Apocalypse reveals its full meaning.
Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing
from the throne of God and of the Lamb 2 through the middle of the street of the
city. On either side of the river is the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit,
producing its fruit each month; and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the
nations. (Revelation 22:1–2).
8/35
The crystal clear water = the Spirit –> in the last times it is the
Spirit himself in person who is sent and given.
Trees of life = apostolic Church
Cure of the nations = all men
The Church is the “event” that manifests the Spirit. The Church
becomes bride and mother through the Spirit of Jesus who dwells in
her. The Church manifests the Spirit because she is his kenosis.
In this period, which is the last times, all the torrents of the divine
compassion flow together into the river of life; the suffering love of the
Father and the Passion of the Son pour out into the depths of our death
through the kenosis of the Spirit that is manifested in the Church. 85.
Ch.7: The Transfiguration
The Incarnate Word is the true burning bush because “the flame of his
divinity does not consume his humanity but illumines it from within
and shows through it” (89).
9/35
The Synoptic writers place the Transfiguration as the “historical and
literary centre of the Gospel by reason of its mysterious realism: the
humanity of Jesus is the vital place where men become God” (91). The
entire purpose of this event is the salvation of men: “When our
humanity consents without reservation to be united to the humanity of
Jesus, it will share the divine nature (2 Peter 1:4); it will be divinized”
(95).
(4) The radiance of the light in Jesus’ body is the “thrill of the
Father” (93)
“By his miracles Jesus shows himself to be the great and unique
sacrament of God for man and of man for God” (89). “The divine
energy no longer acts alone but,in the body of Christ, acts in synergy
with a man; that is why Jesus is the great sacrament” (90). Therefore,
“it is always in his body that the Word “comes” to save men” (87).
10/35
Eastern Churches consider the Transfiguration as the source of the
sacramental liturgy (95). The body of Jesus is a sacrament in that it is
“anointed” with the divine nature in the unity of the person of the Son
(95). What we call sacraments are in fact the divinizing actions of the
body of Christ in our own very humanity (95). The body of Christ is the
sacrament of human salvation and God’s glorification. The liturgy
creates in the Church the transfiguration of the “whole body”, which is
now growing, the transforming union in which men become God (97).
Ch.8: The Holy Spirit and the Church in the Liturgy
11/35
Threefold Extension of the Energy of the Spirit (according to the 3
times of the economy of salvation that the body of Christ
experiences):
1. Manifest –> the fullness of time.
to make known to us the body of the Lord Jesus.
enlighten the eyes of our hearts to the body of Jesus.
2. Transform –> the last times.
to transform us into the glorious body of the Lord.
to offer our whole beings & be transformed into the
glorious body of Jesus.
3. Communicate –> the consummation of time.
to send us into the world as the Son was sent by the
Father.
to be sent into the world as Christ was to help transform
others too.
** Primary tragedy of history –> the Word comes among men as
their light and their life, and they do not recognize him (102). Why?
Jesus cannot be known from outside, since exteriority is the wound
afflicting our mortal knowledge.
Solution –> the Spirit reveals Jesus to us from within, not by
means of a technique reserved to initiates but through the personal
commitment of anyone who receives him.
The Spirit manifest Jesus to those who are poor enough to believe
in him, leave everything for his sake, and become capable of
carrying him within their tribulation… by purifying our hearts for
him.
The 1st synergy by which the Spirit transforms us into disciples and
theologians –> through loving faith in his Christ (renounce
ourselves & seek him in love).
12/35
We need only acknowledge that we are blind from birth, and his
Spirit will enlighten us; but if we claim to see, our sin remains (Jn
9:39ff.). The Holy Spirit teaches us the humility of heart that
reaches beyond the limits of all out “external knowledge.” 105.
* The question that is concealed in every event: Are we to be the
slaves or the conquerors of death? 106
The Lord is here and is coming, given to us as promise of
Resurrection at the heart of every event.
The Spirit carries on an inexhaustible pedagogy, for the discovery
of the Lord is always new.
Love alone gives sight and the power of discovery.
* The Spirit will make the body of Christ known to us until it fills
our entire field of vision: nothing is alien to it, as we shall see in the
lived liturgy. 106
The Spirit teaches us first to rediscover the way of the heart, where
he pours himself out in us and where prayer becomes life itself 106.
13/35
The wellspring creates a thirst in us and slakes that thirst with the
Spirit, so that we become the body of Christ.
14/35
The kenosis of the Spirit in the Church reminds us that the
liberating event of Christ’s Pasch-Passage is simply offered to us in
every event and that it must be brought to bear with us and
through us. 112.
15/35
The economy turned into liturgy once the river of life leaped forth
from the tomb 117.
Every celebration of the liturgy is geared to that lived liturgy in
which each instant of life should become a “moment” of grace 117.
The celebration is thus a fontal moment in which the river of life
renews the trees of life and gives them new growth and vitality 117.
An ecclesial moment, or it does not exist at all.
The Spirit gives life to men by making them the body of Christ 118.
Without celebration of the liturgy, we would die of thirst… etc.
You cannot live in communion with the Lord while at the same
time live in isolation and separation from Him or say you go to the
Father while scorn the way he has given us to go to him… it’s a
disincarnate spiritualism – a form of death – a contradiction in the
faith – that does not recognize the body of Christ.
Pseudomysticism / Individualism / Disincarnate Spiritualism
The Church’s celebration is the center from which the light of the
mystery radiates into the world of the last times. It “focuses” the
energies of the transfiguration and applies them to a particular
human situation here and now.
16/35
The Celebration as Epiphany – since it allows it to radiate out in
various energies.
The Divine Liturgy contains the whole of the mystery – cannot be put
on the same level as any other celebration.
17/35
(3) omnisacramentalism – Christ present in everything, BUT
Christ is “not yet” all in all – everything subsists in him, but this
world is still in the power of the evil one.
Because the event of the Cross and the Resurrection is always life
giving here and now, ritualism is overcome: a sacred sign and the
event it signifies are no longer separated 134-5.
The newness of Christ makes available to us the wellspring, the
liturgy
“He Split the Rock and Out Streamed the Water” (Is 48:21)
How does the liturgy that manifests itself in the celebration give us
life?
We must go from the mystery as revealed to us in the economy of
salvation to its concretization in the liturgy.
It is the meeting of two freedoms – that of faith and that of the
Spirit – that the transfiguration, that is, the sacramental liturgy, is
experienced.
Think of sacraments in terms of : (1) life, (2) energies
One can slake one’s thirst at the living, streaming water only if one
experiences the astonishing synergy of the Spirit and the Church
136.
“The sacraments are the masterpieces of creation” ~ Nicholas
Cabasilas
Creation is the first kenosis of the love in the Holy Trinity
*** In the celebration of the sacraments, just as in our life in the
Spirit, there is an inverse proportion between spectacle and
authenticity, between appearance and effectiveness. 139. In his
masterpieces the Father uses a minimum of show and a maximum
of omnipotence: “He is, and he is coming”.
Only through this synergy – our response of faith to God’s kenosis
in the sacraments – does a sacrament exist.
18/35
3 constants that mark the operation of this synergy in the
celebration of the sacraments:
(1) radical movement of every celebration – the river of life
that rises from the throne of God and the Lamb then begins to
flow back to him in the celebrating Church 140. for God’s glory
& human salvation.
(2) overall rhythm of every celebration – streaming forth
threefold synergy of the Spirit and the Bride: manifest,
transform, communion.
(3) subordinate rhythms – “sacramental units” – combo of
action, word, song.
19/35
Celebrated Liturgy as “Symphony”:
prelude
1st movement – liturgy of word
2nd – anaphora
3rd – communion
finale – everything begins anew.
NEEDS OUR COOPERATION TOO – Prepare ourselves for it and
respond to it. The celebration is a constant synergy between him
and us. 2 step rhythm: awakening of our faith and the faith event.
**
20/35
From Prelude to Finale
The Spirit and the Church act in various sacraments because the
members are many and have many needs for eternal life and many
functions in the body of Christ 162.
The epiclesis of baptism is for birth according to the Spirit 163. The
coming of the Holy Spirit into the water… the consecration of the
baptismal water… born from the maternal womb of the Church 164.
21/35
The epiclesis of confirmation has for its specific content the
marvelous total gift Christ the Lord makes of himself in this anointing:
he hands over his own personal Spirit and engraves or imprints this
Spirit on the hearts of those to whom he has just been united forever.
The seal of the gift of the Holy Spirit gives the baptized a participation
in the synergy of the fontal liturgy; the Spirit is henceforth united
with the spirits of the baptized so that the latter may live a wholly new
life in which the two wills can produce the one fruit of the Spirit.
22/35
Chapter 13: The Celebration of a New Time
The “today” of the living God is the hour of Jesus that runs through all
of history and sustains it… transforming our time and making it
sacramental 179.
The Liturgy of the Hours is where “we give everything back” in praise, a
divine service with the sole occupation of loving. The office is our
incarnate participation in the prayer of Jesus himself. The office is a
prism allowing the pure light of the Son’s own praise to be channeled
through the adopted sons of God. The Psalms are where the entire
economy of salvation becomes prayer. The office is the divine
occupation par excellence, the occupation of those who dwell in the
kingdom of love transcending individuals and making them one in
community 186-7.
God prepared earth to be a dwelling place but man rebelled and made it
into a hiding place. Jesus came into our hiding place and by defeating
death, changed everything: “Space, like time, explodes, it is no longer
closed in upon itself but is delivered from death and filled with him who
contains all things in his very body” (191).
The Church of stone or wood, although being a space within the world,
is indeed set apart from the world because it is a space that the
Resurrection has burst open. God’s promise of a new dwelling place is
23/35
fulfilled. We must see this sacramental space through the eyes of faith.
Like all sacramental synergies, the space of our celebrations is in an
eschatological condition; that is, in it the kingdom is “already” coming,
but the space is given to us precisely because the kingdom is “not yet”
fully here (194).
Christ is our living space, the mysterious place, “hidden in the Father”,
in which we sacramentally celebrate the eternal liturgy (189). Abiding
in Him – and He is us – we will doubtless cease to celebrate His liturgy,
but we will begin to live it (195).
Goal of liturgy = may water our entire life and render it fruitful.
our sinfulness is less the cause than the effect of the separation we
maintain between celebration and life.
Old Covenant – twofold deadly rift in Spirit’s pedagogy: cult &
worship and moral life. did not contain saving events as present.
The New Covenant takes us beyond the separation of cult and
moral life. This “beyond” is liturgy “in spirit and truth” (Jn 4:24).
24/35
Rev 22 Exigesis:
25/35
** we pray as we live and we live as we love. 206.
Only in the heart are we ourselves; only there do we become
ourselves.
The heart is the place of authentic encounter with ourselves, with
others and above all, with the living God.
The heart is alive, the place of decision, prior to and present in our
consciousness of it,
The heart is the man as image of the trinitarian communion and in
search of the likeness, that is, of divine communion. divine
presence alone fills the heart by expanding and drawing it.
it is our heart that prays.
Before the Holy Spirit lays hold of us, “we do not know how to pray
properly” (Rom 8:26), but once he has brought us into the prayer
of Jesus, we will not know what we pray for: we will simply pray.
liturgy of heart = is as indescribable as the mystery that it lives out.
Holy Spirit = pedagogue in prayer & mystagogue in celebration.
begins with liturgy of word – holy spirit bringing the risen Christ
into the heart that is awakening to prayer.
JESUS: the one word that expresses everything – contains
presence it invokes – opens heart by drawing it to him.
Prayer “to” Jesus is our way of genuinely entering into the liturgy
of the heart b/c when we call upon Jesus “in the Holy Spirit” (1 Cor
12:3), we enter into the mystery of his holy name. 209
Invocation of the name of Jesus = NOT an optional method like a
prayer technique, but the first movement of the Spirit in the heart
of the Bride. We become immersed into Christ’s mystery.
Our prayer can ONLY be Jesus, the incarnate Word; otherwise it is
empty words and lapses back into death.
26/35
The decisive question for prayer –> what presence dwells in that
space?
27/35
The mystery of the lived liturgy is summed up in divinization.
Through baptism and the seal of the gift of the Holy Spirit we become
“sharers of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4).
“Man becomes God as much as God becomes a man” ~ St. Maximus the
Confessor.
28/35
What the Spirit finds is a remnant of glory, an icon of the Son:
ceaselessly loved, but broken and disfigured (222).
3 great Questions that haunt everyone: the search for our origin,
the quest for dialogue, the aspiration for communion — are the
primary imprints in me of the image of glory, of the call of my very
being to the divine likeness in which my divinization will be
completed.
Following these three pathways of the transfigured icon, we are
divinized to the extent that the least impulses of our nature find
fulfillment in the communion of the Blessed Trinity.
We must simply but resolutely turn every moment of
possessiveness into an offering.
the new thing that the liturgy accomplishes is the restoration of this
wonderful oneness of life.
the liturgy is action: the work of God and the human person in all
the dimensions of man
Work and culture are the place where men and the world meet in
the glory of God.
From the divinization of man and the liturgy of the heart (flows the
transformation of work and culture?)
The iconography of the Spirit goes unrecognized as long as creation
is held captive (Rom 8:19-22), but the Spirit divinizes men so that
creation and men may attain to the freedom of the glory of God.
Work Transfigured
29/35
The iconography of the Spirit consists in transfiguring the hearts of
men in their work.
In the heart of the worker, work is the place of epiclesis
the light of communion that incites to sharing
Shall the river of life save a culture form the barronness of death?
If beauty is to save the world, it must first cleanse the world (230).
Culture is an iconography of the sSpirt and man, or it is the beauty
solely of the devil.
The supreme activity of man is to consent to a marriage with the
Word (231).
Either our life is ruled by one or other morality and by nothing more, or
it is seized and transfigured by the mystery of Christ.
The realism of the liturgy, both celebrated and lived, consists in making
the ideal become a vital principle; the Holy Spirit and the human heart
then become a source of life, and we are confronted agains with the
mystery of the synergy, the unparalleled Christian synergy (232).
This passage from law to grace, from a deadly moral life to a “mystical”
life of conformity to Christ, is always the moment when the river of life
crosses a new barrier. Every time that we fall back into our moralism
with its promise of security, we dam up the energy of the Holy Spirit;
the liturgy is then cut off from the life that it ought to be watering 233.
The irruption of the kingdom of the Holy Spirit into a human group was
thus the event that established authentic community among persons.
30/35
The fruit of this communion is the body of Christ: a body always
crucified, in which hatred is put to death, but also already risen, so that
from Her the Holy Spirit is poured out on all flesh (240).
The wonder of the lived liturgy, then, is that in it the mystery of divine
love becomes coextensive with our life. In its source, in its flow, in its
fruits, this love seeks to permeate everything: the depths of the heart
and of the person’s being, work and culture, relations between
individuals and the very texture of societies… But this same love also
urges us to go ceaselessly further, as far as love can go… the liturgy of
compassion (241).
The epiclesis of divine charity always takes place in its kenosis (241).
31/35
“We can understand why Andrei Rublev was always loath to paint a
fresco of the Last Judgment in the
apocryphal style so popular in the Middle
Ages. He was too deeply in touch with the
wretchedness of man to falsify in this way
the mercy of his Lord. We all know what
the fruit of Rublev’s long silent fast was:
the icon of the divine hospitality in which
the altar of the world is received into the
midst of the Blessed Trinity. It is on the
altar of the poor that the passion of God
becomes the compassion of his Church
for man” (244-5).
The Church can serve the poor only by becoming poor like her
Lord.
Compassions first movement is creative forgiveness.
The abyss of divine compassion reveals itself in the real scandals of
life
The Cross of his Son is the place from which he seems most absent
but in which he in fact gives himself most completely.
It is only a stone’s throw between the slumber of the disciples and
the agony of their Lord: to cross that space is to enter into the
struggle of prayer, intercession, and compassion (247).
For to suffer with, to be powerless, is to share in the weakness of
God on the Cross (247).
Let us learn to suffer with others.
“The glory of God is man fully alive”, says Saint Irenaeus, and the
glory of God is in a state of kenosis in man.
Compassion is the liturgy of the poor.
Chapter 20: Mission and the Liturgy of the Last Times
32/35
Our hearts must be converted, tilled, and watered by the divine
compassion if we want the mystery of the Church’s mission to become
part of our lives.
The 3 great synergies of the Spirit and the Church: manifest, transform,
communicate, are the same 3 that inspire from within the entire
movement of mission.
The Church’s mission in the last times is to be both the human face of
God, the face in which man can recognize him whom he is seeking, and,
in the same light, the face of man, in which the glory of God is reflected
(cf. 2 Cor 4:6).
33/35
Mission is “an epiphany of Christ through his Church as the new
community of love” (254).
The good news that she proclaims be her mere existence is that
impossible love is here as a real event (254).
Jesus “is the only truly human being, because he knows in his own
flesh both the struggle sinners have and the freedom to live
divinely as a man” (255).
If our mission does not encounter opposition, we are false
prophets.
The prayer of the heart ensures that the liturgy of mission will
never become a dried-up stream.
The prayer that fills the heart of the Church is the epiclesis of its
unbroken mission.
Monastic life is thus a hidden charism, but its hiding place is in the
front lines of the eschatological combat, and it supports the entire
mission of the Church. In the words of St. Therese of the Child
Jesus, to live a monastic life is to be love at the heart of the Church
(258).
Conclusion: The Liturgy, Handing on of the Mystery
The liturgy is the great river into which all the energies and
manifestations of the mystery flow together, ever since the very
body of the Lord who lives with the Father has been ceaselessly
“given up” to men in the Church in order that they may have life
(261).
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The liturgy is not something static, or a mental memorial, a model,
a principle of action, a form of self-expression, or an escape into
angelism. It reaches far beyond the signs in which it manifests
itself and the effectiveness it contains. It is not reducible to its
celebrations, although it is indivisibly contained in them. It finds
expression in the human words of God that are written in the Bible
and sung by the Church, but these never exhaust it. It is at home in
all cultures and no reducible to any of them. It unites the multitude
of local Churches without causing them to lose their originality. It
feeds all the children of God, and it is in them that it ceaselessly
grows. Although it is constantly being celebrated, it is never
repeated by it always new (261).
The total Christ event… that assumes and permeates all of history,
as well as all men and each of them in all their dimensions, and the
whole cosmos and all of creation (262).
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