How shall we repay?

From the Detailed Rules for Monks by Saint Basil the Great:

What words can adequately describe God's gifts? They are so numerous that they defy enumeration. They are so great that any one of them demands our total gratitude in response. Yet even though we cannot speak of it worthily, there is one gift which no thoughtful man can pass over in silence.

God fashioned man in his own image and likeness; he gave him knowledge of himself; he endowed him with the ability to think which raised him above all living creatures; he permitted him to delight in the unimaginable beauties of paradise, and gave him dominion over everything upon earth.

...How, then, shall we repay the Lord for all his goodness to us? He is so good that he asks no recompense except our love: that is the only payment he desires. To confess my personal feelings, when I reflect on all these blessings I am overcome by a kind of dread and numbness at the very possibility of ceasing to love God and of brining shame upon Christ because of my lack of recollection and my preoccupation with trivialities.

Brenden Contra Mundum

At certain intervals in our lives it is without doubt that God lays before us certain catalysts that cause our hearts to illuminate having found something that we know to be truly transcendent and meaningful; punctuating our youth with his fragrance so as to always reference it. For myself, it was the beauty of the form in the via affirmitiva. This 'way', of course, is timeless. It is the Incarnation. It's the beauty of the Incarnation; the spirit of the dogma that the early church fought so hard for against the Gnostics and Arians. Shown to me by Dr.Barry Craig, my life has been a constant reflection on the implications of the incarnate logos. Cardinal Ouelette said of von Balthasar that he had “illuminated my mind and my heart.” My words can only echo that of Cardinal Oulette's when I speak of Dante. What is more, it is not strange that my words parrallel Ouelette's since they are reflections on the same mystery, in von Balthasar's own words, "If there were no such thing as the resurrection of the flesh then the truth would lie with gnosticism and every form of idealism down to Schopenhauer and Hegel, for whom the finite must literally perish if it is to become spiritual and infinite. But the resurrection of the flesh vindicates the poets in a definitive sense: the aesthetic scheme of things, which allows us to posses the infinite within the finitude of form (however it is seen, understood or grasped spiritually), is right."


So, I think it is fitting that two years ago I set off to start a blog only to post the initial passage of the Commedia. I am really looking forward to putting 'to pen' much of what I have been thinking and reading about lately. Having said that, I must quote Balthasar again in saying "let the kind reader refrain from weighing every one of my words with a gold-scale. Let him rather pick a nugget here or there, if he comes across one."

And finally, bear in mind that the questions raised here are viewed from one perspective, reflecting my specific interests as I make sense of the particular daily content we are all forced to baptize.