Hans Urs Von Balthasar, Unless You Become Like This Child Quotes
It is to the Cross that the Christian is challenged to follow his Master: no path of redemption can make a detour around it.
To be a child means to owe one's existence to another, and even in our adult life we never quite reach the point where we no longer have to give thanks for being the person we are.
God defines himself as "I am who I am", which also means: My being is such that I shall always be present in every moment of becoming.
What the Father gives is the capacity to be a self, freedom, and thus autonomy, but an autonomy which can be understood only as a surrender of self to the other.
Her (Mary's) Son first had to be the Child of the Father in order then to become man and be capable of taking up on his shoulders the burden of a guilty world.
Mary thus learns that the Most High has ever borne a Son in his bosom, and that this Son has now chosen her bosom as dwelling-place.
