Food for the Other

I bumped into an old friend, Tim Brown, who is the new President of Western Theological Seminary in Holland, Michigan. The curious thing is that he was walking through the Minneapolis airport with three books in his hand and seemed to be reading them all at once.

Tim was head pastor of one of the fastest growing churches in America, Christ Memorial and then went back to teach at Western, to work with the next generation of spiritual leaders in the Reformed Church (Dutch and Protestant), after my older brother and another young adult member of Christ Memorial both died from cancer in 1993.

Here is what he was reading:

Christian Meditations by Hans Urs von Balthasar
Spiritual Theology by Diogenes Allen
Life Together by Dietrich Bonhoeffer

I bought the books that night on Amazon and just finished Christian Meditations which was life-changing. Some short quotes that I recently shared on our FaceBook thread are below:

All, reading Christian Meditations by Hans Urs von Balthasar (Ignatius Press), worthy of the time and investment to find more unity in our individual pursuits of truth, love and grace:

I'm having a hard time pulling short quotes, but here are a few:

. . .this blessedness of poverty is likewise manifested in the Eucharist as the heart of the Church and thus in the whole of ecclesial life. It is Jesus" blessedness so to dispossess himself that he can become the living space for all who receive him and, through them, for all others. . .

Origen very strongly emphasized this in interpreting the texts in which the prophet Ezekiel and the seer of the Apocalypse are commanded to eat the Word (in the form of a scroll). This Father of the Church knows that "the Word is the true food of the spirit", and "what could be more nourishing for the soul than the Word?"

The concrete spoken Word cannot be detatched from the Word that he himself is. . .This is why, above, we could bring Word and Eucharist into such close connection and compare mediation with Communion. Christ who seems to stand before us, asks to be admitted to a common meal with our being: "See I am standing before the door knocking. . .I will go in to dine with him and he with me." (Rev 3:20)

It leads to an exchange in the deepest level: each one becomes food for the other.

(Photo credit: Cathleen Falsani)