Being Remade by the Living Word

Christian Meditations by Hans Urs von Balthasar has been resonating deeply with me these Lenten and Holy Week seasons.

This was from a friend this week who has also been reading Ezekiel and getting into what "eating the scroll" means--what it means to injest the Word and to be reborn/remade by it:

Then the friend is on the ground. Kathy and I are burying her in the dirt. She is still trying to talk to me and taunt me and I kick dirt over her face and tell her if she says it again I will stomp on her face. She is completely buried now except for her eyes.

Next scene: I watch the friend come up out of a pool. Face up toward the sky, wet hair down her back, and I think to myself, “Oh good, she got all the dirt off.” I am also standing in the water up to my waste aware that dirt is coming off me as well.

Baptism.

Here are some words from Balthasar about the continual rebirth/renewal we experience in the Word:

Now in the bridal oneness of Christ and the Church, as God-Man and as the Father's Word, he certainly remains the active Word in quote another way, above all in the free spontaneity of his Eucharist. The Church receives the gift of the Word--like Mary, as handmaid of the Lord--in "reverential fear" (Eph 5:33). And the word that she returns to him as response s an echo; as it were, of his Word, although an active echo that the power of the Word has given her to express. So given that she is first of all "produced" (Eph 7:27) by the Word; in her very response she is a creature, a product of the Word. This is so not only once but ever anew, inasmuch as she is continually being "produced" by the Eucharist of the Bridegroom; but she likewise receives perpetual authority to "produce" this Eucharist herself. As response to the Word she is empowered to speak back to the Father (in the eucharistic Sacrifice) the Word itself in thanksgiving (eucharistia).

In both these contexts it reminds me of how the DNA that God gives us, the code or word of ourselves, is constantly remaking us--how our cells are constantly regenerating tissue. When our internal code, our DNA, our word is corrupted the regeneration can evolve into things as normal as the aging process and as abnormal as cancers. One of the benefits of stem cells is the renewel of the reservoir of that code. In the same way, we as the body of Christ, the church, the Communion of the Saints, need to continually renew our DNA, our word by 'eating the scroll' by meditating, injesting the Eucharist and speaking back in thanksgiving.

eat the living word
regeneration happens
baptized by the scroll