On this Feast of Saint John, Apostle and Evangelist, here is an excerpt from Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger's book, On The Way to Jesus Christ (Ignatius, 2005):
Seeing Jesus in the Gospel of John | An Excerpt from On
The Way to Jesus Christ | Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger
The farewell discourses of Jesus, as the Gospel of John presents them
to us, hover in a singular way between time and eternity, between the
present 
hour
of the Passion and the new presence of Jesus that is already dawning,
because the Passion itself is at the same time his "glorification" as
well. On the one hand, the darkness of the betrayal, of the denial, of
the abandonment of Jesus to the ultimate ignominy of the Cross weighs
upon these discourses; in them, on the other hand, it seems that all of
this has already been overcome and resolved into the glory that is to
come.
Thus Jesus describes his Passion as a going away that leads to a new and
fuller coming–as a state of being-on-the-way with which the disciples
are already acquainted.[1] Thereupon Thomas, surprised, asks the question,
"Lord, we do not know where you are going; how can we know the way?" Jesus
answers with a statement that has become one of the central texts of Christology:
"I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father,
but by me."
This revelation of the Lord, however, elicits a new question now-or rather,
a request, which this time is made by Philip: "Lord, show us the Father,
and we shall be satisfied." Again Jesus replies with a revelatory word,
which leads from another perspective into the very depths of his self-consciousness,
into the very depths of the Church's faith in Christ: "He who has seen
me has seen the Father" (Jn 14:2-9). The primordial human longing to see
God had taken, in the Old Testament, the form of "seeking the face of
God". The disciples of Jesus are men who are seeking God's face. That
is why they joined up with Jesus and followed after him. Now Philip lays
this longing before the Lord and receives a surprising answer, in which
the novelty of the New Testament, the new thing that is coming through
Christ, shines as though in crystallized form: Yes, you can see God. Whoever
sees Christ sees him.
Continue reading...
"The seeing occurs in following after, Following Christ as his disciple is a life lived at the place where Jesus stands, and this place is the Passion. In it, and nowhere else, is his glory present."
In your later post, Michael O'Brien echoes this in his interview, in describing the choices that are before us in times of severe persecution and de-humanizing barbarity;
"The third way is Christ's way—one which is open to all of us, but which is impossible to discover, let alone live fully, without an ever-deepening union with Jesus. It is a way that is neither passive nor aggressive."
That is living in the Passion, the place where Jesus stands.
Cardinal Ratzinger makes it explicit; "Seeing occurs by entering into the Passion of Jesus" and then, "Seeing Jesus, in whom we see the Father at the same time, is a thoroughly existential act."
So then, to understand Michael O'Brien's warnings about the vision he sees of the demise of the west, particularly in his other novels, we must realize what what Cardinal Ratzinger is here saying, that we must live in the Passion of Christ. To save ourselves, to save our nation, to see peace from totalitarian barbarity we must live now in the Passion, and not wait for the test of persecution. That is our existence, that is how we see Christ.
That is the fundamental Catholic mystery for some of us, that has drawn us as moths to a porch-light. We have seen the cleaned-up, sanitized, scrubbed walls of candle-free, statue-free meeting halls and have been presented with a dissociated Christ. Our songs were about me; me and my salvation, highly spiritualized. Even songs and preaching about the blood and sacrifice had safely encased it, like plastic lamination, in the past as we told ourselves that we celebrated the risen Christ. Amen, hallelujah!
But in the Catholic Church, in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit we are welcomed to the real world. Without the shedding of blood there is no remission of sin. We are slammed back through time until there is no time between us and the dying Saviour, in agony, there before us, in the Holy Eucharist, and with his Holy Mother we weep, with St. John the Evangelist we weep, in the realization of the cost of salvation, and our minds reel in awe at the love that was willing to pay it, and is still offering it up to the Father while there is still one sinner unrepentent, one sin un-confessed.
Posted by: LJ | Friday, December 28, 2007 at 01:07 PM