O Jesus, meek and humble of heart, make our heart conform to Your Heart.

Christ’s Church shows herself to the world as a sign of humiliation, persecution, and death. Her rising again is indeed real but hidden. The world will always wonder why the Church is not finished and done for. And the Church cannot precede herself with a triumphantly proclaimed Cross. The Cross she preaches says only one thing: it is something to die upon. The Church can proclaim only one Christ, the one for whom one loses one’s soul in order to gain it by virtue of losing.

“No other sign”, Jesus says. It is as if he thereby sweeps away all his healings and exorcisms, all his multiplication of loaves and calming of storms, as if all these “works” were invalid as signs, as if in the ultimate decision he was confining himself to himself, who surpasses Jonah in signification. He transcends Jonah’s sign through the insignificance (“even to death on the Cross”) of his three days spent hidden in the bosom of the earth. Those demanding a sign receive nothing but the character of the (incarnate Divine) Word in its mundane, humiliated form. This, and only this, is believable—every ostentatious sign would be incredible and would point only to a power opposed to God (Rev 13:3-4, 13-15).

God must be identical with his action if he is not merely to have love, like the creature, but really is love.

In a Christian view, nothing in any height or depth of contemplation surpasses the limits of simple Christian faith: the faith that God and man are one person in Christ, the faith that the Persons of Father, Son, and Spirit are not three gods but a single God. Contemplation simply realizes what was always present in Christian faith (which itself is a gift from God).

It is no rational conclusion that leads from the Son to the Father but rather faith in God’s perfect unity, in which Image and Imagelessness, Birth and Birth-giver are simply integrated. The Son is so much a pure expression of the Father that one cannot encounter him without being addressed by the Father. His human, and thereby divine, love is purely and simply the Father’s word of love spoken to us.

We know about this fullness in God only because the eternal Image has entered the multiplicity of our world of images, portraying and explicating the imageless Father, immersing us in the Divine Spirit so that we gain access to the divine world of love.