“And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth” (Jn 1:4). The glory, grace and truth came down and dwelt in the flesh. The Son entered history lived a life of contradiction and conflict and was crucified and became silent with cry on the cross and entered the silence of God. The silence of God speaks in creation. Things in the world are mirrors of God, they are silent words singing His glory.

And crucified remained the event and the reality of God. In giving God reveals, and in revealing God gives. God incarnating gives the possibility of flesh becoming word. The deed of God speaks. “This economy of Revelation is realized by deeds and words, which are intrinsically bound up with each other.” Henry de Lubac states the “Church is of God (de Trinitate) and she is of men (ex hominibus).” De Lubac describes the Church with the highest ecclesiological descriptors: she is “a mysterious extension in time of the Trinity,” “the incarnation continued,” “the spouse of Christ and His body.” After the coming of Christ and His resurrection, “‘time-after’ is already present in the interior of time.” The Church is a visible and historical communion that anticipates the eschatological theme, the “people of God journeying towards a common destiny.” This theme recovered the historical dimensions of ecclesial existence as a communal pilgrimage on the way to a goal that transcends history. The Church exists in a paradoxical “not-yet” and “already-present;” it is the “Church on pilgrimage” and the “Church as already filled with Christ and the Spirit.”

The reign of God is yet to come; but “without waiting for history to run its course, it has already, in a mysterious anticipation, made its appearance in the inner marrow of history.” Since the fact of Christ and His resurrection, ““time-after” is already present in the interior of time.” The historical church is a means to its own eschatological realization and a proleptic anticipation of that realization: “The Church is the ark that saves us from death. But we are not mere passengers on this ark: we are the ark, we are the Church.”… “The announcement of salvation contains the salvation announced. The object revealed does not consist in notions, by themselves without vital efficacy, which would just barely have as their goal to make explicit a Christianity existing already in an ‘implicit’ state, or to name finally a reality until then ‘anonymous.’” The old religions are anonymous preparations for the coming of the Word. The natural desire for the supernatural De Lubac claims “is a capacity [for God] that is naturally accompanied by desire, a desire that must be described as ontological.” By “ontological” he means that desire for the supernatural belongs essentially to the constitution of humanity.

“To await God is to possess Him.” Mysticism is the “inherent” capacity for grace. Both mysticisms designate the passive capacity to receive the mystery, a capacity that is “empty and powerless.” De Lubac recognizes a common, “natural” root to Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, Jewish, Muslim and even atheistic forms of mysticism. The fluid interaction between Church and world in the process of universality permits S. Augustine’s assertion, noted by De Lubac that pagans have hidden saints and prophets. Rahner thinks of human frustration in terms of incompletion, Balthasar in terms of tragedy. The self-identity of the community of believers must maintain its relative, epistemological priority in order for God’s work to be done, but must not lose sight of the ontological universality of God’s gracious gift of the Holy Spirit. Balthasar asserts that love alone is credible, all true love is, in fact, a participation in ‘Christian’ love – and so, a possibly unwitting participation in Christian revelation. There must be no two-tier differentiation between Christian and non-Christian love; if it is not Christ’s love, then it is not love at all! Love of neighbour can only be considered ‘identical’ with love of God in that the barrier between nature and grace, between ‘natural’ knowledge and ‘graced’ faith, is broken down. Love can bloom inside or outside the Church, wherever it has bloomed Holy Spirit is there. We cannot clip the wings of the Spirit, nor can we fence love within our home. Wherever it blossoms, it is divine and the veil of love is torn in suffering persecution and death for love.