The Chaplain Chatters

From Hans urs von Balthasar’s Heart of the World: 

Trust Time. Time is music, and the space out of which it resounds is the future. Measure by measure, the symphony is created in a dimension that invents itself, and which at each moment makes itself available from an unfathomable store of Time. Space is often lacking: the stone is too small for the statue, the town-square cannot contain the multitude. When has Time ever been lacking? When has it run out like too short a piece of string? Time is as long as grace. Entrust yourself to the grace of Time. You cannot interrupt music in order to catch and hoard it. Let it flow and flee, otherwise you cannot grasp it. You cannot condense it into one beautiful chord and thus possess it once and for all. Patience is the first virtue of the one who wants to perceive. And the second is renunciation. For look: you cannot grasp the melody’s flight until its last note has sounded. Only now, when the whole melody has died away, can you survey its mysterious balances, the arcs of tension and the curves of distance. Only what has set in the ear can rise in the heart. And therefore (and yet!), you cannot grasp invisibly in the unity of the spirit what you have not sensibly experienced in the manifoldness of the senses. And so the eternal is above time and is its harvest, and yet it comes to be and is realized only through the change of time.