What empowers us to embrace a contemplative faith which listens, which beholds, is fundamentally grace; grace as our election, calling and justification by God the Father, and the resultant faculty and liberty to gaze openly into his truth made manifest.
But the manifest truth of the Father is the Son. In the Son, the Father contemplates us from before all time, and is well pleased. It is in the Son that the Father can predestine and choose us to be his children, fellow children with the one, eternal Child, who, from the beginning of the world, intervenes as sponsor for his alienated creatures. It is in him that the Father justifies us, viewing and valuing us in the context of his Son’s righteousness which pays all our debts; he ascribes the Son’s righteousness to us; he gives it to us as our very own. Finally, it is in the Son that the Father glorifies us, by permitting us to participate in the Son’s resurrection and finally, by grace, setting us at his right hand, the Son’s rightful place.
- Hans Urs von Balthasar, Prayer, p. 51
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