Fr. Raimundo Panikkar
What ultimately matters is not our ideas, or our
experiences, our denying this or doing that; what "matters" is not a
prayer or a peculiar way of life. The all-important thing, the unique and the
ultimate end of man is sanctity, union with God, transformation in God,
divinization of our full being.
Throughout the whole of the 16th century Europe
was suffering from a world crisis in all aspects. Everywhere problems and solutions
were planned and enforced in the horizonal line. The answer of the Carmelite
nun has only a single tune: sanctity. But not a sanctity of the nature of a
selfish self- reform, not an individualistic saintliness in order to arrange
world and solve its problems, or to save oneself, i.e., as a means for
something else, or as first condition, but a true sanctity as an end in itself,
because the ontological weight of a divinized person is greater than anything
else, because the mean of life on earth—this "bad night in a bad
inn"—is not to organize heaven on earth, but to move earth into heaven.
And as a consequence, as something that comes from itself, it is the only real
approach to the world. According to its deep nature will life on earth be truly
human and happy and beautiful "Is it not somehow amazing that a poor nun
of St. Joseph's Cloister can reign over the whole earth and elements?" It is the least world-denying attitude
imaginable, because it sees the whole creation as an outburst of divine Love.
Only then will humankind be the king of creation and transform everything into the
real everlasting Kingdom, which is much more than a temporal world.
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