Introduction: Mediation
“In [Christ’s] mediation, the medium truly is the message: God reveals himself as love, and he does so precisely by giving himself in love, and thus enabling those he loves to love him and each other in turn.”
“Christian mediation invites human beings into a performance of fragility that is a resounding ‘yes’ not only to the dynamic, fertile exigencies of creaturely being, but also to the loving vulnerabilities and intentional exposures of divine being.”
“In the very act of desiring union with her, the lover gives back to the beloved her own beauty and its inner promise, but with a difference—her own beauty is presented to her as a gift received by and a source of delight for another.”
“This reciprocal working of Son and Spirit through each other in fulfillment of the Father’s sending is the way in which the triune God concretely opens himself up to Mary and, even more astonishingly, with Mary, so that through her the human being may finally be what he was created to be.”
“[W]e are not only made in communion; we are also made to share that communion, to participate within it in freedom. For the human person, then, mediation is the task to share that communion with others in freedom through self-giving love.”
“In love, the one who is not disposed to shed blood cannot drink the wine of true joy.”
“[T]he blood that runs in the veins of men, the blood they shed for ‘the earthly cities,’ is the same blood that flows in the veins of the Babe in the Manger, the same that was poured out on the Cross.”