George soars

 Reading this is like a breath of fresh air after trudging through the Mordor of this pontificate:

Throughout the Lenten itinerary of conversion we have lived for six weeks, the Church has asked us to reflect on God’s thirst for us. Thus, the paradigmatic Lenten Gospel reading of Jesus and the woman at the well on the Third Sunday of Lent points to prayer as a “gift of God” (John 4:10): Prayer is our divinely empowered response to God’s burning desire for our holiness. Other paradigmatic Lenten Sunday Gospels strike a similar note: The cure of the man born blind (who is empowered to see Jesus as the Light of the World [John 9, 5, 38]) and the raising of Lazarus from the dead (which follows Martha’s act of faith in John 11:27). God creates or “speaks” the world into being through his “Word” (John 1:3) and redeems the world through the Word incarnate (John 1:14) to share the divine holiness. God yearns, God “thirsts,” for the holiness of the human creatures he has created, so that he might be in covenant relationship with them. 

The Redemption wrought in Christ is not, therefore, some sort of addendum to creation. The paschal mystery of Christ’s passion, death, resurrection, and ascension is the axial point of the entire drama of creation: the decisive, definitive turning point that reveals why there is “creation” at all. Thus, the answer that Christian faith, which is Easter faith, gives to a question philosophy has pondered for millennia—Why is there something rather than nothing?—is, in a word, holiness. The Thrice-Holy God created so that the holiness shared among Father, Son, and Holy Spirit might be shared ad extra: in a world brought into being to experience the eternal giving-and-receiving of love that is God’s inner-trinitarian life.