NOTES: Be Filled with the Fullness of God by George A. Maloney, SJ

p. 10: The Trinity is primal grace as the self-giving of each unique person of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit to us in the uncreated energies that bombard, penetrate, surround us at every moment in and through every creature. … Creation is not finished.

p. 12: Only by love can we penetrate the mystery of God as the ground of our being and the mystery of our own uniqueness…. The first loving touch of another human being is the beginning of our discovery of God, who is love (1 Jn 4:8), and points us to the center of ourselves where God lives as a community of self-emptying love.

p. 18: The dark side of God's no-thingness turns to light as God wishes to find himself in self-giving to his Word.

p. 19: Gabriel Marcel, "The I is the child of the We." n. 5

pp. 20–21: God-Trinity is truly an I-thou-we community. …all reality is already contained within the circle that has no circumference.

p. 24: [The Father] utters his Word in love, the Spirit, [and the Word] turns back to his source and the Father hears his Word come back to him in a perfect, eternal yes of total surrendering love, that is again the Holy Spirit.

p. 28: The Godhead knows itself in its Logos….

p. 30: Athanasius, De Incarnatione Verbum Dei, 54: "God became man that man might become God-like [Αυτός γαρ ενηνθρώπησεν, ίνα ημείς θεοποιηθώμεν]."

p. 34: Creation would be brought to its completion in becoming the loving community of the body of Christ, the Church….

p. 35: …the whole cosmos us an immense symbol of the trinity's revelation to us. … It is the Spirit who harmonizes chaos into a loving unity.

p. 39: It would be an imperfection between the Father and the Son if their love did not want to be shared with another. But to share this mutual love, there is need of a condilectum, one that is loved equally as the Father loves the Son and the Son loves the Father. This is the Holy Spirit.

Cf. Richard of St. Victor, De Trinitate bk. 3, chap. 19 (PL 196.915B-930D) and n. 6:

Strictly speaking, there is shared love when two person love a third in a harmony of affections and a community of love they have for the third…. From this, then, it is evident that shared love would not have a place in the divinity if there were only two persons and not a third.

p. 40: In this continued, unchanging "action", the Spirit finds his whole personhood, his unique self…. Speaking the Word in eternal silence through his out-pouring love that is his Holy Spirit, the heavenly Father hears his Son-Word come back to him in a perfect, eternal yes of total, surrendering love, that is again the Holy Spirit.

p. 42: The true nature of love is not to have a "face", but to be experienced in the kenotic or self-emptying between two persons.

p. 56: It is the Father who is imaged to each of us in the torn, mangled body of Jesus….

[Jesus is WHAT the Father says to us; the Holy Spirit is HOW He says it to us.]

p. 61: Basil, "Man is the creature who received the order to become God by grace." n. 1

p. 62: Maximus the Confessor wrote that human beings by divinization have all that God has by nature, but without identification of nature. n. 7

Cf. PG 91.1308B, choris tes kai ousian tautoteta

p. 66: …we do not have access to the Father except only in the Son and we have access to the Son only by the Holy Spirit. n. 11 Thus the epiklesis is necessary.

p. 75: Do you understand the dignity to which you were called?

p. 76: Maximus Confessor, "The Word of God, born once in the flesh…, is always willing to be born spiritually in those who desire him. In them he is born as an infant as he fashions himself in them by means of their virtues. He reveals himself to the extent that he knows someone is capable of receiving him." n. 7

p. 77: The only destiny God ever had conceived for all of us human beings is our transformation into the image and likeness of the only-begotten Son, Jesus Christ.

p. 81: Christ is the center of the world and yet resides at your center as in his temple. … To be a Christian is to become ever more aware that Christ lives in us. … we must struggle to dissipate such darkness. Sin in any form is the absence of the life of Christ in our lives.

p. 82: Often the Christian mystics… used the symbol of seeing Christ within themselves as light, illuminating their minds as to what was the will of God in the given moment.

p. 83: Symeon the New Theologian, "man indeed becomes truly like a woman carrying a child." n. 10

Cf. Chesterton, The Napoleon of Notting Hill, chapter 1:

"Individually, men may present a more or less rational appearance, eating, sleeping, and scheming. But humanity as a whole is changeful, mystical, fickle, delightful. Men are men, but Man is a woman."

p. 84: St. Isaac of Nineveh, "Your heart is aflame, burns like fire day and night; and so the whole world seems like dust and dung…." n. 11

p. 86: We reach our true identity to the degree that we live in Christ…. We know the abiding power of Christ loving within us by the love we show others.

p. 92: The Spirit is moving lovingly throughout the material world to draw God's embryonic creation in the definitive unity… the body of Christ. … [Athanasius expresses] optimism in a world moving toward an ordered beauty [thus:] "…the Wisdom of God, holding the universe like a lyre, adapting things heavenly to things earthly,… harmonizes them all…, makes one world and one world-order in beauty and harmony." n. 1

p. 93: God the Father utters his creative Word by calling his Spirit down upon the cosmos in a continuous cosmic epiclesis … to divinize matter into spirit.

p. 95: …he would have remained a muted Word in the silence of Calvary if in his "glorification" he would not have sent his Holy Spirit….

p. 96: 1 Cor 3:16, ecclesial not merely individual, n. 2

p. 103: …prayer becomes more an action of yielding to the indwelling Spirit so as to enter into the very movement of triadic life that is present and dynamically exercising its life from within. …let go in the darkness of our inner poverty to be guided by the [p. 104] "luminous-dark" presence of the indwelling Trinity.

p. 110: …what the indwelling Spirit within us reveal is that our proper dignity as children of God consists in our functioning within the body of Christ out of love to serve the whole community.

p. 113: [The Spirit's] unifying force is felt in all technological and medical advances brought about by human beings co-operating with the uncreated energies of God. … [He is also active] in the lives of a man and woman deeply in love who experience this divine, unifying force of love in their conjugal union as they leave selfish eros to find their own beings and to expand by giving without reserve to the other to bring forth in that overflowing energy of life a new life, made to the image and likeness of God himself.

p. 117: The truly charismatic Christian… is a mystic who has been transformed into a living incarnation of God's love for mankind.

p. 120: The eucharist is the centre of all other presences of God toward us. In the eucharist, we touch the basis of all reality, the Holy Trinity….

Cf. Cyril of Alexandria, "Fundamentally the eucharist is a victory…." CITATION?**

p. 123: Gregor of Nyssa, n.3, like bread leavened, the eater becomes the divine nourishment

p. 125: John Chrysostom, "…not merely to look upon him, but even to touch him and to consume him and to fix their teeth in his Flesh and to commingled with him…." n. 4

Recall St. Augustine's words in Confessions X, 27:

Too late have I loved you, O Beauty so ancient and so new, too late have I loved you. You have called to me, and have cried out, and have shattered my deafness. You have blazed forth with light and have put my blindness to flight! You have sent forth fragrance, and I have drawn in my breath, and I pant after you. I have tasted you, and I hunger and thirst after you. You have touched me, and I have burned for your peace.

p. 128: Cyril of Alexandria, "…one by conformity in godliness… and this is a real, physical union." n. 6

p. 130: Hilary of Poitiers, "Christ is in us by his flesh and we are in him, while all that we are is with him in God." n. 8

p. 136: …we become Church when we share the caring love of Jesus for each suffering person we meet.

p. 137: The eucharist is not fully received unless it is lived.

p. 140: …the Church… is to be the resurrected body of God's creation, evolving through history and brought to its completion with our co-operation.