Verbum Domini part 1 section 1

The God Who Speaks

• There is no greater priority than this: to enable the people of our time once more to encounter God, the God who speaks to us and shares his love so that we might have life in abundance.

• The Word of God makes us change our concept of realism: the realist is the one who recognizes in the word of God the foundation of all things.

• This realism is particularly needed in our own time when many things in which we are tempted to put our hopes, prove ephemeral. Possesions, pleasures and power show themselves sooner or later to be incapable of fulfilling the deepest yearnings of the human heart.

• This 'condescension' of God is accomplished surpassingly in the incarnation of the Word. The eternal Word, expressed in creation and communicated in salvation history, in Christ became a man.

• The Son himself is the Word became small - small enough to fit in a manger. He became a child, so that the word could be grasped by us.

• From the beginning, Christians realized that in Christ the word of God is present as a person. The word of God is the true light that men and women need. In the resurrection the Son of God truly emerged as the light of the world. Now, by living with him and in him, we can live in the light.

• We can compare the cosmos to a 'book' -Galileo himself used this example- and consider it as "the work of an author who expresses himself through the 'symphony' of creation.

• Since he has given us his Son, his only word (for he posseses no other), he spoke everything at once in y¡this sole word - and he has no more to say...

• Private revelations... Whose mission is... to help live more fully bt it in a certain period of history.

• Private revelation is an aid to this faith, and it demonstrates its credibility precisely because it refers back to the one public revelation.

• We cannot come to understand the meaning of the word unless we are open to the working of the Paraclete

• Ultimately, it is the living Tradition of the Church which makes adequately understand Sacred Scripture as the word of God

• Althouth the word of God precedes and exceeds sacred Scripture... It contains the divine word "in an altogether singular way".

• Whenever our awareness of its inspiration grows weak, we risk reading Scripture as an object of historical curiosity and not as the work of the Holy Spirit in which we can hear the Lord himself speak

• Christ experienced the silence of the Father when He was on the Cross (My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?)... God also speaks by his silence... Is the situation of all those who, having heard His word, must also comfront his silence. God's silence prolongs his earlier words.

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