Hans Urs Von Balthasar

- Prayer -
Translated by Graham Harrison

„The word is near you, on your lips and in your hearts” (Rom 10:8). Who was Balthasar?
According to Henri de Lubac "perhaps the most cultured man of our time." or Karl Rahner
described his achievements with the following words"really breathtaking." He is considered
one of the most important Roman Catholic theologians of the 20th century. He was born in
Switzerland in a really religious family on August 1905. At the same time he was a slave, a
humble slave of our Lord, as he was a priest too. He is the author of over a thousand books
and articles. His one of the most famous book is the „Prayer” which published in 1967.
The main theme of the book is the correct practising way of the everyday prayers
principally the contenplative prayer. I am sure that in every people life, has a question what
they would ask from the Creator. All of us wants to keep contact, to get into in a closer
relationship with the God. We often feel that we are can’t be able to address the God or at
least we don’t know how could we do it. Balthasar says that this kind of problems is all
springs from the fact that we can not interpret the commandment of the prayer. He highlighted
that the prayer is a conversation between God and the soul (our souls). At the same time the
language in the prayes is the God’s language. Many of us thinks that the prayer is a kind of
monolouge what we rattle of before the God day by day and it is done or it has already
finished, it is enough. In front of this previous opinion Balthasar says, that the prayer actually
is a dialogue, not the man’s monologue. When if we only praying we always inudate the
Almighty with our problems and demand immediately informaions, forgetting that in his
Word he has given us the solution to every problem. And what is His Word? Where should I
have to search that? The answer is simple: in his Son, who is his Word. But we think with
wordly mind and we can say how can the God speak to us through his Son, when Jesus was
incorporated before 2000 years ago? The answer is that once God’s Word has rung out in the
midst of the world, in the fulness of time, it is so powerful that it applies to everyone, address
everyone, all with equal directness, no one is disadvantaged by distance in space or time.
From this we colud have already understand that the God was and is and will the first who
spoke. Our task is only to listen to our compassionate God’s Word and to sahpe our life
according to His Will….