Only the Christian religion, which in its essence is communicated by the eternal child of God, keeps alive in its believers the lifelong awareness of their being children, and therefore of having to ask and give thanks for things.

But the saints are never the kind of killjoy spinster aunts who go in for faultfinding and lack all sense of humor. (Nor should the Karl Barth who so loved and understood Mozart be regarded as such.)For humor is a mysterious but unmistakable charism inseparable from Catholic faith, and neither the "progressives" nor the "integralists" seem to possess it - the latter even less than the former.

There is a moment when the interior light of the "eyes of faith" becomes one with the exterior light that shines from Christ, and this occurs because man's thirst, as he strives and seeks after God, is quenched as he finds repose in the revealed form of the Son.

If God wishes to reveal the love that he harbors for the world, this love has to be something that the world can recognize, in spite of, or in fact in, its being wholly other.

Without a doubt, at the center of the New Testament there stands the Cross, which receives its interpretation from the Resurrection.

But the issue is not only life and death but our existence before God and our being judged by him. All of us were sinners before him and worthy of condemnation.

Hence the importance of patience in the New Testament, which becomes the basic constituent of Christianity, more central even than humility: the power to wait, to persevere, to hold out, to endure to the end, not to transcend one's own limitations, not to force issues by playing the hero or the titan, but to practice the virtue that lies beyond heroism, the meekness of the Lamb which is led.