For later reading

David Warren 
on Father Delp in  prison and his mother's 70 year argument with the silence of God.

 from thePrison Notebooks of the Jesuit martyr, Alfred Delp (executed in Berlin, the 2nd of February, 1945)...

"...Life only begins when the whole framework is shaken. There can be no proper preparation without this. It is precisely the shock of rousing while he is still deep in the helpless, semi-conscious state, in the pitiable weakness of that borderland between sleep and waking, that man finds the golden thread which binds earth to heaven and gives the benighted soul some inkling of the fullness it is capable of realizing and is called upon to realize."

--------------------------------

Writer Brian Sibley posts a similar quote about Advent

“A prison cell, in which one waits, hopes…and is completely dependent on the fact that the door of freedom has to be opened from the outside, is not a bad picture of Advent.”
– Dietrich Bonhoeffer

------------------------------

Waiting for GodotToLeaveBlog points out this is the eros of God

Of course the answer is not reverent liturgy alone.  But whether we're talking liturgy or art or music or any other great thing - and especially when we're talking love, the aspect of love calledEros (that face of love that makes Catholics extremely uncomfortable) - we are not made for safety, comfort, mere contentment, constraint.
We are made - God has made us - to "o'erflow the measure".  Antony & Cleopatra - sinners that they were - "overflowed the measure", and something mysterious and glorious is revealed to us in their story.

more here:

if we try to achieve perfect selfless Agape in everything we do, we are also sinning.  Eros is the passionate part of love, the part of love that has a vested interest in the object it loves or that it's pursuing.  Eros gives a damn.  Eros cares.
Take away Eros, as I said before, and you end up with Unreality, with weirdness, with love without blood, with, what Chesterton called an "airy, disinterested lust" - in fact, you end up with Christianity without the Cross, for the suffering of Christ is a passion in more ways than one.  Our God is a jealous God and a consuming fire - and our God is love (Ex. 34:14, Heb. 12:29, 1 John 4:8 & 16).

heh. Sounds like the old GermanShepherd's encyclical on Love:

The one God in whom Israel believes, on the other hand, loves with a personal love. His love, moreover, is an elective love: among all the nations he chooses Israel and loves her—but he does so precisely with a view to healing the whole human race. God loves, and his love may certainly be called eros, yet it is also totally agape.[7]

A lot of this is the underlying theme in Andrew Greeley's X rated novels, where God often interferes with the comfortable life of his characters by hitting them with erotic love that messes up their lives and brings them back to Him, or in the writings of JP2 about the theology of the body...

and yes it is in the message of Francis, if you actually read everything he says. The "good news" of the gospel is that God cares: that the universe is not an impersonal force, but "the love that moves the sun and other stars", and that the huge God of the universe cares for the least person on earth.

as I said: for later reading.

I'm waiting for Lolo to wake up and am using my laptop half asleep to check the web, but will read the stuff later on my tablet, where it is easier to read.