An Embracing Plunge

Someone posted the video of a baby elephant joyously discovering and frolicking in the surf.

Two quotes came to mind as I watched  with tenderness and affection the frolick of this fellow creature. 

"Eternity is not an unending succession of days  but  something more like the supreme moment of satisfaction, in which totality embraces us and we embrace totality—this we can only attempt. It would be like plunging into the ocean of infinite love, a moment in which time—the before and after—no longer exists." (Pope Benedict XVI,   Spe Salvi, § 12.)

And from Schiller's Ode to Joy,

Freude trinken alle Wesen	All creatures drink Joy
An den Bruesten der Natur,	At nature's bosom;
Wollust ward dem Wurm gegeben,	Pleasure was given (even) to the worm,
Und der Cherub steht vor Gott.	And the Cherub stands before God.

At the same time it painfully saddened me to think that this beauty is being exterminated by man's avarice and this made me think of Hans Urs von Balthasar,

"Whenever the relationship between nature and grace is severed (as happens... where 'faith' and 'knowledge' are constructed as opposites), then the whole of worldly being falls under the dominion of 'knowledge', and the springs and forces of love immanent in the world are overpowered and finally suffocated by science, technology and cybernetics. The result is a world without women, without children, without reverence for love in poverty and humiliation — a world in which power and the profit-margin are the sole criteria, where the disinterested, the useless, the purposeless is despised, persecuted and in the end exterminated .... " (Love Alone pp. 114-15).  

With all my heart I wish this baby elephant well and many happy frolicks.