Our existence, in its very foundations, is structured for sacrifice. As we grow up we want to become something, to grasp, to climb; but then the curve takes a downward turn. Quietly life takes from our hands everything we have snatched up. In the end we are granted the possibility of dying and, with it, that of performing the highest act of homage before the Eternal One.
Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Grain of Wheat: Aphorisms (1953), chapter titled Man