Hey Kid!

I met a young seminarian, Edouard, when I was in Guatemala recently.  Edouard is from Haiti, and is spending a year at the Claretian seminary in Guatemala City.  We struck up a very nice conversation and exchanged emails.

Yesterday he emailed me to say hello, and reminded me that this is May, the month of Mary.  He signed his email, "your younger brother in Christ."  I thanked him for his email and said I would send him an article on Mary I happened to read recently. "The Marian Dimension of Existence," Stratford Caldecott, in Being Holy in the World, Nicholas J. Healy, Jr., 281 - 294.

The Marian dimension of existence is, essentially, a receptivity or fiat to goodness, and the incarnation of that goodness in one's life.  The church is Marian, and since we are in the church, so are we.  The Marian is our ideal, that is, to strive for a perfect bodily response to God's prior love for us.

One aspect of the article struck me particularly:

Marian spirituality is the spirituality of childhood.  We can say, in fact, that the authentic Christian never grows up.  "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."  (quoting Balthasar, Unless You Become Like This Child, at 49.) It is only sin that causes us to become old (in an other-than-physical sense).  Bernanos was perfectly correct, then, in describing Mary as "younger than sin."  The saint lives in an eternal spring, because her existence is always being received, celebrated, and appreciated (that is, shared and given back) instead of snatched, hoarded, and taken for granted.  Motherhood and childhood are very much alike in some ways, since it is necessary for the mother to understand the child, and for the child to be understood by the mother.  But the childlike aspect of motherhood is also present in genuine fatherhood. . .

A child is innocent, fresh, spontaneous, and lively.  It's that attitude of childlike receptivity that responds to another by seeing his or her beauty and goodness, and going out to affirm it in love.

And so, wasn't it appropriate that Edouard signed his email, "your younger brother."