Unless You Become Like This Child

To follow up on he post of 12/21/2019 we continue with von Balthasar's reflection on being a child.

"... for a child, his parents' concrete love is not at first separable from God [see post of November 22, 2017 here ]; if everything follows an even course, this difference must be tenderly shown to him by his parents' humility and their own dependency on God. If this occurs as it should, the "archetypical; identity" will once again be confirmed for him in expanded form. The child will see clearly that love is realized only in reciprocity, in an oppositeness that is encounter and not opposition, a relationship that is held together in its very difference by the spirit of love and that, far from being endangered by mutuality, is rather strengthened by it. Love, too, is what enables the child to experience its absolute neediness as some thing other than a threat, since it is lived as the situation in which the mother's ever-latent love may be realized always anew.

The "archetypical identity", which we discover in creatures within a clear separation of persons who are held together by love, is a creaturely imago trinitatis ...."

Unless You Become Like This Child, Hans Urs von Balthasar, pp. 18-19

A Praying Servant

From the January 2020 edition of First Things

LITANY

For the fire that answers the covering dark,
For every marriage that ends in faith,
For the hand that finds desired work,
And for every reconciled death,

We bless you, O Lord, and we ask that
             we may be added to their number.

For the wall that answers wind’s assault,
For every roof that withstands weather,
For the level and square and the justly built,
And for long lives that have kept their savor,

We bless you, O Lord, and we ask that
        we may be added to their number.

For the hour that we have squandered,
       Have mercy on us.
For the hour we have begrudged,
       Have mercy on us.
For the good that we have coveted,
       Have mercy on us.
And for the good we have neglected,
       Have mercy on us.

For the day lived with its end in mind
And for the remembrance of such a day,
For the losing race, run to its end,
For the blue sky and the night sky,

We bless you, O Lord, and we ask that
       we may be added to their number.

—Timothy Dusenbury

On the Becoming of a Child

 Balthasar, early in his short essay on becoming a child, takes us to the most intimate of our connections, the creative ability of God. The mystery into which his contemplation takes the reader is portrayed as the sacred union of God and mankind and reflected in this union is the sanctity  of the the union of man and woman. Contemplating this collaboration between God and mankind and God’s highest forms of creation, man and woman, we can appreciate God’s plan of creation with wonder and awe. Yet, we in our hubris and self-reliance reduce our sexuality by considering this magnificent gift to be just another form of recreation or make of it a merely physical process that can be manipulated to cater to our desires and whims. In so doing the sacred nature of the mystery loses its hold on our spirit.

Quoting from the essay:

Nevertheless, there does exist the sphere in which every person born possesses an archetypical model in keeping with which he is to direct his conscious life, surely following the course of his existence into the future but always with the memory of his origins before him.

Between the mother and the child she bears in her womb there exists an "archetypical identity", a unity which by no means is purely "natural", "physiological" or "unconscious": the child is already itself, it is already something "other" than the mother because it derives from the man's seed as much as from her. She had to conceive in order for the child to come to be in her, to come out of her most intimate being, as of course the father too had to receive from his wife in order to become fruitful in her. They had to be "two in one flesh", with mutual gratitude, in order to be able to procreate and love the new life that surpasses them both, the new life that will owe its existence to both of them together but for which they, together, will always have to be thankful in the site of the absolute creative Power that transcends them: "Children are a gift of the Lord" (Ps 127:3). Neither father nor mother would pretend that their contribution has given the child its spirit, its freedom, its immediacy with God.

Unless You Become Like This Child, Hans Urs von Balthasar, pp. 15-16

Mary of Magdala Mourns for Jesus

Sholem Asch's portrayal of Mariam of Magdala's mourning on Jesus' death from the final pages of his novel, Mary.

p. 424

Of all Yeshua was mourners no one, with the exception of the mother, felt his loss more poignantly then Miriam of Magdala. If for all others the Nazarene had been Israel's, even the world’s, Messiah, for Miriam he had been her personal Redeemer. The others, after all, were of the holy community of Israel. If there hopes in Yeshua had faded, they still had the root from which the Messianic faith had sprung. This was not the first, no, nor the last time that Israel had been deceived. Jewry loved its Messiah, sickened for its coming. Their love and their nostalgia would in time nurture the new Messianic fruit. If the Nazarene had failed them, another would arise, the true Redeemer who would rally the heavenly host and descend in the panoply of vengeance.

But for Miriam of Magdala, Yeshua and none other had been the Messiah, and with his death perished her hope. What other Messiah, or what other rabbi, would stoop to lift her kind out of the gutters, cleanse her polluted body and soul, efface what was past even as the light of day scatters the bad dreams of the night, and infuse her with a new spirit to thirst for purity and holiness? What other rabbi would turn his back on the mighty, the learned, and the elect to embrace sinners; and finding her among the most unclean, on whom sin lay like a constrictor snake, would call out to her judges, "Let him among you who is without sin cast the first stone?" What other master would admit her to his presence?

But if Yeshua was not the Messiah, then all her effort was in vain, and vain was her purgation in the fires of penance. She would relapse into the clutch of sin from which he had delivered her. With all her longing and hunger for purity, she would be thrown back into the gutter that had been her cradle.

For her no hope existed outside Yeshua, the redeemer who had come with the blessing of God in his hand to help fallen ones like herself. All things passed away with him – the love and the splendor of God, the thirst and the longing, the hope and the remission of sins. Life with him had been blessed, without him it would be perdition.