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