Thursday, December 26, 2019

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

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