Unless You Become Like This Child

from "Unless You Become Like This Child", page 22-24

"so it is with all other attributes needed to children: all of them are modeled on the wholesome exchange of love between the primarily giving love of the mother and the primarily received love the child. For the child it is natural to receive good gifts, and so docility, obedience, trust and sweet surrender are not for him virtues to be expressly achieved but the most unreflectedly natural things in the world. This is so to such an extent that the child adopts the mothers giving attitude unquestioningly as the right one, and he gives spontaneously when he has something to give. He shows his little treasures without hiding any of them; he wants to share her because he has experienced sharing as a form of goodness. The fact that he can make this attitude his own presupposes that he does not need to distinguish between the giver and the gift, since both at the mother's breast and in all other things given him the two are one: in the gift the child directly recognizes the love of the giver."

Balthasar takes this idyllic state of unity and introduces the effects of the human ego on this unitive love.

“It is the expressly perceivable egoism of the giver (Lk. 11:13) that results in the gift’s no longer being understood as the image of the giver: only then does the inclination to private possession become split in the child from its use as possible gift. Then we see vanish the spontaneous seeking of refuge in the place of protection and obedience as the immediate response to the “fostering “ source ; only then does concrete “fosterance” (auctoritas, from augere: “to make grow”, “to foster”) become abstract, legal “authority”.

Now Balthasar speaks to a important contemorary aspect of the civil culture and its role in developing the individuals' primal concept of love.

“Here arises the burning question whether the ruling, concrete authority of the parents of the family in regard to the children is something preliminary which is then enhanced to the seemingly all-encompassing and definitive authority of the state or of society, whose fostering care replaces that of the family. … But the fourth commandment of the Mosaic Decalogue stands opposed to this confiscation of the individual by the state, and it is a commandment that Christ reaffirms and which enjoins on adults, too, the respectful love of children for parents. Even when the educational element of the parents’ authority disappears as the children come of age, this does not abolish the original relationship of giving and responding personal love between children and parents.”

Near the end of this chapter of the book Balthasar gives a beautiful expression of one aspect of the doctrine of the communion of saints.

“… when children grow up and themselves become mothers and fathers … they will have an active experience of “archetypal identity”, still they will not be able to dissociate it from the passive form of it they had once experienced. The experience immerses them in the great stream of memory of generations whom they cannot cease to thank for their existence and whose past becomes for them the present, to the extent that, along with their progeny, they look out toward the future.”