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.”

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.

St. Peter the Rock

A brief of decription of St. Peter.Note the spectacular composition of the second paragraph. Could more be expressed with so few words as is done in these lines?

"This Friday eve, when the meal had been eaten with the disciples together, Yeshua slept once more under his mother's roof. And when he had laid himself down to rest, Miriam went out into her garden to learn what manner of men her son had chosen for his followers. She had seen them before, at the marriage in Cana; they were the three whom he had apparently elected to be his closest intimates, for they never stirred from his side.

St. Peter

Among them was the stocky fishermen with the leathery face – Simon, whom they were already calling Cephas, signifying "a rock." A curly black beard, which seemed continuous with his hair, framed all his features. His eyes were overhung with heavy brows and made a pattern of crow's feet at their corners, all of which would have expressed only simplicity and kindness had not the frank gaze of his eyes suggested the practical sagacity of the people, the accumulated wisdom of generations.

Simon showed her all possible reverence, addressing her with utmost humility and catering to her where he could, and Miriam sensed in him the love and devotion which the simple Jew of Galilee had for her son. She soon came to understand why Yeshua held him in such high regard. For the man was all faith, and this faith had begotten his conviction that the ways of his rabbi were those of righteousness and that his every act was performed on the word of God. It fortified his hope and assured him that no harm would come to his rabbi, that Yeshua, like Elijah before him, would avoid the narrow Strait of death and ascend, undying, into heaven, there to sit on the right hand of God for the judgment of the world. In this hope Miriam found her affinity with him, for since his coming to her house, Simon had been strengthening and consoling her, saying:

"Do I not see the Angels going in and out of his door as in Abraham's house? What evil can befall him, or what hurt can come to him, when a host of ministering angels stand at his right and left, waiting to act at his bidding?"

This hope of Simon's for happy issue of his rabbi's ministry brought him close to the mother and awakened her love."

from Mary, by Sholem Asch, p. 366-368

Coincidence of experience and disconnect of experience. What do we seek in life? What is our personal experience of life and are the conclusions we draw from these experiences valid as a measure of how we should live our lives?

To provide light on the answers to these questions we look the many sources of reinforcement of or cause to abandon our experience based conclusions. One of the ways we seek such guidance is by examining the experience and conclusion of those who have placed their experience at our feet and allowed us, at their great risk, to either accept their offerings as validating our own or rejecting their conclusions as inconsistent with our own.

In our effort to validate our own experience and the conclusions we can draw from them, the seeker could be guilty of only seeking the experience of others that reinforces their own conclusions. Such a seeker could be accused of not being open to new ideas or new ways of looking at our experience, of not “thinking outside the box” so to speak.

On the other hand one could be so open to new ideas that in efforts to accept the new experiential offering, which has not been coincident with our own, that they could be guilty of abandoning accepted norms and accused of “following false prophets” so to speak.

Where then is the balance between these two opposite tendencies? Can one actually attain such a balance? When one is faced with choosing one or the other on a particular issue how is one assured that their choice is consistent with the will of God, that being the ultimate goal of existence.

Particular dangers exist in our philosophical environments that enjoy the practice of deconstruction. By deconstruction I mean the deliberate practice of trying to reinterpret certain accepted cultural axioms, even moral norms, and presenting them in innovative ways. This being “thinking outside the box”. We are constantly presented with ways in which practices once considered unacceptable to a prudent way of life are re-presented in ways which attempt to make them appear to have virtues, opposite to their original intent, which can justify their acceptance.

I offer an answer. Only look at things plainly. When you hear something or read something it evicts from you a sense of truth or a sense of self-service, believe in that initial sense. Whichever sense (feeling) you experience is probably due to the coincidence with or disconnection from your own personal experience. Follow that sense in the direction of truth.

Critics of what I say may argue that feelings are not a reliable indicator of truth. God gave us emotions for a reason. Our emotions are guided by that “tabernacle in our heart” placed in us by our creator when we were formed in the womb and through which our God speaks to us.