The eternal child of God

I read a short book by this title from Ignatius press (by the way, if you ever want to see what great book design is, look into their stuff ... amazing). It was by Hans Urs von Balthasar and the cover has this picture by Emil Nolde. What a beautiful picture! Christ Among the Children.

Balthasar is contemplating the stories of Jesus holding out a child and telling us that we will not enter his kingdom unless we become like this little child. He describes that ultimatley this is rooted in Jesus very way of life. As a grown man, he never leaves the "bosom of the Father." His identity is inseperable from his being a child in the bosom of the Father. No other philosopher or founder of religion or psychologist have ever lived more authentically and deeply as a child of the Father than Jesus Christ. In one part he imagines the child Jesus becoming conscious of the world around him ... "when the Mother awakens him, the opening up of the whole horizon of reality is experienced not only as somthing holy but as the realization that in the depths of this opened fullness of being there radiates the personal Face of his Father, personally turned toward him."

And so he is truly able to call us into sonship and daughterhood ... "we must perservere, together with Christ, in fleeing to the Father, in entrusting ourselves to the Father, in imploring and thanking the Father." He also talks about what fights against this for us modern humanity. The biggest is the "makability of man." Our leaning on the idea of being self-made ... of plundering and conquering the world (as opposed to seeing it as given to us). "Nothing, compared to this, has ever more emptied the wonderous mystery of childhood of its value. But the ideal of man's self-fabrication is infallibly also his self-destruction."

"Thanksgiving, in Greek eucharistia, is the quintessence of Jesus stance toward the Father. The Eucharist celebration is when we thank God for Jesus and through him are able to give ourselves away ... "Paul reminds his communities of this need to give thanks to God, and just as often he himself thanks God for having received the grace that enables him to spend himself for Christ's work."

And our thankfulness is also for our very existance ... that we are even ourselves. "To be a child means to owe one's existence to another, and even in our adult life we never quite reach the point where we no longer have to give thanks for being the person we are. This means that we never quite outgrow our condition of children, nor do we therefore ever outgrow the obligation to give thanks for ourselves or to continue to ask for our being. Individual men, cultures and institutions may forget this. Only the Christian religion, which in its essence is communicated by the eternal child of God, keeps alive in its believers the lifelong awareness of their being children, and therefore of having to ask and give thanks for things."

On Sex
"As the erotic faculties of the growing person begin to blossom, the ability to marvel that was enjoyed at the dawn of life again awakens in the same primal sense. Now the Christian task lies in trying to deepen the erotic faculty from the surface of the senses into the depths of the heart: for here eros can keep alive an awed amazement at one's partner's self-surrender within all the routine of the common life, even after the first sensual stimulus has evaporated." This is such an intersting perspective on sexual desire ... it seems very true.

On being present
"The child has time to take time as it comes, one day at a time, calmly without advance planning or greedy hoarding of time. Time to play, time to sleep. He knows nothing of appointment books in which every moment has already been sold in advance." Instead every moment "we should receive with gratitude the full cup that is handed to us ... And only with time of this quality can teh Christian find God in all things, just as Christ found the Father in all things. Pressured man on the run is always postponing his encounter with God to a "free moment" or a "time of prayer" that must constantly be rescheduled, a time he must laboriously wrest from his overburdened workday."

It was a pretty good book ... but more than anything the concept of our faith being led by the Eternal child of God is something we would do well to reflect on.