The Universal Call to Childhood: JPII, Ulrich, and Chesterton

“See what love the Father has for us that we might be called children of God, and so we are.” 1 John 3:1

One of the greatest mysteries of God is that He not only loved mankind to the end, but did so in a familial way. Salvation history is marked by the trustee family of God, by which all families imitate, and finds its culmination in Christ’s own prayer: “Our Father.” The radicality of calling God “Father” is essential for understanding who God is in His essence. When Catholics make the sign of the cross, they say the words: “In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” This is prayed instead of: “In the name of the Creator, and the Redeemer, and the Sanctifier” (Hahn, Catholic for a Reason, 9). Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier are titles that fundamentally diminish the Gospels because they are but mere titles. However, what God has invited man into is the reality of creation, redemption, and sanctification which was established through a familial bond. Therein, we see the reality of fatherhood as not merely a title for God, but His very essence or way of being. The significance of this is that man is not merely a child of God by title, but in reality. And while the fatherhood of God is eternal, so too is the invitation to be a child. Therefore, the vocation of man is to become what he is, a child, and to live through this reality as the ‘turn’ to God, and to finding himself.

Becoming a child is undergirded by the call to God’s trustee family. There are two ways to ground this experience: in the reality of God’s family, and in the reason for a family. Beginning with the first point, the Catechism says, “Becoming a disciple of Jesus means accepting the invitation to belong to God’s family” (CCC 2233). In that, “you are no longer strangers and sojourners, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God” (Ephesians 2:19). However mysterious this reality, it is the way God chose to reveal Himself to man. Converting and living in accordance with God then, means living in accordance with a Baptized family; a family by which every member partakes as a child. The benevolence of the trustee family is impossible to fully grasp, however, through a familial bond, God mysteriously affirms man of a deep and intimate reason for being by calling Him to the family of God and the family of man. The affirmation begins in the creation of each. The Church was created out of a self-giving love between two persons: the Father and the Son. So too does a child find themself in being, created by a mutual gift between two persons. Such is why John Paul II said: “Every child comes to be through an exchange between two persons and comes into reality by being “introduced into the “human family” and into the “family of God,” which is the Church” (Pope John Paul II in Catholic for a Reason, 70). The family then, brought forth through love, is at the center of created reality because it is through the family that creation has been orchestrated. John Paul II also writes:

“The family itself is the great mystery of God. as the “domestic church,” it is the bride of Christ. The universal Church, and every particular Church in her, is most immediately revealed as the bride of Christ in the “domestic church” and in its experience of love: conjugal love, paternal and maternal love, fraternal love, the love of a community of persons and of generations” (Pope John Paul II, ‘Letter to Families’, par. 23).

This gives light as to why Christ Himself came into being through a family. The family is not only the place where one finds themself secured in love, but it is the reality of the cosmos. All of creation is held by the love of a Father, and this is precisely the mission of the family. The family brings one into being and fosters growth, mirroring the same mission of the Church: “Church and family, therefore, in view of Christ’s mission, have mutual bonds and converging purposes” (Pope John Paul II, ‘Message for World Mission Sunday,’ par. 1). The Church, through Christ, has become the place by which all may find themselves secured in familial love. Therefore, “No one is without a family in this world: the Church is a home and family for everyone” (Pope John Paul II, Familiaris Consortio, par 28). However mysterious this may be, God saw it fit to bring man into being through paternal sacrifice and maternal nourishment. 

Through the reality of the trustee family, man comes to know God as the Father. Scripture reveals this in several places in both the Old and the New Testament: “Yet, Lord, you are our Father; we are the clay and you our potter: we are all the work of your hand” ( Isaiah 64:7), “Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom” (Luke 12:32), “I will be your Father, and you shall be my sons and daughters” (2 Corinthians 6:18). Unveiling Himself as the Father, God reveals to mankind the dignity of their creation as one marked by familial love:

“God is more than our Creator; He is Our Father by grace. Instead of mere creatures, we are made in God’s image and likeness to live as His sons and daughters. Instead of a vast impersonal cosmos, the Father fashioned the world to be our home - a royal palace and a holy temple” (Hahn, 10).

Further along in this work by Scott Hahn, he writes, “There are seven ways by which God extends his fatherhood: we live in His house, are called by His name, sit at His table, share His flesh and blood, share His mother, celebrate as a family, and receive discipleship and discipline from Him” (Ibid., 16-17). This seems to be one of the hardest mysteries to grasp that God would make man after His own image and tend to him as the Father, “The Son of God became the Son of Man so that sons of men could become sons of God” (St. Athanasius in Ibid., 11). Indeed, the mystery of God’s fatherhood demands a reverence, not an explanation:

“O marvelous condescension of divine love for us! O inestimable dispensation of boundless charity! In the crib, on the Cross, in the unending glory of the Father, Christ has all the members of the Church present before Him and united to Him in a much clearer and more loving manner than that of a mother who clasps her child to her breast, or than that with which a man knows and loves himself” (Pope Pius XII, ‘Mystici Corporis Christi,’ par. 75).

John Paul II also understood this well. In one of his most famous encyclicals, Familiaris Consortio, he writes “Love for his wife as mother of their children and love for the children themselves are for the man the natural way of understanding and fulfilling his own fatherhood” (Pope John Paul II, ‘Familiaris Consortio,’ par. 25). While this is observed on a natural level, the material family is only in reflection to the supernatural one. Therefore, God’s Fatherhood is fulfilled by His children just as they are fulfilled in Him. In one John Paul II’s plays entitled ‘The Radiation of Fatherhood: A Mystery,’ John Paul II encapsulates the beauty of fatherhood by showcasing how all fathers participate in the one Fatherhood, and how each child finds themself through their parents, through their father. Monica, the daughter of Adam, says to him, “I discover this world in you slowly and all at once: it is the world of my father - how much I long to be in it” (Pope John Paul II, The Radiation of Fatherhood, 142). Here, John Paul II shows how a child comes to know themself through paternity. Children look to their fathers not only for protection but for their identity. “Who am I to you?” a child wonders, by which the only acceptable response from a parent is “Everything.” God reveals Himself in this way. Through His paternal correction from the beginning and His sacrifice on the cross, Christ secures and bestows man’s identity upon him as a person that means “everything.”

Part of the mystery of the trustee family does not end with the paternity of God, for a father can only be understood by reference to a mother. Mary images the Church in her maternity and further reveals the Father’s familial love as whole, a family with both parents. This image is thus explained:

“As the mother is the bond between father and child, so in God the Holy Spirit is the bond of love between the Father and the Son; and as she brings forth the child in unity of nature with the father by transmitting the nature from the father to the child, so the Holy Spirit manifests the unity of nature between the Father and the Son, not of course by transmitting the divine nature to the Son, but because He Himself is the fruit of their mutual unity and love” (Scheeben, The Mysteries of Christianity, 183).

A mother is the connection between a father and his child for she bears the child within herself before a father is invited into the intimacy. This same reality, embedded into creation, is one Christ participates in. While God’s Fatherhood brought Mary into being, He nevertheless desires for her to participate in the plan of salvation history. She acts as a bond between the Father and the Son and does so by bearing Christ within herself and in gifting Him back to God. When Jesus dies upon Calvary, He says to John, “Behold your mother” (John 19:27), thereby extending the invitation to all of humanity. Therefore, “the role of the Blessed Virgin in the mystery of the Incarnate Word and the Mystical Body, and the duties of redeemed mankind toward the Mother of God, who is the Mother of Christ and mother of men, particularly of the faithful” Pope Paul VI, ‘Lumen Gentium,’ par. 54). One of these parallels observed by the Church is Mary as the new Eve. Just as sin entered through a woman, God saw it fitting to bring salvation through the same end. The phrase “mother of all living” (Genesis 3:20) is fulfilled by Mary and becomes not only her title but her essence. As the Church now understands her role as co-redemptrix, advocate, and mediatrix of all graces, Mary continues to live out of her maternity which Christ bestowed and blessed. The Church partakes in this image:

“And such too, modeled upon her, is the Church which, animated by the Holy Spirit, is in Him and through Him the spiritual, virginal mother of all those whom in the power of the Holy Spirit she presents to God the Father as His children, and incorporates in the incarnate Son as members of His mystical body” (Scheeben, 188).

While Christ wed His Bride, the Church, He extends her to man as a mother (Hahn, 17). This motherhood, akin to God’s fatherhood, is the essence of Mary’s identity as it is the Churches: “By the chrism of Confirmation, the faithful are given added strength to protect and defend the Church, their Mother, and the faith she has given them” (Pope Pius XII, ‘Mystici Corporis Christi,’ par. 18). To complete the family, God saw it fitting to establish a mother and man is thus tasked with the reverence and honoring of Her. The faithful find the only fitting response to be the words of St. Augustine, “Let us love the Lord our God; let us love His Church; the Lord as our Father, the Church as our Mother” (St. Augustine in Leo XIII, ‘Satis Cognitum,’ par. 16). By God wedding Himself to His Bride, the Church, He made the metaphysical reality of the familia dei material. With God as Father and Mary and the Church as Mother, man finds a unique call to childhood as not merely a title, but an esse=nce that he must attend to.

As Christ reveals Himself as Father, by which all other fathers imitate, and Mary as Mother, by which all other mothers imitate, then mankind is a child. A question thus arises: What does it mean to live as a child of God in reality? One must first reconcile the wealth and poverty of childhood. This wealth is shown through a child’s trust, but there is a poverty of childhood wherein the subject is not yet aware of themself. Adults have the opposite toil. While their wealth is found in a sense of identity, of having found themself, their poverty lies in an ability to trust and often, to live. This phenomenon was explored best by Ferdinand Ulrich:

“Thus the transformation of “childish substance” into a “subject” brings forth the freedom of childlike personhood that was hidden from the beginning and the previously mute authority to speech. It is only the “grown up” child that can “know himself as a child” that can make his childhood something real because now the word of authority of the other rings out “within” the subject as a word that has become his own!” (Ulrich, Three Short Works, 72).

A child is unable to know themself truly. When Christ calls man into the reality of childhood, He does not do so to diminish the interiority of the subject. Instead, it is a call to become a “grown up child” wherein the adult is a subject, but a subject who is only justified through his childhood “and together with it” (Ibid., 73). Man is seen through this dichotomy of wealth and poverty. He is one called to be completely dependent upon another, and yet completely his own. When Christ extends childhood to all of the faithful, He seems to seek a unity between these two realities. 

While the wealth and poverty of childhood are grounded on a metaphysical level, spiritually, the dependence a child has upon their parents is essential for understanding the nature of being a child of God. A child’s need for another becomes part of their “I” and there is a grander in this dependence. God does not want an adult to lose his conscious subjectivity. However, He does invite man back to a spirit of dependence upon Himself. Parents learn from observing their children in this way of being. Children know that without their parents nothing is accomplished, and they constantly return to the gaze of their authority for affirmation and consolation. This is precisely the way to live out of one’s spiritual childhood: “It is to recognize our nothingness, to expect everything from God as a little child expects everything from its father … to be disquieted about nothing, and not to be set on gaining our living,” that is, “the eternal life of heaven.”” (St. Therese of Lisieux in John Henry Hanson, ‘Growing Young.’). Adults are thus called to grow young. They are called to return with themself, now fully developed, to such a dependency. 

Attending to experience, childhood is also marked by a purity of sight which inspires creative play. Not yet having the ability to sin, children fundamentally see the world differently. They see more. Everything to them is an instance of wonder and a phantasm of magic. Adults seem to lose this. Such is why C.S. Lewis wrote to his God-daughter Lucy: “One day you will be old enough to read fairy tales again” C.S. Lewis, Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, 8). When adults become darkened by sin, they lose an ability to see. Sin distorts and reduces the world to a perverted disinterest in the reality of creation. This was explored in the Garden of Eden. After eating the forbidden fruit, Adam and Eve were naked and ashamed. Their look had been reduced and they in fact, saw less of the person, of reality. Purity returns the gaze to the wonder of creation and as children showcase, the only response therein is to delight in it. Therefore, they play, and in doing so, they create. Children, so pure and so close to Love, create as Love does, without measuring the cost. They create for the sake of creating, and here lies the value. Play, which children value in itself, is the specific activity of childhood whereby they interact with creation through an imaginative story. They do not do so because the world is void of meaning. Instead, they do so because they see that the only proper response to the glory of creation is to play alongside it. G.K. Chesterton describes this beautifully: 

“Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, "Do it again"; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, "Do it again" to the sun; and every evening, "Do it again" to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we” (G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy).

And this is likely what St. Augustine was exploring as well: “Man, grown old through sin, is rejuvenated through grace” (Augustine’s Commentaries on the Psalms: Psalm 149). Children never grow tired of creation because they see it purely. As a result, they yearn to be a part of it by which they respond through playing in a creative story. While childhood is marked by a poverty of becoming, an adult is able to return intentionally. They, unlike children, can fulfill the wealth and poverty dichotomy which distinguishes the ages. As they do so, they find a joy in dependency again. Secured by the gaze of the Father and the guidance of the Mother, an adult relearns to see and thus, to play. In this new reality of a ‘developed’ childhood, one begins where they started, but knows it for the first time.

If God is so intentional with creating the family, then part of the mission of redemption for mankind and the world is found within the turning back to childhood. When Christ says, “unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 18:3), He is implying that children have something in their essence which adults must rediscover. If childhood, although containing a poverty, contains at the same time a wealth of dependence, purity, and creativity, then here is precisely where an adult is called to turn. Adults ought to always live out of a spirit of dependence upon God apart from which they can do nothing. While adulthood is marked by the ability to be self-sufficient, a grown-up must remember that they are small and completely metaphysically dependent. Although adults have children of their own for which they are always providing, they must recall that God’s Fatherhood cannot be outgrown. They too need to be provided for, and God the Father and Mary the Mother never grow tired of holding their children. Adults must also attend to purity, specifically sexual purity, so as to see as children see. As Eden shows, purity of heart allows one to see reality in its glory. When reality is seen through such a lens, the only fitting response is to rejoice in the discovery, and the world becomes a sort of playground whereby it is always exciting and always new. The Church will be redeemed if all of Her children recognize themself and creation in this way, for it is the way God intended man to live. This does not seem to be possible unless all members live out of the reality of their childhood. In so doing, the Church in Her genius does not call all of Her children to become one repeatable subject. As childhood is marked by radical individuality, the Church invites all Her people to find themself again. She wants Her children to be who they were created to be, and to be fully alive therein. Tracking the simplicity of Christ, it does not seem that the Church will be saved through encyclical documents or grand ceremonies. Instead, it is much more likely that God is inviting each person to partake in Her redemption through the very contribution of being themself (fully realized in their childhood).

The entire mission of man is to become what he is, a child: “Do not forget: anyone who does not realize that he is a child of God is unaware of the deepest truth about himself” (St. Josemaria Escriva in ‘Growing Young.’). Although a great mystery, God has indeed created the cosmos as a Father, not merely in title but in His essence. To complete the trustee family, He saw it fitting to create with a Mother, hence Mary who is the mother of all the living, and the Church which she resembles. As man finds himself called to the reality of childhood, he does so in a complete way. While God does not want an adult to lose his conscious “I”, He does invite him into a spirit of radical dependence, purity, and creativity by which the subject finds themself most fully. As an adult learns to delight in the world again, the Church finds the crux of Her redemption therein because Her children have become fully alive. Therefore, the universal call to childhood is one that awakens the person to themself. There is nothing that could delight the Father more than this.

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