Become as children

Again drawing on the work of Luigi Giussani, Lopez ( Gift and the Unity of Being , 29-30 ) discusses the centrality of birth, the retrieval which is “the crucial cultural problem today.” According to Giussani, “every evil originates with the lie according to which man theoretically and practically attempts to define himself, forgetting, erasing from his memory his own birth.”

Lopez continues:

“Birth expresses primordially the gift of being . . . . The child is the fruit of a loving union of a man and a woman. Birth, in this regard, is a radically non-democratic events: the child has no say in his own birth and the parents cannot force his personal existence into being. Certainly, scientific progress can facilitate the manipulation of the begetting of a child, but science can never overcome the fact that it always operates with preexistent material that it did not and cannot create.”

If existence is a gift, there must be a giver, and a recipient, and “a dynamic loving relation between them.” Birth points to the fact that this relation is “in different degrees a dwelling place. The child is loved into existence and comes as a gift within a home.” But modern technology has deprived us of a sense of home: “A dwelling place is now seen as a stopping point in the path of time, and time is no longer viewed as the confirmation of the gift that grands indwelling and unity.” Modern technological society quantifies and thus “social life turns out to be a sequence of individual encounters that not only leave the person radically isolated but, more intensely, force the relationship with others into an exercise of power and instinct” (30).

A true home is not only the place that welcomes the child, but is also the setting within which the child continues to experience life as a gift. Parents who bring children into the world also feed, clothe, change diapers, do everything for children. Even as they grow to adulthood, the home is a mark of the person’s original dependency, the foundational giftedness of his existence. Thus, “the home, with the shared life it entails, is not only where one is born but also the place that continuously helps the person discover his own constitutive childlikeness [emphasis added]. The home is the continual, living reminder of one’s having been begotten, of the gift-ness of life, and of the task of existing.”

“You must become as little children” isn’t sentimental or superficial. It’s a call to be what we constitutively are, beings who exist because we have been given to ourselves as gifts.