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The royal destiny of marriage, which is a community of love as in the Trinity, is to beget something outside itself. The nuptial chalice is too small for the love it contains and therefore it must overflow. Since God is in all love, love cannot be limited. It must go on even unto infinity. The temporal continuity of parents in their children thus becomes the fleshly symbol of the eternal continuity of God. God communicates His Power of creativity to His subjects. This does not mean that people marry in order to have children; they have children because they are truly in love. The less the triune element enters into that love, the less is the desire for children. There is, indeed, in a selfish world such a thing as an "unwanted child" or a "child by accident." It means that despite their best attempts to stifle love, it overflowed through the very impetus that God gave His creation. Where there is love, there is no calculation. Hence Our Lord, when asked by Peter how many times he should forgive, answered: "Seventy times seven." That did not mean 490, but rather that there must be no mathematical exactness in love. Nothing is as cold as mathematics, wherein people limit the expression of their love. Love is outside of law. Without it, all the rhythm of daily exchanges becomes an unsupportable banality.
Love between two who deliberately exclude the trinity would, in a desert, bore more quickly than anything else in the world. Very soon the two become juxtaposed. This does not mean that, in those cases where God does not bless a union with children, there is failure. As we pointed out, there is trinity here, too, when husband and wife understand love not as looking at one another, but as looking to God. The child is the physical expression of that Divine counterpart of love. For childless couples, where there is no frustration of love's overflow, the law of marriage still holds true; it takes three to make love, and that third is God seen not in children, but through resignation to His Will.
The first direct, human limitation of infant life in the history of Christianity took place in the village of Bethlehem through an Infant-Controller whose name was Herod. The prevention of infant life was simultaneously an attack upon Divinity in the person of God made man, Jesus Christ, our Lord. No one strikes at birth who does not simultaneously strike at God, for birth is earth's reflection of the Son's eternal generation. To those who conspire against life in Herod's way or more scientifically, there will one day come the haunting conscience described by John Davidson:
Your cruellest pain is when you think of all
The honied treasure of your bodies spent
And no new life to show. O, then you feel
How people lift their hands against themselves,
And taste the bitterest of the punishment
Of those whom pleasure isolates. Sometimes
When darkness, silence, and the sleeping world
Give vision scope, you lie awake and see
The pale sad faces of the little ones
Who should have been your children, as they press
Their cheeks against your windows, looking in
With piteous wonder, homeless, famished babes,
Denied your wombs and bosoms.
From the day when the Son of God became a child, there has been an intimate bond between Christianity and the family. Bethlehem was a kind of earthly Trinity. It placed primacy at a point never before seen in history. Up until that first Christmas, the hierarchy had been father, mother, and child. Now it was turned backwards, and became child, mother, and father. For centuries humans looked up to the heavens and said: "God is away up there." But when the mother held the Child in her arms, it could be truly said that she looked down to Heaven. Now God was "way down here" in the dust of human lives. Did Mary have other children than Our Lord? No! Not of the flesh. The word "Brethren," applied to Our Lord in Scripture, refers to all kinds of relatives. It no more implies that He had blood brothers than a preacher, addressing his congregation as "My Dear Brethren," implies that he and the congregation have the same parents. But Our Blessed Mother did have other children according to the spirit. Our Lord was her "first-born"; what St. Paul calls "the first-born of creatures." As in the stable she became the Mother of God, so at the Cross she became the Mother of men. When her Divine Son spoke to her calling her the Universal Mother, or "Woman," and telling her that John was her new "son," she entered into a new relation with mankind. Our Lord did not here call John by name. If He had, John would have been only the son of Zebedee and no one else. In virtue of his anonymity, he stood for all of us to whom Our Lord was saying: "Behold thy mother." It was a poor exchange for Mary. She was giving up the Son of God to get the children of men, but really, it was to gain a larger family in her Son. At that moment, Mary suffered the pangs of childbirth for all the children who would be born to her until the angel of doom comes. She brought forth Jesus in joy; us in labor, and in such agony that the Church has called her "Queen of Martyrs."
In Mary's Child all children are found; in her motherhood all women are mothers; and through her, as Gate of Heaven, all men see the Ancient of the Days grown young. Of that beautiful relationship of Mother and Child, Chesterton writes:
Or risen from play at your pale raiment's hem
God, grown adventurous from all times repose,
Of your tall body climbed the Ivory Tower
And kissed upon your mouth the Mystic Rose.
Since in her Child through the flesh at Bethlehem Mary had many children through the spirit, at Calvary the word child has a collective meaning and refers here not to an unique offspring, but to the fruit of love as God bestows it.
One of the greatest mistakes that couples make is to think that their love will endure because it is strong. Rather, love continues not because of its strength, but because it is related to the power of self-renewal. The love of husband and wife is less a continuing thing than it is, like Calvary and the Resurrection, the finding of new life at a moment when it was believed that satiety was the master. The Church is not a continuous phenomenon through history. Rather, it is something that has been through a thousand resurrections after a thousand crucifixions. The bell is always sounding for its execution which, by some great power of God, is everlastingly postponed. The world is ready to chant a requiem over its grave, and it rises to chant a requiem over their graves. In family life, in like manner, two hearts do not move on a roadway to a happier love; rather, every now and then they seem on the brink of losing their love, only to find it on a higher level. The child is not just a birth; it is a Resurrection and perhaps even an Ascension. The seed that is dropped into the field in the springtime is not the same seed that is gathered in the harvest, but rather its effect, multiplied in quantity, renewed and vivified in quality. The child is not the proof that the love of father and mother continues to endure; it is the sign and symbol that, phoenix-like, their love has found its spring and its renewal.
The newly-married often describe their love as "out of this world." In a certain sense it is true, for they are called upon to create a new world. In the Incarnation, "The Word became flesh and dwelt amongst us." In the family, "Our love became flesh and dwelt amongst us." As the Christ-Love left a Memorial of His Sacrificial Love in the Eucharist, so the father and mother leave a memorial of their love in their children. As witnesses through history, they will testify to the parents who once walked the earth! Standing before the feeble creature who prolongs their life, the parents experience both an attachment and a detachment. They feel an attachment because the child is their love, their body and blood; a detachment because the child is someone else. Creation and birth are both solemn separations. Because he is born of them, the child is also born from them and has a destiny all his own. Love means not only to captivate a free soul, which is conjugal love, but also to liberate a captive soul, which is birth. Anyone who gives freedom to another takes a risk. God took a risk when He made man free; parents take a risk when they open the prison doors of their flesh to beget a child. Each child has his own soul to save, but the child will not know it until he has already been formed for some seven years by the parents. Their child is therefore a trust. His target is fixed, and as the poet has said, the parents must realize that they take the place of God in the beginning of the soul's salvation. Kahlil Gibran wrote:
And a woman who held a babe against her
bosom said, Speak to us of Children.
And he said:
Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing
for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they
belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to
make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children as
living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the
infinite, and He bends you with His might that His
arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the Archer's hand be for
gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so
He loves also the bow that is stable.
Children have a messianic character in the family. First of all, they represent the conquest of Love over the insatiable ego; they symbolize defeat of selfishness and the victory of charity. Each child begets disinterestedness, inspires a sacrifice. As all love tends toward an incarnation, even God's, so does all love move toward a cross, even Christ's. So long as love has a body, there will never be any other way to prove love than by sacrifice. Possessed of soul and body, man al ways has a choice. He can give supremacy to the flesh or to the spirit, but one must "suffer" at the cost of the other. Love's greatest luxury is to spend itself on others. Until the child is born, the little sacrifices are for one another, made in the form of gifts and, above all, the gift of self. Then the sacrifices are made for the sake of the crushed-out sweetness of their two hearts. Because a child is born of a mother's pain, it brings a certain redemption into the world. Wrote Victor Hugo:
When she cried, "My Father"
My heart cried out "My God."
Children also take away any shame that may have been attached to the mutual act of love. Sowing seed, or planting a garden, would indeed be tedious if there were no fruit. The union of two in one flesh is the overflow of the cup of love. Even in the childless marriage, the body becomes the gesture of the soul and thus a reflection of God's increasing revelation of His Love through history. Even without children, love answers love with a perfect reciprocity, so that an ideal love spirates and breathes forth from both. In their union of irreversible and indissoluble love is proclaimed that unity of Christ and His Bride, the Church, which is the model of their union. Though childless, they are to be likened to the contemplatives who glorify God without making converts; while the husband and wife who are blessed with children are like the active clergy, whose mission it is to increase and multiply the Kingdom of God.
In the child the parents have a feeling that their soul-love which expresses itself in the flesh-unity, has had a function. Love now has no more shadows. Satieties disappear as the fatigue after work vanishes in seeing the product of labor. The more love is spiritualized, the more quickly Eros passes into Agape. The more the union ceases to be the possession of the other and becomes a gift, the more harmonious is its orchestration. The psychic and the spiritual, dominating the physical and the sexual, have their own peculiar melody, which is sweetest when the two who listen to it hear, as well, the voice of the child of love. A wise father once said to his son, about to be married: "Try to make it last for only ten years. After those ten years, your heart will be full of memories and your house full of children and you will never want it to end."
The child is also the sign and promise of human liberty, because he is a new act of freedom added to the world. The increase of marital introversion through the prevention of buds on the tree of life goes hand in hand with the increase of totalitarianism and suffocation of personal liberty. The furnace of Dachau was only one of the scientific ways modern man has found to snuff out the candles of freedom. There are other ways, too, all performed to "benefit" humanity. Herod said: "Go, and enquire carefully for the child, and when you have found him, bring me back word, so that I, too, may come and worship him." (Matt. 2:8) But the gift he gave was the sword meant to bleed infant freedom white.
The frontiers of freedom today are not on the political and economic front, but in the home. Not they who prattle about freedom, but they who create new areas of freedom through birth, are the true defenders of real democracy. Children are conceived despite the exact calculations of man. Their sex cannot be absolutely determined, nor the exact time of their coming. There is something beautifully undetermined, something free about their advent. Like the love from which they issued, they are as free at creation as a poem. All things else are slavery compared to this new act of freedom and the promise of a better world. It is, indeed, curious that those who would shirk the responsibility of life defend their egotism, on the ground that they want to be "free." If freedom is egotism, the plea is justified. Freedom belongs to pioneers who bring new choices and revolutions and decisions into a weary and old world. Here is novelty at its best; thanks to the child, all covenants with death are abrogated.
Love exists only where there is freedom. To be forced to love is hell; to be free in love is heaven. Where love is, there is freedom. Since the child is the flower of love, it is earth's sacrament of freedom. As the cradles come back into the world, freedom will come back. This freedom will consist not in throwing off restraint, which is license, but in the increase of new centers of freedom. In each child God whispers a new secret to the world; adds a new dimension of immortality to creation; and makes the clinging hearts of husband and wife feel a little freer, as they look into that strange and mutual hope which has come to them from God.
Children also beget humility. Before an infant, the big feel little, and the proud so insignificant. As an elephant before a mouse, so is the egotist before the child. There is something about a baby that disarms, attracts, and makes even the evil want to appear as good. Everyone unconsciously puts himself on the level of a child; even the scholars descend to baby-talk. It may be that all love makes us little; or perhaps it is our littleness that makes us love. There was something staggering to the Wise Men about that Child, Whose Hands were not quite long enough to reach the huge heads of the cattle. Somehow they felt that they were Hands that steered the sun, moon, and stars in their courses. Before that Infant, the Wise Men discovered Wisdom and the shepherds discovered their Shepherd. Every child in talking us back to the source of life, takes us back to God Who is the Fount of Life. Only two classes of people found that Littleness Who is Greatness: the shepherds and the Wise Men; those who knew they did not know anything, and those who knew they did not know everything, never the man with one book, or the man who thinks that he knows.
The intelligentsia, who are educated beyond their intelligence, stay away from children for the same reason that they stay away from God. They cannot bear the vision of the source of life. But the humble, who live in communion with the life of an living, like to get as close to it as possible, and from this flows the family. There is something awesome about a child, for it is the unveiling of love. A great secret has been let out and one stands in filial fear of it.
The child makes men humble as the thought of God makes men humble. There is little difference between the two, for the child is, in a certain sense, "Emmanuel," or God with us. Great depths of true wisdom are hidden in the heart of those parents who always say their night prayers before the crib of the last-born child. In that as yet wordless Word they see not the increase of their image, but the very image and likeness of God. With the crib seen as a tabernacle and the child as a kind of host, then the home becomes a living Temple of God. The sacristan of that sanctuary is the mother, who never permits the tabernacle lamp of faith to go out.
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