Love Begins in a Child's Questions
This week’s article is by Fr. Timothy D., O.P. - if you’d like to contribute your own reflections to knowHis.love please join us
Married people might not take a priest seriously who gives parenting advice. Then again, John Paul II gave advice on sexuality, explaining in his introduction to Love and Responsibility that he felt qualified because he worked with many different couples in his ministry. I also hope to take the risk and give parenting advice, as I've worked with many children in catechesis and grade schools. It's the priest's distance from family life that also makes him a good observer.
Recently, I celebrated a wedding and afterward received a phone call from one of the groomsmen. He had been dating someone a couple of years, best friends, but unsure about marriage with her. I asked, “How much do you want children? And how much do you want to see your girlfriend one day become a mother and yourself become a father, to go through that together as a next step of being closer?” He said, “I used to want it more when we first started dating.” Exactly. Our culture downplays the procreative power of marriage so much, that even in imagining it, we're just not sure. We're unsure about the most beautiful things in life, because well, we might have some other plans. Or travel. Or whatever. A few weeks later he proposed and already feels a new level of freedom and openness. Do we love children and family more than any other plans? God has written it in our heart of hearts that this must be so.
Working at a grade school taught me there are two kinds of parents: those who share their children’s questions and those who avoid them. No parent has answers for all the questions, but every child invites you back back back, to look again at everything in life. If you’re willing to join them, they know that and will bloom. If you don’t join them, they know that also and rebel. To leave them alone in front of life’s questions, really in front of life itself, or to pay someone else to do that job for you, this is like Esau selling his birthright but instead is a selling of parental rights! These rights are to be the primary sharers in their children's questions.
A good college friend of mine, Rebecca, lives in San Diego and has two children while finishing her PhD in nursing - not a light load! Still, she said over the phone to me recently, "Kids always invite you to wonder at everything again." Her daughter knows immediately when mom has shifted attention to her phone only, and she hears about it, "You're just saying ‘Yes,’ and not listening!" Recently her daughter called her from the front porch to come to the side yard and see something.
"I see it," Mom said.
The reply: "It's on the other side of the house. How can you see it?" She stood corrected. So she walked to the side yard.
Priests, too, can sell their parental rights. Maybe their goal is to preach undiluted orthodoxy, straight from the catechism or the blogs they read. Maybe it's to live the life of a business man and simply provide for the parish. Whatever the form, to not share in people's lives, people's questions, this is to sell their parental rights. This is Esau. To be a shepherd is not only to have the sheep hear your voice, but it is to hear theirs. It's to actually notice if one of the one-hundred have strayed. You can't set out in search of it, if you haven't first noticed.
Parenting, of the family or the priestly type, can be told even from their eyes, whether they look often into their people's eyes or always away at life somewhere else. It is also clear by their mouth, whether they smile at the majority of things or frown. One of the most beautiful sights in the universe is a parent bending down on their knees, humbling themselves, and being on eye-level with the child asking a question. This is Christ's posture towards the world. And it was manifested physically even in his case, and it must be so in ours. Sure, all of us have different personalities and circumstances, but there's truth in the simplicity of the issue: do parents share the questions of their children or not.
A child's first and primary conscious experience of being loved - after first being held and fed and bathed - is having someone share their questions. Mom has seen a maple leaf one-thousand times before, but she still asks, “What is that?” And then she thinks, “Have I really ever once seen a maple leaf?” And her son picks it up, red and fresh and fallen from the backyard tree. The tree has been there far longer than they have, and it watches over them, an invitation of God to enter creation right there in the very yard. The child sees the leaf for the first time, and she must also, and not only will he feel loved, but she will also. For parents, this love isn’t simply that God has given them a child, has given them nature, but that He smiles through these things at them. Each parent is still a beloved child. These flesh and blood revelations are meant by God, meant to be common, meant always to be shared, when we love another person so much that yet again we'll listen to their questions.