What Christian parents hope for their children

Not wealth or health. Not success. Not intelligence or skill or talent. Not safety per se. Not freedom from suffering. Not a long life for its own sake. Not goodness, considered as a moral achievement. Not even happiness, in the popular sense.

No, each of these things is secondary. Naturally, every Christian parent prays for all or most of them. But they’re not primary. What’s primary, what a Christian parent hopes above all as most important for his children, is that they know Christ. And knowing Christ, apart from having priority, cuts against those secondary desires in two important respects.

The first is this. To know Christ is not to have it all together. Far from it. To know Christ is to know that, far from having it all, one has nothing. Having it all is the illusion from which Christ delivers us. There is no one righteous, not one. Like our children, we sometimes imagine the world is divided between good and bad people. But those aren’t the basic Christian categories. The basic Christian category for human beings is sinner, and we all belong to it. The aim of the Christian life isn’t to avoid being Peter, the betrayer of Christ; Paul, the persecutor of Christ; Thomas, the doubter of Christ. For we are all, every one of us, Peter and Paul and Thomas. The aim instead is to be the Peter and Paul and Thomas we already are on the far side of Christ—on the far side of seeing and recognizing Christ for who he is: the lover of our souls, the One who forgives seventy times seven, the grace of God incarnate. The aim is to know Christ, as the One who sees us for who we are and forgives us as the sinners we are. Kichijiro, in the novel Silence, is not the paradigmatic “bad” Christian. He’s the paradigmatic Christian full stop. His perpetual failure is ours. We are all Kichijiro: believing, confessing, failing, betraying, and in sincere contrition falling prostrate before the Lord, begging mercy once again. And receiving it.

That is the shape of the Christian life. That, therefore, is what a Christian parent hopes for her children. She knows in advance that the shape of human life is failure, so she doesn’t kid herself that her children might escape such a fate. What she prays for instead is that her children’s inevitable failure might be cruciform, that is, formed and defined by the cross of Christ. For when our failures are united to his, then his triumph becomes ours. Per crucem ad lucem. Only by darkness, light; only by death, life; only by the cross—by suffering, shame, rejection, and humiliation—comes resurrection life, which is the life of God: eternal life.

This is the second element of knowing Christ. To know Christ is to follow Christ, taking up our crosses in his wake. For the way of Christ is the way of the cross. To follow him is to be conformed to his image, to the pattern of his life, death, and resurrection. Far from the path of passivity or unrighteousness, this is the path of holiness. What it means, in a word, to follow the Christ, the Anointed One, is to become holy as he is holy. It is to become a saint.

As Léon Bloy famously remarked, “The only real sadness, the only real failure, the only great tragedy in life, is not to become a saint.” Few of us, alas, become saints in this life, though all the baptized are bound for it, here or in the life of the world to come. But what does it mean to be a saint?

The answer to that question is found in the lives of the saints. And as C. S. Lewis wrote, “How monotonously alike all the great tyrants and conquerors have been; how gloriously different are the saints.” Their fundamental differences doesn’t mean there is no commonality, however. The commonality is their proximity to Christ: their having been seized, captured, and won by Christ and for Christ to serve his will alone. What he wants, they want; what he does, they do; what he commands, they obey. The heart of the saint is the prayer of St. Augustine: “Command what you will, and will what you command.” A saint, therefore, is someone whose total life and being are utterly transparent to the desires and actions of the Lord.

The thing about the Lord’s will, though, is that it, too, is not primarily interested in wealth, health, success, intelligence, skill, talent, safety, long life, mortal righteousness, earthly happiness, or freedom from suffering. To be a saint, as the lives of the saints suggest, is as a rule to be asked to relinquish or avoid such things. For the crown of sainthood is martyrdom, and all saints are called to be martyrs in one form or another. A saint is likely, as a result, to be marked not by worldly signs of flourishing but, instead, by ostracism, loneliness, pain, mockery, ill health, poverty, neither spouse nor children, a brief life, and, on the part of the wider society, either befuddled neglect or outright repudiation. I might as well be describing St. Paul, after all. Or Jesus.

And that’s the point. To raise children to be Christians is to raise them to follow Christ; to raise them to follow Christ is to unclench one’s parental fists, entrusting them to the Lord’s care, with the full knowledge that the Lord may lead them to where he himself was led: Gethsemane, Golgotha, a garden tomb. The reason why a parent might even consider this is, on one hand, because we know what follows that sequence: an empty tomb. And, on the other hand, because Jesus says that even in this world, even in this life, the only true life is following his way, wherever it may lead. Resurrection life looks like cruciform life even before one arrives in Jerusalem.

“I came that they may have life, and may have it abundantly.” As parents, we either take Jesus at his word or we don’t. If we do, our prayers and hopes for our children will look wildly, even scandalously different than our neighbors’. If we don’t, then of all people we are most to be pitied. If Jesus can’t be trusted, we should let our children know as soon as possible, and quit all this church business for good.

Deposits of mercy

Tidal

By R. S. Thomas

The waves run up the shore
and fall back. I run
up the approaches of God
and fall back. The breakers return
reaching a little further,
gnawing away at the main land.
They have done this thousands
of years, exposing little by little
the rock under the soil’s face.
I must imitate them only
in my return to the assault,
not in their violence. Dashing
my prayers at him will achieve
little other than the exposure
of the rock under his surface.
My returns must be made
on my knees. Let despair be known
as my ebb-tide; but let prayer
have its springs, too, brimming,
disarming him; discovering somewhere
among his fissures deposits of mercy
where trust may take root and grow.

Dreams and prayers

More than occasionally I dream of people whom I have neither seen nor thought of in years, sometimes near on two decades. I was in high school from 2000 to 2004, and at least once every couple months nowadays a random person from high school—a stranger, not a close friend, someone I might have been “friends” with on Facebook, before I deleted my account—just walks into a dream. Not a weird dream. Not a nightmare. Just populated by people I know as well as the name and face of an almost complete stranger I last saw more than 17 years ago.

Actually, I’ve also dreamed of people I haven’t met before, and not just actors or famous people whose faces and personalities I’ve seen on TV. I’ve dreamed of writers I’ve never met plenty of times. As though they were a regular fixture of my daily life.

It’s always made me wonder: Whose dreams am I rambling around in? What almost or actual stranger woke up this morning wondering why “what’s-his-name, that Brad guy” appeared in his or her mind while sleeping last night?

*

It occurred to me this week that prayers are the same. I’ve been praying the last few weeks for someone I don’t really know. We’ve met once or twice, but we might as well be strangers, and he definitely does not know I’m praying for him. In fact, looking at the little hand-scribbled list of people to pray for on my office desk, I imagine almost none of them, even those I’m close to, know—or at least would assume—that I’m praying for them. Some of them the family members of friends, some of them students, some of them close or distant friends who are expecting a child. (I have a rule: If I know you and you’re pregnant, you will be prayed for.) But like strangers strolling through dreams, the names and faces and sufferings of the prayed-for are “present” in my life and to my mind in a way they wouldn’t guess and I wouldn’t have known to expect in advance of finding myself compelled to “add them to the list.”

Which, naturally, raises the question: Who’s praying for me? What distant relation, what tenuous acquaintance, what absolute stranger is praying for me, not just on a lark or when tragedy strikes, but every single day of the week?

I learned, after becoming a parent, the secret of someone winning my affection in the blink of an eye. The secret: letting me know you are praying for my children. You could be my mortal enemy, worthy of contempt and derision—or, less intensely, just an unlikable or unpleasant person—but if I learn that you pray for my children, my heart swells up like a balloon. All I feel for you henceforth is love and gratitude. Prayer covers a multitude of sins. I have no higher esteem than for the people in my life who, if I told them my children were in peril or need, would stop what they were doing, fall to their knees, and beg God for mercy.

Anonymous prayers are themselves a special mercy. Someone today will say a prayer for one or all of my children; even, perhaps, for me. I won’t know it. But God will hear it. Just as he hears my prayers for the unknowing prayed-for on my list.

This is a great mystery. But I am talking about the communion of the saints.

Narnia’s saints

Does Narnia have saints? It occurred to me, as I was listening to The Last Battle this morning, that the function of the children in the stories (minus The Horse and His Boy) is analogous to the function of the saints in devotional and liturgical prayer in catholic traditions. There is no question that Aslan alone is King and Lord, but by his will the sons of Adam and the daughters of Eve are sent as ministering servants to the beasts and people of Narnia. Not only that, but more than once they are called. Caspian blows Susan’s horn to call them for help. And while captured and alone, King Tirian bellows aloud—following a prayer addressed directly to Aslan—a prayer to the children of old who once aided Narnia long ago. Indeed this latter petition for the children’s intercession comes after Tirian recalling to mind the old stories he was raised on, having been well versed as a child in a kind of common Narnian hagiography of Peter and Lucy and Digory and Polly and the rest. And more or less the moment he begs their intercession, under Aslan, he is brought to them in our world, and moments later (for him: a week later for them) Jill and Eustace arrive to help.

That description is quite similar to catholic teaching and practice regarding the saints. They are alive with God in heaven (read: another world); they once lived in our world and we tell and retell stories of their words and deeds (read: tales of the fabled children who came to Narnia’s aid in times of great need); they have no power of themselves but by God’s grace hear the petitions of the church militant and intercede for them before the heavenly throne (read: the children being called or summoned to Narnia); and occasionally through their intercession the Lord works some miracle or wonder in answer to a believer’s prayer and as a sign of the saint’s patronage or protection (read: the children appearing in Narnia and defeating the White Witch or coming to Caspian’s aid or sailing to the end of the world or rescuing Prince Rilian from his enchantment). If this account makes the role of the saints, and therefore of the children in Lewis’s stories, akin to that of the angels, that is because it is. At least according to sacred tradition.

I vaguely recall Lewis half-punting the question of the saints’ intercession in his book on prayer, or perhaps in a separate essay. I’ll have to run down the reference, but I believe he affirms the saints’ intercession on principle, but not wanting to be divisive he allows the legitimacy of Protestant worries about superstitious and abuse. In any case, though, I’d be shocked if he were dead-set opposed to the practice. And even if he were, he’s rendered the practice in an intelligible and quite beautiful narrative form in the children of the Chronicles of Narnia.

Saint Monica (TLC, 2)

Today is the feast of St. Monica, the mother of St. Augustine of Hippo. St. Monica is (if you will allow it) my self-appointed patron saint. She is an inspiration and a sacred exemplar of Christian fidelity, maternal love, and undying hope. A couple years back Matthew Rothaus Moser, a theologian at Azusa Pacific, wrote this on Twitter:

Theology hot take: *Confessions* is less a narrative of Augustine’s search for God than it is a narrative of the efficacy of Monica’s prayerful tears.

I retweeted that with the following small thread:

Print this out and plaster it on every mirror, wall, and doorframe of your house. God help us parents to pray with one percent of the blood, sweat, and tears of St. Monica.

This supposed hot take should be so cool as to be frozen solid. St. Monica is the human hero of the Confessions: the exemplar, the faithful one, the stubborn widow pestering the judge, Abraham haggling with the Lord: tear-stained incarnation of irresistible grace in fallen form.

I've shared this before, and I always share it whenever I teach the Confessions: Re-reading the book after becoming a parent—sitting in a little YDS second-floor study room—I wept like a newborn baby when I got to the end of Book VIII. God heard her prayers. All grace. Pure joy.

Come by my office, and you'll find icons of St. Monica on my door, on my wall, at my window. (Sitting in my study at home, I'm looking at an icon of her as I write.) When I grow up I want to be like St. Monica.

A few months later, on the feast of St. Monica in 2019, I retweeted that thread with the following appended comment:

A thread from last month for the feast of St. Monica: mother of St. Augustine, soldier of prayer, and my own (alas, self-appointed) patron saint. Jesus spoke of her in Luke 18; she is the persistent widow incarnate.

Remember and celebrate St. Monica this day, and give thanks for her witness and for her tears, which by the Spirit’s grace made her wayward son a son of God. Like Hannah, the one thing she loved most in the world she gave over to the Lord, whom she loved even more; she knew her boy needed the church as a mother, not only herself. And what she gave up, she received back one hundredfold.

Why, after all, did St. Augustine write what may be the most important, influential, and beautiful work of Christian literature in the church’s history? Answer:

My Lord, my God, inspire your servants, my brothers, your sons, my masters, to whose service I dedicate my heart, voice, and writings, that all who read this book may remember at your altar Monica your servant and Patrick her late husband, through whose physical bond you brought me into this life without my knowing how. May they remember with devout affection my parents in this transient light, my kith and kin under you, our Father, in our mother the Catholic Church, and my fellow citizens in the eternal Jerusalem. For this city your pilgrim people yearn, from their leaving it to their return. So as a result of these confessions of mine may my mother’s request receive a richer response through the prayers which many offer and not only those which come from me.

The Confessions exists to elicit the prayers of God’s people in perpetuity, on behalf of St. Monica and as an extension and fulfillment of her own prayers, while she was still on earth. So say a prayer today on her behalf; say a prayer especially for your children, as she did her only son. She’s in heaven now, all her earthly prayers answered, yet still (we may trust) praying without ceasing. For whom? For all God’s children still journeying toward their eternal home.

Patrick Leigh Fermor on prayer in the monastic life

"After the first postulate of belief, without which the life of a monk would be farcical and intolerable, the dominating fact of monastic existence is a belief in the necessity and the efficacy of prayer; and it is only by attempting to grasp the importance of this principle—a principle so utterly remote from every tendency of modern secular thought—to the monks who practise it, that one can hope to understand the basis of monasticism. This is especially true of the contemplative orders, like the Benedictines, Carthusians, Carmelites, Cistercians, Camaldulese and Sylvestrines; for the others, like the Franciscans, Dominicans or the Jesuits—are brotherhoods organised for action. They travel, teach, preach, convert, organise, plan, heal and nurse; and the material results they achieve make them, if not automatically admirable, at least comprehensible to the Time-Spirit. They get results; they deliver the goods. But what (the Time-Spirit asks) what good do the rest do, immured in monasteries far from contact with the world?

"The answer is—if the truth of the Christian religion and the efficacy of prayer are both dismissed as baseless—no more than any other human beings who lead a good life, make (for they support themselves) no economic demands on the community, harm no one and respect their neighbours. But, should the two principles be admitted—particularly, for the purposes of this particular theme, the latter—their power for good is incalculable. Belief in this power, and in the necessity of worshipping God daily and hourly, is the mainspring of Benedictine life. It was this belief that, in the sixth century, drove St. Benedict into the solitude of a cave in the Sabine gorges and, after three years of private ascesis, prompted him to found the first Benedictine communities. His book, The Rule of St. Benedict—seventy-three short and sagacious chapters explaining the theory and codifying the practice of the cenobitic life—is aimed simply at securing for his monks protection against the world, so that nothing should interfere with the utmost exploitation of this enormous force. The vows embracing poverty, chastity and obedience were destined to smite from these men all fetters that chained them to the world, to free them for action, for the worship of God and the practice of prayer; for the pursuit, in short, of sanctity. Worship found its main expression, of course, in the Mass; but the offices of the seven canonical hours that follow the Night Office of Matins—Lauds, Prime, Tierce, Sext, Nones, Vespers and Compline, a cycle that begins in the small hours of the night and finishes after sunset—kept, and keep the monks on parade, as it were, with an almost military rigour. Their programme for the day involves three-and-a-half or four hours in church. But other periods, quite separate from the time devoted to study, are set aside for the reading of the martyrology in the chapter-house, for self-examination, private prayer and meditation.

"One has only to glance at the mass of devotional and mystical works which have appeared throughout the Christian era to get an idea of the difficulty, the complexity, the pitfalls and the rewards of this form of spiritual exercise. However strange these values may appear to the homme moyen sensuel, such are the pursuits that absorb much of a monk’s life. They range from a repetition of the simpler prayers, sometimes tallied by the movement of beads through the fingers, to an advanced intellectual skill in devotion and meditation; and occasionally rise to those hazardous mystical journeys of the soul which culminate, at the end of the purgative and illuminative periods, in blinding moments of union with the Godhead; experiences which the poverty of language compels the mystics who experience them to describe in the terminology of profane love: a kind of personal, face-to-face intimacy, the very inkling of which, since Donne, Quarles, Herbert, Vaughan and Traherne wrote their poems, has drained away from life in England.

"With this daily, unflagging stream of worship, a volume of prayer ascends, of which, if it is efficacious, we are all the beneficiaries. Between people pledged to those spiritual allegiances, 'Pray for me' and 'Give me your blessing' are no polite formulæ, but requests for definite, effective acts. And it is easy to imagine the value and fame, before the growth of scepticism, of men whose lives were spent hammering out in silent factories these imponderable but priceless benefits. They are the anonymous well-wishers who reduce the moral overdraft of mankind, les paratonnerres (as Huysmans says) de la société. Life, for a monk, is shorter than the flutter of an eyelid in comparison to eternity, and this fragment of time flits past in the worship of God, the salvation of his soul, and in humble intercession for the souls of his fellow exiles from felicity."

—Patrick Leigh Fermor, A Time to Keep Silence (1957), 26-29 (paragraph breaks mine)

Ronald Knox on setting free the wings of prayer

"For myself I always think it's not much use trying to fight against this particular kind of distraction, trying to make ourselves feel every single petition in the Our Father every time we say it. No, I think it's meant to be a sort of taking-off-from-the-ground when we want to set free the wings of prayer. And therefore what I would recommend is getting hold of just one idea in a prayer like that, either the first idea that comes along, or the idea that appeals to us most, or the idea that appeals to us most at this particular moment, and hanging on to that all through our recitation of the prayer itself; the words Our Father, for example, are quite enough by themselves to key one up, don't you think? I don't see why we shouldn't just back in that idea, sun ourselves in that idea, of God's fatherhood, and let the rest of the prayer slip past us while we are about it. But with this recitation of the Pater Noster at Mass, I'm afraid it's worse than that so far as I am concerned; I don't think I try to concentrate on any single phrase in it, I just babble it out with a delightful sense that I am talking to God. With most of our prayers, I mean, we feel—at least I do—as if we were talking into a microphone, knowing that as a matter of fact there is Somebody listening, but not having the sense, the awareness, that our mind is in direct contact with another Mind. But the Pater Noster at Mass is somehow like sitting over the fire with somebody else sitting over the fire in the opposite chimney-corner, talking about a hundred things, perhaps, important and unimportant, perhaps just sitting there and not bothering to say much, but with the sense, the awareness, of somebody else's presence. If you feel like that about the Pater Noster at Mass—or about any other bit of the prayers you say in the course of the day—don't bother to disturb your intimacy with God by deliberately and laboriously thinking about this or that; just stop thinking and throw yourself into the experience of being with him."

—Ronald Knox, The Mass in Slow Motion (Aeterna Press, 2014 [1948]), 71-72

The liturgical/praying animal in Paradise Lost

In Book VII of Paradise Lost, Milton has the angel Raphael recount to Adam the six days of creation, and this is what he says concerning humanity:

There wanted yet the master-work, the end
Of all yet done—a creature who, not prone
And brute as other creatures, but endued
With sanctity of reason, might erect
His stature, and upright with front serene
Govern the rest, self-knowing, and from thence
Magnanimous to correspond with Heaven,
But grateful to acknowledge whence his good
Descends; thither with heart, and voice, and eyes
Directed in devotion, to adore
And worship God Supreme, who made him chief
Of all his works.

What is striking about this account is the way in which the rationality ascribed to humanity, unique among all creatures, is specified and given content. Initially it seems quite in line with classical accounts: humans are distinct by virtue of their reason. But what sort of reason, and to what end?

According to Milton, men and women are rational inasmuch as, and so that, they "correspond with Heaven," thanking God for his manifold gifts and worshiping him as the source of all, including their own, being and goodness. Which is to say, human rationality is at once the condition and the means of prayer, which is reason's telos. What sets apart human beings from other animals is that they use words to talk to and about God in thanks and praise. As Robert Jenson has it, human beings are "praying animals." Or in Jamie Smith's words, homo sapiens is homo liturgicus.

Rationality, for Milton, as for Jenson and Smith, isn't the cold logic of unbiased inquiry or instrumental reason. It is the devotion of a heart on fire for the Creator, manifested in the speech of adoration and love, awe and thanksgiving. Rationality is correspondence with heaven.