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.
