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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, it’s something else.
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.
God help me, an MCU viewing order
Regarding the Superhero Industrial Complex I have always felt ambivalent.
On the one hand, I couldn’t agree more with the long exhausted sigh that is the sum total of film critics’ response to the comic book takeover of Hollywood. I wish it were not the case; I wish we still had a diverse array of mid-tier, mid-budget, middlebrow movies made with style and competence for adult consumption; I wish Hollywood did not let the profit motive, and the current fad of capes and tights, determine so much of its offerings—at the very moment that the theater experience is at risk and quality writers (and directors!) are moving to TV.
Regarding the Superhero Industrial Complex I have always felt ambivalent.
On the one hand, I couldn’t agree more with the long exhausted sigh that is the sum total of film critics’ response to the comic book takeover of Hollywood. I wish it were not the case; I wish we still had a diverse array of mid-tier, mid-budget, middlebrow movies made with style and competence for adult consumption; I wish Hollywood did not let the profit motive, and the current fad of capes and tights, determine so much of its offerings—at the very moment that the theater experience is at risk and quality writers (and directors!) are moving to TV.
On the other hand, I don’t hate the MCU. I think few of the Marvel movies stink, most of them are a blast, and some are quite good. My suspicion is that the critical exhaustion with them is due not just to their colonization of cinema, but also to their not being as bad as critics think they ought to be. (By comparison to J.J. Abrams, for example, Kevin Feige comes out smelling like roses.) Moreover, if the Marvel movies existed alongside and within a healthy cinematic ecology of flourishing diverse films made for adults, teenagers, and children alike, I suspect further that most of the ugh and meh tenor of their reception would be muted, or at least marginal.
So, God help me, though I know they aren’t High Art or Great Cinema (yes, I get it, thank you for the reminder, Mr. Scorsese), I enjoy the MCU, and have enjoyed its run since 2008. And now that my oldest two children have gotten to an age where they can be introduced to these movies, I’ve been doing so, slowly, over the last six months, just as I did a couple years prior with Star Wars.
And I’m here to tell you: it’s been fun. Really fun.
And as we draw ever closer to Thanos In Two Acts, as I like to think of Infinity War and Endgame, I’ve drawn up my ideal viewing order for all 24 films of Phases 1-3, at least for elementary-age boys, since they are the sole two-person viewership of my little experiment. Called it the Sacred Order. Here it is, in all its glory:
Part I: Avengers, Made and Unmade
Captain America: The First Avenger
Iron Man
The Incredible Hulk
Thor
Iron Man 2
The Avengers
Iron Man 3
Captain America: Winter Soldier
Thor: The Dark World
Avengers: Age of Ultron
Ant-Man
Captain America: Civil War
Part II: Fallout, Earthly and Cosmic
Black Widow (minus post-credits tag)
Spider-Man: Homecoming
Black Panther
Ant-Man and the Wasp (minus mid-credits tag)
Captain Marvel (minus mid-credits tag)
Guardians of the Galaxy
Guardians of the Galaxy: Vol. 2
Doctor Strange
Thor: Ragnarok
Avengers: Infinity War
Avengers: Endgame
Spider-Man: Far From Home
What’s the logic? What are the benefits? Answers:
I like sequences organized by character, event, or theme. So, for example, in Part I there are two sets of three films in a row in which Stark (the man or the family name) is central: IM2–AV–IM3 and later AV2–AM–CA3. This keeps the focus on him and his character arc, as well as the consequences that spin out from decisions he makes. (In fact, Tony reappears two films later, in SM1 in Part II, then disappears for seven full movies. That’s good! It clears the path for others to make an impression.)
I like as well that the division of the 24-film sequence is divided evenly in two; that it focuses on the run-up to the creation of the Avengers and to its rather disastrous dissolution; and that in Part I, apart from two Thor films, it focuses entirely on Earth (and even those two Thor films spend time on Earth, too). It also makes clear that Thanos has basically no narrative role whatsoever in this run of films; Part II, accordingly, is all about (a) the fallout from the Avengers’ dispersal and (b) the slow march to Thanos’s grand entrance on the scene.
Part II contains, in effect, three mini-sequences: fallout from the events of CA3, while doing double duty as extended introductions to new, important characters; a more expansive look at the cosmic, celestial, and magical side to the universe; and the two-part Thanos epic as climax of all that came before (along with the SM2 epilogue in a minor key).
The opening of Part I and the closing of Part II form a sort of inclusio for the narrative arcs of both Steve Rogers (who is in five of the 12 films in Part I) and Tony Stark, both of whom are absent (minus Stark in SM1) for nine straight films in Part II. That’s fitting: we don’t see them for a good while, not only because we need to meet some other folks, but also because they’re separated from each other, and suffering the consequences.
The space sequence of CM–GG–GG2–DS–T3 as a five-film lead-in to AV3–AV4—plus having the latter two as a back-to-back double-header, rather than interrupted (as they were in real life) by AM2 and CM—is ideal. Ideal for world-building, for developing character and narrative momentum, for opening up the larger scope of the story and beginning to point to where it’s headed. It also makes clear that Thor is a part of that world more than he is of Earth’s, and that his story will continue beyond Thanos, unlike Rogers’ and Stark’s.
Also: Spider-Man stars in the final three-film sequence, and depending on the chronology of Shang-Chi and The Eternals, I could imagine SM3 coming hot on the heels of SM2, in which case you would get a straight shot of four movies in a row featuring everybody’s—especially my boys’—favorite teenage webslinger.
Finally, this arrangement of the MCU’s first 13 years makes a clean break both for the huge slate of new Disney+ shows (WandaVision, Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Loki, Hawkeye, Ms. Marvel, Moon Knight, Secret Invasion, She-Hulk, Armor Wars, Ironheart) and for the next Big Step into space, magic, aliens, and the multiverse. Knowing what’s ahead, then, it seems clear (to me at least) that there really are three major movements of the MCU, rather than four phases (governed by chronology and artificially timed/named Avengers films), and we are about to see that third major movement played out in the next three to four years. Given that Part II is all about fallout from Part I, it makes sense that Part III will in turn be all about fallout from Part II: Wanda’s grief and possible breaking-bad, Sam’s acceptance of the mantle/shield, Loki’s pruning from the sacred timeline and introduction to the TVA, Kang’s multiversal war, Quill’s search for Gamora, Yelena’s search for Clint, Clint’s training of a successor, Fury’s (and Monica’s) exploration of space, Carol’s encounter with Kamala, Strange’s adoption of Peter, Peter’s continued maturity … and did I mention the multiverse? Put all these characters and events and hours upon hours of plot together, and you’ve got a jam-packed Part III as a worthy sequel to the previous two Parts.
That, in any case, is how I see it. My boys are eating it up. I’m having a good time, too. Feel free to ignore. But if this is your thing, and you’ve got intrigued little ones, follow my lead and heed the Sacred Order.