Imagine spending a day caring for an infant and a toddler. Imagine crushing it: reading 37 picture books, providing well-proportioned meals, keeping rear-ends clean and dry throughout, and sorting out their weird little apocalypses with saintly good humor. Finally, they lay down to the blissful sleep of the cared-for ignoramus and—your work is obliterated. If it lingers at all, it is never as “something nice you did yesterday” meriting a “thank you.” At best, your goodness has established the quiet, animal expectation that you will do the same again tomorrow. At worst, they wake up cursing your name for your neglect of a set of problems they developed during the night.
Children are crucibles for the adult—suction hoses vacuuming up whatever glory he exudes and dispersing it into empty space. For whenever a man does something for a small child, he forsakes the glory which, by rights, should accrue to him. David saved the Israelite people, and received glory for the fact; Dad saves his people seven times a day and Mom seventy more—but watch their glory run off them like water off a duck’s back!
Still, don’t hate the child. It is no easy thing to inhabit the Kingdom of Heaven, but it is especially difficult when we ignore the kingdom which is already “among you”—the family. The doctrines demanded and customs commanded by Christ are “ways of living” that strike us as so supernatural as to be positively unnatural. But they are quite naturally achieved—and without too much screaming—within the family, especially as it deals with very young children.
It is difficult, when you give alms, to “not let your right hand know what your left is doing.” But the child receives alms from your hand as it operates a plastic spoon—and he has no idea what either hand is doing. He cannot fathom that you freely decided to feed him in his poverty; he cannot thank you, nor comprehend your motion as anything but the bough of the fruit tree already bowed towards his hunger. He will not remember the fact; no glory will accrue to your name.
Adults battle with their pride in order to cease seeking any reward except the one which comes from “the Father who sees all things in secret.” But the family wins that battle by the strength of its structure: fathering children simply is work done in secret. From nursing to nap-time, from diapering to discipline, parenthood is a prayer that obeys the command of Christ, that you “go into your room [and] close the door” to perform your works before an audience who keeps all your brilliance secret.
It is tempting to “blow a trumpet before you,” to play a fanfare alerting every ear to your good works. But blare such brass before a baby and he’ll bawl. In fact, your children do not understand that you are “working” at all! All your sweat, all the weight of the laundry basket on the hip, all the labor that the adult experiences as the taking on of some extrinsic project, the child sees as intrinsic to your being: Mom simply is the laundry woman. And what glory should the laundry woman receive for doing the laundry? Do we praise the rock when it falls, sing odes to the worm when it worms? Neither does the baby praise the mother for her milk.
Parenthood is unrewarding, and this is not only its cross, but its hope of future glory. The life of the Pharisees was rewarding, and they were condemned for it—“they have already received their reward.” But the mother has no need to quench the applause of man so as to secure the reward of God: no one is clapping for her.
Jesus Christ was very explicit: if we want Heaven, we must “become like the little children.” We take his command sentimentally, as if he ordered us to moon about like so many doe-eyed ignoramuses. But when he tells the adults that he heals “not to tell anyone who has healed you,” does he not demand the same thing? That adults are to be like the little children, who are healed by the father’s kiss and the mother’s sympathy but tell no one who has healed them and give no glory for the fact? Christ’s healings are wasted on those who cannot compensate him for it, cannot make a “return unto the Lord”: and so the one who “tells no one” puts himself in the right relation with the one who says, “I do not receive glory from men.”
The child rips us out of the world—where good deeds are done in exchange for glory—and naturally inaugurates the kind of action adults perform, by grace, within the kingdom of God—where good deeds are done for the sake of reality. I was once asked, “Why celebrate a birthday party for a child too young to remember it?” I answered spontaneously, “Because the world is real!” Not entirely lucid, I’ll admit, but it seems to me now that these early celebrations are holy celebrations for precisely this reason—that they are done “in secret.” The child will not comprehend the party, much less remember it, and so the party cannot be confused for an exchange of cake, ice-cream, and effort for goodwill, good memories and impressed friends. One must face the fact (as your one-year-old spreads frosting on his scalp) that the reality of his birth is worth celebrating for its own sake; that the goodness of existence is real, quite apart from what its celebration can do or what glory it can accrue.
In this respect, “woman will be saved through child bearing.” The bearing of children is a task that points us out of the world in which we are our own center and our desires are the measure of things, up and into a world in which the child is our center and the reality of things measures the worth of our desires. Social media afflicts women especially in this, their particular mode of salvation, because it is a way of attaining “glory from men” for the sake of works which are naturally “done in secret.” It is a colonial outpost in the domestic church, providing the memory that young children lack of your care, the glory they cannot give you, and the appreciation they do not have. The mother achieves by the posting of her children the recompense of glory that the child would otherwise bid “adieu.”
But this parental deferral of glory should not be misconstrued: parenthood is not a life of pain that is only extrinsically rewarded by God, after death. The parent is glorified, but not in himself—only in the child. The good child—in all his virtues—gives evidence of the goodness of the parent. We can say of the glory of the child what Bernard of Clairvaux says of the glory of the saints: “If I discern in the saints something that is worthy of praise and admiration, and proceed to examine it in the clear light of truth, I become aware that what makes them appear praiseworthy and admirable really belongs to another.”
But the goodness and life of the child, which is a gift of the parent, is nevertheless really, truly given to him: it is his goodness and his life. “A man is known by his children,” (Sirach 11:26) but this doesn’t mean that children are merely the ciphers of the man. The glory-of-the-father that they exhibit is their own. Children always steal glory, always “get away with it,” for the only “place” that the thankless sacrifice of parenting can be known, pointed to, and applauded is precisely the place where it is separated from the parent: where it really and truly belongs to the child it benefits.
It would be abhorrent if one were to admire a child, to say to his mother, “Your daughter must have really good parents,” and for the mother not to demur, not to say something to the effect of “well, we do try our best” or “really, she’s a wonderful kid, I can’t take credit for it.” If she instead said, “Yes, my parenting was good”—even though this simply rephrases the compliment—the response would disturb a sacred order in which we expect glory to be denied, deferred, passed on, and given over.
At the same time, it would be abhorrent for the child to claim his virtues as his own, without any acknowledgment that what he has is nevertheless the glory of another, the glory of the father, the mother, and a host of others whose good works have become an objective presence in him. We call such a thankless child “spoiled,” and it is fitting: he attempts to enclose and stifle the glory of others within himself; it rots and stinks precisely insofar as it is hoarded rather than deferred. “For the glory of a man is from the honor of his father.” (Sirach 3:11)
But what is this? The parent’s glory is not in the parent, but in the child, but the child’s glory is not in the child, but in the parent! Well, to whom goes the glory? And why, if no one gets it, are we so obstinately shuffling it about as a desirable object?
If all glory is properly deferred; if “woman is the glory of man” (1 Cor. 11:7) and “a multitude of people is the glory of a king” (Proverbs 15:28) and no one ever gets their own glory, but only ever receives it in and as another who “gets away with it,” then it is only logical to posit the existence and reality of a glorious One Who set this entire cascade of deferred glory into motion. This we call God, known to us as the One Who alone can say, “I will not yield my glory to another” (Isaiah 48:11) precisely because He is the creator of all and the very condition of all subsequent glory-giving. Life in the family is an intense experience of yielding glory; and so encountering the One to Whom all glory goes and from Whom all glory ultimately comes. “Not to us, Lord, not to us but to Your name be the glory”: this is the cry of the family, not simply as a matter of choice, but according to its nature.
This essay is a companion piece to the essay, “What Children Are For,” available in Issue 4.1 of New Polity Magazine.