10. MARIA, MOTHER AND TEACHER

We continue to reflect on family education in the school of Nazareth. In that liturgical jewel, the Mass dedicated to St. Mary of Nazareth, the Church returns again and again to reflect on the fact that Mary (and with Her the Church) became our Mother and Teacher because even before she was Mother and Teacher of Jesus, she was first inspired and formed to be a perfect disciple. In the beautiful preface of this Mass, it says thus: "in daily familiarity with her Son, in the house of Nazareth, the cradle of the Church, Mary offers to us a precious teaching of life. Mother and disciple of Christ the Lord, she guards and ponders in her heart the first fruits of the Gospel."

The familiarity contracted with Jesus in carrying out her mission as Mother led Mary to become a disciple of her Son, and it is by virtue of her discipleship that she is now our loving Mother and authoritative Teacher. This happened - which is not to be underestimated -"united to Joseph, a righteous man, by a bond of spousal and virginal love," the same love that circulates in the Church and makes supernatural every natural bond, which, left to itself, does not stand the test of fragility, sin and death. And this, for the simple fact that a child needs a father and a mother, in the natural as well as in the supernatural order. No psycho-sociological alchemy and no socio-political pressure should convince us otherwise.

To understand the "precious teaching about life" that radiates from the house of Nazareth for successful family upbringing, let us try to compare, aided also by Recalcati's reflections in his fine book, ‘The Secret of the Son,’ the four paradigmatic figures of the relationship between parents and children that culture and Scripture deliver to us: Laius and Oedipus, the merciful Father and the prodigal son, Abraham and Isaac, Mary-Joseph and Jesus.

Belonging and freedom

It is interesting to note that Jesus, who from boyhood showed that he was supremely free, was nevertheless filially submissive to Mary and Joseph, who in turn became more and more aware of the mystery of which their son was the bearer. It did not occur to Jesus either to be free without constraint or to obey in a servile manner: his identity as son of God and son of man was perfectly harmonious. Jesus is the concrete ideal of every son, the one who inaugurates the possibility of being grateful for the bond with one's parents, and is also able to recognize in God a greater origin and destiny.

In the story of Jesus, parents and children do not deny or kill each other: there are tensions, certainly, but they do not result in conflict and rupture. As an adult, Jesus will have the mission, lived in perfect and loving agreement with the Father and also with the consent of the Mother, to give his own life to redeem our lives, and to offer his death to free every man from death, but in his story, unlike the Greek as well as the Freudian tale--in short, unlike the family tragedy that marks man's experience and is a fundamental figure of Western culture--there is no shadow of real or symbolic infanticide or patricide, nor is there any trace of authoritarian or incestuous affiliations. In the story of Jesus, law and freedom, family bond and personal destiny, find a happy human and divine accord: nothing inhuman, nothing fanatical.

In Nazareth, it fully succeeds in the educational enterprise that every family has to accomplish, that of living a bond united to its children, of offering intense affections but respectful of its own mystery and the mystery of its children, of achieving a happy balance between old and new, between tradition and innovation. In Nazareth, there is even the ultimate happening of God in the cycle of human generations. In the mirror of Nazareth, it applies to all that the parent-child relationship is sharing the unshared, continuity of common life and recognition of the originality of each. The experience of filiation is never appropriation and possession, but always somehow displacement and decentralization, and this Mary and Joseph began to understand from the very beginning, and they lived it to the end in an exemplary way. And Jesus, better than any other son, was truly a son, that is, he was able to inherit, to make his own, in an original way, what was given to him as an inheritance, even becoming Himself the foundation of the new and eternal Covenant. For the task of a son, Recalcati says very well, "is not to repeat, but to take up individually, subjectively, what has been transmitted to him by those who have gone before him."

The lost son

Fear dominates between Laius and Oedipus: Laius fears his son, Oedipus hates his father. Weighing on both is a fate of death: the father tries to kill the son, the son kills the father. The law of fate applies, there is neither freedom nor grace: "Oedipus remains fixed in the position of one who, rejecting the symbolic debt that binds him to the other, constantly claims only his credit with the other. For that matter, Oedipus' father does not know, in turn, how to pass on any inheritance to his son except his own vow of death." The story of authoritarian fathers, unable to beget, and ungrateful, rebellious sons, unable to inherit, is one that tends to repeat itself, despite the best of intentions, authenticity of desires and sincere love, mostly because of ‘too much’ love.

And please do not say, as we often hear, that love is never too much: here ‘too much’ means excessive, unbalanced, unmatured love. Love is never too much when it is true love, but that is all to be seen. Yes, because parents generally sincerely love their children, and great is the affection that children feel for their parents. But the point is that loving is not enough! Loving feeling does not protect against inexperience, immaturity, selfishness. It is important to create the conditions for children to be and feel truly free, and thus grateful to have been generated and eager to become generative in turn.

Oedipus is the lost son, as lost is every son who does not understand the debt of gratitude to those who begot him, and misunderstands the sense of law and authority as despotic and oppressive of his freedom. It is the son who aims at self-assertion without the recognition of the other: his desire knows no bounds because he recognizes no debt. "I didn't ask you to come into the world," is the blackmail motive that legitimizes the claims of many adolescents. It must be said, however, that such a child is often the fruit of parents who, by covering him with things and care, and not with testimonies of what is true and good, necessarily and blamelessly becomes conceited and pretentious, selfish and tyrant: it is the child, says Recalcati, who "has the feeling of being in perpetual credit by rejecting all forms of debt. His demand knows no limits because it is based on the disavowal of debt. This parable properly illustrates the fate of the son when his just right to freedom stands swaggering without acknowledging any form of provenance. The imperative demand – ‘give me!’ - of the son does not honor the father, but implicitly accuses him of selfishly keeping all his substance for himself."

The son found

The found son is the one in the of the merciful father (cf. Lk 15:11-32). He too is a lost son, as indeed is his older brother. Both misunderstand their father's law, which basically educates one to be both free and grateful: the one trying to assert himself through transgression, the other trying to get approval through conformity. The one losing the gifts, the other inhibited in the midst of so many gifts. For both, is decisive, in different ways, the father's word: "my son, what is mine is yours"! For the younger son, it sounds like this, "why appropriate an inheritance that no one takes away from you? Why want everything and now, prematurely and out of time?" For the elder son instead, "look, you are son, not slave! You can take it whenever you want!"

Now, how does the younger son become the found son? Here: because the father goes beyond the law, which would condemn the son, through mercy, which instead redeems him. In fact," Recalcati explains, "although the law imposes stoning for sons who do not honor their father and mother, this father does not avail himself of the law that would confirm him in his authority. He does this a first time by immediately depriving himself of his substance, not therefore reminding him that his inheritance is due only upon his death. As if to suggest to him, ‘you do not need to kill me to be yourself, nor to violate the law to enjoy life,’ he does this a second time by denying him the slave treatment his son expected, and by cladding him in his son's marks. As if to tell him, ‘do not expect condemnation, but forgiveness. I do not look at your sin, but I think of you as my son!’ He does this a third time by celebrating his return. Hence the Christian logic, which so many believing and non-believing parents have known and know how to live by: after a thousand admonitions to their children not to do evil and not to harm themselves. In the end, they win by not being overcome by evil but by overcoming evil with good, and this leads them to anticipate forgiveness upon their son's repentance, to celebrate having found him rather than hold his mistakes against him. For, forgiveness is not the fruit of merit, but a gift that overcomes all demerits. Here, too, Recalcati says it well: "forgiveness is not deserved by the son; it does not reward repentance. Rather, it is what truly makes it possible. It makes repentance possible not as cynical reasoning (‘if my father keeps his wage earners, he will keep, at the very least, me as well as them...’), but as conversion, change, authentic transformation." Theologically it is clear: repentance deserves forgiveness, but forgiveness elicits it.

What is remarkable, from a psychological and educational point of view, is that here the son is found, because the father has the courage to lose him. Recalcati appropriately points out that "the condition of the son as such always demands the right to revolt. The family cannot exhaust the horizon of the world. Just as human life needs acceptance, home, family, so, with the same intensity, it needs to go elsewhere, to separate, to cultivate its own secret. Belonging and wandering are two equally fundamental poles in the process of humanizing life." Put simply: when parents do not accept the ‘educational risk,’ they will try to protect their child with the force of law (which today means excessive care, words, instructions, explanations, protections), unbalancing the relationship between law and desire, which instead is essential for the child's growth. Now, on the other hand, the law is only a pedagogue, says St. Paul, but what counts is grace: so, it is wrong for children not to keep the law, but it is equally wrong for parents to play the part of interpreters and guardians of the law. The law has love as its content, and the heart of love is mercy.

The sacrificed son

It is so challenging to become fathers and mothers according to the heart of God. Our faith is based on what God worked in the heart of Abraham, whom in fact, Christians recognize as their ‘father in faith.’ In the face of the perennial risk of ‘appropriating’ a son, perhaps as in the case received as a miraculous gift from God, God asks Abraham for the sacrifice of Isaac, and in this way he educates Abraham to lose his son, to know how to let go of him, to give him to himself, because to withhold a son out of too much love is to prevent him from becoming a man and from achieving something new: "Abraham faces a test that, in reality, awaits every parent. God is the symbolic other of the law that asks every royal father to give up his ownership of the son he has begotten. Is not this, the highest manifestation of the love of a father, and, more generally, of every parent toward a child? To let go of the child, to know how to lose, to sacrifice all right of ownership, to abandon, as happens to Abraham, his own son to the desert."

But more than that, it is so costly to become fathers and mothers according to the heart of God, that God the Father Himself realizes the right father-son relationship by bringing the beloved Son into play. Solemn here are the words of St. John to express the extremity of God's love for us: "For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life" (Jn. 3:16). Remarkable! Whereas the sacrifice of Isaac required of Abraham is ultimately a "suspended sacrifice" (Petrosino), the Son's sacrifice is consummated to the end: "before the feast of Passover Jesus, knowing that his hour had come to pass from this world to the Father, having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end" (Jn. 13:1). The non-paternalistic fatherhood of God and, at the foot of the Cross, the non-maternalistic motherhood of Mary, realize the masterpiece of an obedient and courageous son, capable of fulfilling his mission to the end, and of becoming the paradigm of a successful life, whose fundamental rule is that, it is vital to give life, it is mortal to withhold it: "he that hath found his life, shall lose it: and he that hath lost his life for my sake, shall find it." (Mt 10:39).

Here is what children should progressively learn so as not to avoid growing up either weak or conceited: that life and true love are joy and sacrifice, willingness to give one's life even for the sake of receiving it, and joy in experiencing -- according to the Lord's word -- that "there is more joy in giving than in receiving" (Acts 20:35). And here is what parents should avoid: if too many sacrifices were prematurely imposed in the past, today's risk is to pander to and saturate every request for enjoyment, trying to avoid all kinds of sacrifices for them. Those who have some life experience know well what Scripture already assures and repeats, "Man in prosperity does not understand, he is like animals that perish" (Ps. 48:3, 21). And he knows equally well that, if taken well, trials make one grow: "we boast even in tribulation, knowing full well that tribulation produces patience, patience a tried virtue, and tried virtue hope" (Rom. 5:3).

Roberto Carelli, SDB