The Lord gives the grace to experience three childhoods in our life. They represent a mystical ascent
Adolescence: Awakening
In the beginning, you opened your eyes, and there was light.
The teachers say that light reaching us in the night sky arrives late from very long ago, impossibly far away. Your infant sight unveiled, and stars were finding those eyes from millions, billions of years ago – the adolescence of the universe greeting a new soul, like unto like. In the first childhood of life, all things are new. Everything is on offer. Only the feebleness of your current memory dulls the shock you once sustained upon seeing the color purple. Memory is a late guest, and for a time it was all immediacy, one miracle upon another. The awakening of spiritual life is all of those things – all of those children. It is unreflective wonder, fully immersed in its experience. In all the seriousness of mature spiritual pursuit, it is impossible to improve upon the play, the uncontrived joy of youth that is in full embrace of the gift of life.
“In order to arrive at the First Principle which is most spiritual and eternal, and above us, it is necessary that we move through the vestiges which are bodily and temporal and outside us,” says Bonaventure. Creaturely amazement through the senses is the first uplifting rung on an upward ladder. The senses’ awareness and delight, “are vestiges in which we can see our God… The eternal light generates a likeness of itself, or a splendor that is coequal, consubstantial, and coeternal.” Now, innocence is immaturity. All life must be trained, its impulses must be addressed. True. But who could be so cruel as to rush it? Youth is eager to grow, but it never considers losing its youth. Fortunately, we don’t need to help hold it back. Youth forestalls its own overurgent grasping with … frivolity. Sheer experience.
Robert Mulholland and Evelyn Underhill put Awakening before the traditional three stages of spiritual growth in order to draw attention to the initial grace-filled encounter with God. That grace colors the whole journey from the start. It gives us the first sense of home in the divine, and the first spiritual gifts by which to begin a new kind of life. We look back on initial graces dotingly, because they made us who we are. Our first identity was a received identity, a name spoken over us. Who else could I be, but a child of my Father?
Parenthood: Purification
She runs so fast, so undisciplined. Things break. She bleeds. The noise and energy of this childhood can be—overwhelming. Then she’s out like a light, and you breathe.
In Awakening, all things had been fresh, but few of them were transparent. Now—years later—comes the second childhood of life. You see it from the outside. Now this is an opportunity to get clear. As Aquinas prayed, “Take from me the double darkness in which I was born, an obscurity of both sin and ignorance.” Purification is an act of grace through which our natural powers are “cleansed by justice, developed by knowledge, and perfected in wisdom,” says Bonaventure. Purification is characterized by effort (at first). On good days: assaults on the enemy gates. On trying days: forbearance. I beat my body and make it my slave. But all this work has a shining goal.
The childhood before me as a parent is a refreshing of the youthful vision. The miracle returns, now to an adult who can think, who has power over the situations of his life. It is the miracle of life again, but it is a life that proceeds out of me and pedals on to the end of the block. To some extent, my son is an extension of myself. He reflects on me, he depends on me. He receives from me. Now is the time to get things right, because so much depends upon it.
I set to work protecting, coaching, learning. The second childhood is a project. It’s a project on myself as much as it is on him. It exercises my self-control, my patience, my durability. It stretches my wisdom, my research, my social skills. For the sake of another. But this son, this daughter is not me. There is a second will, a second passion, a second future, and I am only one. Purification began with effort, but it will be completed upon letting go of the fruits of my action. Release is the real purgation.
It is easy to think we understand this before we actually go through it. But Hugh of Balma reminds: “This wisdom differs from creaturely wisdom in that it has to be put to use in oneself before its words can be understood. In short, the practical precedes the theoretical.” And that means purification. Knowing the Lord requires a scalpel to carve out the self-centered motivations that secretly moved us in Awareness of the Spirit. We use it as we meet limitations, as we require purer motive and better results. And then we let the Lord use that scalpel as he will.
Grandparent: Illumination
They are almost another species. They move faster, they move on faster, they change emotions like socks. (Unmatching socks.) They cling and show affection with a force you can barely remember. But that light of the young stars is there, and you still recognize it. After all the toil of life, this is the real gift: a third childhood. It is yet a further remove from yourself. Mine and yet not mine. As a mystical path, you embrace this. You embrace without grasping, you enjoy without possession, for nothing is kept.
This wondrous remove—where you share in the gift, but it is not yours to keep and lock up—is called reflection, or theoria. It is a still mind, but every recognition—the bruised knee, the braids—jostles loose a dozen cascading memories of your childhoods past. Your own and your children’s. Now you can watch those memories rush in, and you can also watch the waters of your mind ripple into a stillness again. They are both pleasant. All things are messengers of God. Teresa of Avila reflects on this stage: “His Majesty allows the faculties to be conscious of and to enjoy the great work he is doing … There is the will, alone and abiding in great peace, while the understanding and the memory, on the other hand, are so free that they can attend to business or do works of charity.”
Knowledge of God begins with the glories of creation, then it refines through the negations of purification. Illumination looks back on all this from a new perch. It sees the play of our lives, and it says, “I no longer identify with every up and down of the day-to-day; now I can ride those waves, I can observe my own self interacting with the world. Limitations are no longer hindrances but temporary gifts.” We stop and we realize with Meister Eckhart, “We are made perfect by what happens to us rather than by what we do.”
Union
At the end of this earthly path to Zion, you will give yourself up to it. You will return to a childlike, unreflective embrace. You will abandon to Transcendence. The Good. The One. The old mystics used to debate about whether this final “giving up” of yourself was ultimately an act of will or of intellect. They are both important: Thomas Gallus referred to love and intellect walking “hand in hand” up the path into God’s presence. For Gallus, Hugh of Balma, and many other medieval saints, love (an act of will) was the final “giving in” to God; whereas the works purported to be from Dionysius the Areopagite, Meister Eckhart, and Nicholas Cusa, emphasized a final intellectual move: “knowing that I do not know.”
In either case, the final move is sheer grace. God completely takes over, and we can only give the last of ourselves in to Him. Gregory of Nyssa insisted that “final” union with the ineffable God was an unending epektasis, or growing forward. Deeper and deeper. Or higher and higher, if you prefer the metaphor to go that way. Each new grace an opportunity to develop into a further grace, thereby enabling the reception of a greater glory. In this sense, they will be ever new childhoods, receiving with emphatical astonishments the gifts of God and growing into them. As Teresa of Avila used to counsel her fellow Carmelites, “Begin again.”
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