LITMIR.BIZ

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other. The encounter with the gifted irreducibility of the other can be accounted for in many different ways. Yet, rather than imagining what we have described so far as a solitary individual contemplating a beautiful starry night, or a sudden realization in the midst of life—but in a sense also apart from it—that one is not one’s own, it is more helpful to realize that the gift character of being involves first and foremost the personal encounter and the common life that takes place within the family. To be sure, acknowledging being’s utter positivity also happens in many other circumstances. Still, since both knowing and loving have the form of a personal encounter, a look at the nature of familial relations will enable us to give a more complete account of the main characteristics of gift.42 I will thus sketch out the existence of the human person from its beginning to its end with an eye toward indicating the main features of gift.

Giussani referred constantly to the event of one’s own birth to indicate the gift-character of finite being.43 For him, the crucial cultural problem today is the retrieval of the meaning of birth. “Every evil,” he said in an interview, “originates with the lie according to which man theoretically and practically attempts to define himself, forgetting, erasing from his memory his own birth.”44 Birth expresses primordially the gift of being. We have already alluded to the fourfold mystery of birth as that which more than anything else puts us in the way of seeing being’s nature as gift. We can now return to this mystery to see that it first indicates an exuberance of the gift. The child is the fruit of a loving union of a man and a woman. Birth, in this regard, is a radically non-democratic event: the child has no say in his own birth and the parents cannot force his personal existence into being. Certainly, scientific progress can facilitate the manipulation of the begetting of a child, but science can never overcome the fact that it always operates with preexistent material that it did not and cannot create.45

      The existence of gift requires a giver, who gives without claiming a return; a receiver—which in our case also coincides with the gift itself; and a dynamic, loving relation between them. This relation constitutes in different degrees a dwelling place. The child is loved into existence and comes as a gift within a home. It is rather difficult today to understand what a home is. Technology has left us homeless and has forced us to think unilaterally of “place” in terms of time and hence as empty space. A dwelling place is now seen as a stopping point in the path of time, and time is no longer viewed as the confirmation of the gift that grants indwelling and unity. Pushing the human being to do more and better, to try different things, and to master nature, the technological mindset and the tools it creates project the human being ahead in the future, preventing him from living the present and from being some-where. Tragically, since the future is not yet and the past is no longer, by preventing his dwelling in the present, the technological mindset places the human being no-where. Because he is no-where, technology cannot but consider the human person as an individual, that is, a holder of rights who determines himself through his action—now understood as making. Yet, in this way, technological thinking quantifies the subject. It abandons man to laws and policies that accentuate his homelessness. Because of this quantification of the person, even at home, social life turns out to be a sequence of individual encounters that not only leave the person radically isolated but, more intensely, force the relationship with others into an exercise of power and instinct. The home into which a child is born is the place that love generates by allowing people to participate and dwell in it. In this sense, the home, with the shared life it entails, is not only where one is born but also the place that continuously helps the person rediscover his own constitutive childlikeness. The home is the continual, living reminder of one’s own having been begotten, of the gift-ness of life, and of the task of existing. The gift is never a monad: it exists only within a communion.

      As a fruit, the child always arrives as a surprise. Although he cannot come into being without the parents, he is another spirit, who is irreducible both to his parents and to the biological laws. The child is a gift because he is given to himself. Yet the origin remains present in the child as other. The child belongs to this origin, yet is truly given to himself and can enjoy his very being (as the child’s joyful play reveals). The gift is not simply the correct array of gift, giver, and receiver. The giver remains present in the gift (the child), but as other than the gift. This is true both somatically and, more importantly, spiritually. Let us look at this more closely.

The parents’ embrace of the child—expressed both by the physical embrace and by the existence of the home and life together—represents the certainty that allows the child to grow, precisely because each parent images (differently) the ultimate paternal origin from which the child comes. The father is the sign of God’s absolute otherness, and as father, he is always oriented towards the begotten child and the child’s destiny. The human father therefore is rightly seen as the reminder of one’s own origin and as he who accompanies one on one’s own path and leads one to fulfillment. Fatherhood is as much about origin as it is about telos and accompanying the child in moving toward his telos. The mother is the sign of God’s gratuity. The gift does not count the cost of how much it gives. It gives all of itself without regard for what is left for itself because it knows that it is itself only when it gives itself completely and embraces what it receives in giving itself. Paternity and maternity, although different expressions of the same love, are not interchangeable roles. As Balthasar says, “In love and in fidelity the woman has an easier time of it. . . . The woman is not called to represent anything that she herself is not, while the man has to represent the very source of life, which he can never be.”46 Fatherhood and motherhood, however, image the totality of God’s love only together. The father can be father (and so represent the origin and its fecund, accompanying authority) only in responding to the wife’s incarnation of love’s gratuity. The mother can be mother (the icon of divine gratitude and creaturely reception of divine love) only as a response to the husband’s representing the origin. In this way, as the educative task illustrates, the mother helps the child to face life with the certainty of being loved (hence complementing the task of the father), and, as the father responds to the gratuitous love that the wife incarnates, he helps the child to face existence, to grow free in becoming personally responsible for his own destiny. This asymmetrical reciprocity that is fruitful in a third person expresses the nature of gift at the anthropological level.

      Experiencing the fatherhood and motherhood of his parents is essential to the child’s discovery of the positive sense of dependence on God and of the positivity of existence, for it is through his parents that the child can discover the utter positivity of God’s fatherhood. Thus, without fatherhood and motherhood, dependence (and hence sonship) would be slavery, finitude an unbearable limit, and life’s positive destiny dissolution in the One. The home is the place in which one can discover the truth of the freedom of the gift: autonomy (autexousia) and indebtedness.

The education to the truth of the gift that the father and the mother are to give begins by accepting the child as other. The gift is not a gift until it is received. This is the case first of all for the parents: they are to accept the child as a gift to them from another. The reception of the child requires them to affirm joyfully their own finitude, that is, their not being the ultimate origin of the child. If the parents were to present themselves as the only origin, the child would perceive himself to be just a reiteration of that human origin, and the gift of his very self would lose its freedom and novelty. If the parents were to distance themselves completely from the ultimate origin and deny that they are a sign of the divine giver, the gift, as F. Ulrich writes, “would be absolutized; it would be consumed in the things that are and coincide with them.”47 To receive the child as a gift entails the constant acknowledgment that the child is given to them and that they are a true origin precisely because the gratuitous and ongoing gift of their substance is a real sign of the divine love. The child thus needs to be set free if he is to discover being’s gift-ness.48

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