THE LAND OF UNLIKENESS

The following is a response by Jefe G, a fellow resident of the DC area, to the series of posts on Balthasar’s Love Alone and Fathers Day. Jefferson agreed to let us share it here as a guest post – hopefully not his last! Thanks, Jefe. – DWM

I didn’t have the best experience with the first Balthasar book I read, so [the recent series of posts on The Land of Unlikeness] convinced me to give him another chance.
I was surprised that when I was about half halfway through Balthasar’s Love Alone is Credible, I started to feel something like a heaviness of suffering in the text. I was flipping to the title page to see the publication date for its proximity to WWII, when I noticed the description of the cover photograph. The cover of my edition has a picture of an etching from a wall at a cell in Auschwitz of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. I was almost relieved that I wasn’t the only one who saw in Balthasar’s slim book something absolutely ludicrous. Because just as scratching Jesus into a Nazi death camp cell wall is ludicrous, so is maintaining a belief that we remain ordered toward love, and that we are welcomed into that love, despite being absolutely aware of the enormity of human suffering today.

Here in DC, I ride the bus or metro every day. The images of the two mothers you describe are all too common, and the clear image of love is far too rare. And for me, it’s tempting to see a direct cause and effect between the detached, unaffected parenting and the criminal cases I see at my work.

But on some days, a part of me believes Balthasar when he writes that “if we view creation with the eyes of love, then we will understand it, despite all the evidence that seems to point to the absence of love in the world.” (143).
On other days, such a statement just sounds obscene. Just last week, I was talking to a friend of mine who works with juveniles on probation here in DC who said, “The hard thing is, when we get them at 8, it’s already too late.”

Here’s I’m writing about something that I really do not understand, and I’m afraid of either sentimentalizing love or romanticizing suffering. But I wonder about Balthasar’s illustration of the mother and her child – that returned smile – and whether too much focus on that illustration distorts what Balthasar is saying about love.

Maybe I’m putting too much emphasis on Balthasar’s Ignatian background, but I think that Balthasar would see God’s glory and invitation in all three of the images of parenthood you describe. Early in the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, the retreatants are invited to meditate on the incarnation. Ignatius asks us to “image” the moment right before the incarnation, to see “those in the face of the earth, so diverse in dress and behavior, some white and others black, some in peace and others at war, some weeping and others laughing, some healthy and others sick, some being born and others dying, and so forth.” The rest of the exercises is, in a way, finding the incarnation; finding the love of God, through the incarnation, on the face of the earth, in all of its suffering and in all of its joy.

From what little I’ve read by Balthasar, I tend to think he’s making a similar movement – we are invited to an “indirect” God, a God who not only “appears only in man,” but “moreover appears in that dimension of man that is most dissimilar to God.” (87) Even when I know Balthasar’s right, it’s almost too much to watch the daily, trudging sadness that I see on the bus and in the courthouse where I work. Cycles of failure are everywhere. On the court’s computer system, too many times I’ve typed in a defendant’s name and see a list of cases. You see a child’s first contact with the court system where he’s listed as RESP – meaning he was the respondent, or subject, in a neglect proceeding. Then you have all of his criminal matters where he’s DEFT – for defendant. Then, stuck in there, is a case where he’s listed as NATDAD – for natural father in the next generation’s neglect proceeding. It feels wrong to go to that child, now father, and tell him that God’s love was, and is, there. Or to go up to the crying boy in South Philly or on the metro and tell him that God’s love is there in over-abundance. But as Christians, don’t we gather together to remember a death “that manifests the power of God and the wisdom of God . . . precisely in its ultimate impotence”? (85).

We have a paradoxical confidence in that love, and a humility in our knowledge of how little we understand that love. Like I said, there is so little of this that I understand, but sometimes when I see a mother on a bus make a weak gesture toward giving her son a bottle, I wonder whether earlier that day I was involved in a process that put her boyfriend and her son’s father in jail, and that, who knows, maybe that gesture, for her, was a heroic act of love.

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