BORN OF GOD

The characteristic quality of God is generation. God the Father generates the Son, and both bring forth the Holy Spirit. This fatherliness is intrinsic to God's nature. Therefore, it is his most ardent longing to draw as many people as possible, in fact, all receptive, rational creatures into the sonship of his only-begotten Son and to extend his fatherhood to all.

I am born of God. I am a child of God in the truest and most perfect sense of the word, as Holy Scripture and dogmatic theology teach (cf. 1 Jn 3:1).

Our Lord and the Apostles, above all, St. Paul and St. John, use the word “child” with obvious warmth in order to characterize the relationship between us and the divine covenant partner, the “father,” through the New Covenant. On their lips, the two words “father” and “child” have a quality which the Old Testament did not and could not convey to the audience and the reader of that time.

Let St. John address us for a moment and let him point out to us with great care and joy: Listen to the important news I am telling you: “See what love the Father has bestowed on us in letting us be called children of God! Yet that is what we are” (1 Jn 3:1).

We then open Holy Scripture once more, for we recall another passage: After accepting us as his children, God has also given us the Spirit of his Son in whom we speak: “Abba, dear Father.”

This should be for all of us the uniting, happy truth. In making us children of God, he has also given us the spirit of sonship and in this spirit, the Holy Spirit, we speak and pray: “Abba, dear Father.” This is childlikeness, simple childlikeness.

We understand St. Paul who calls out to us in this or that way: “You did not receive a spirit of slavery leading you back into fear, but a spirit of adoption through which we cry out, 'Abba' (that is, 'Father'). The Spirit himself gives witness with our spirit that we are children of God” (Rom 8:15-17).

St. Paul, the ardent herald of the mystery of Christ, does not tire of showing us Christ as the image of the invisible God. He proclaims: “Those whom he foreknew he predestined to share the image of his Son” (Rom 8:29). St. Paul tells us that the Son, “the image of God,” was sent (cf. 2 Cor 4:4) so that we might be transformed from glory to glory into his very image by the Lord who is the Spirit (cf. 2 Cor 3:18). With joy we thank the Father for having brought us into the kingdom of his beloved Son (cf. Col 1:13).

If we want to contemplate the beauty of a soul in the state of grace, we should keep in mind that grace can transform us into “the image of the Son of God” and, in doing so, transform us in him and with him into children of God (cf. 2 Cor 3:18).

By our participation in the divine nature, in Christ and with Christ, we have become children of the Father in a singular and unique way (cf. Jn 14:20; 17:22).

“No one comes to the Father but through me” (Jn 14:6), if only due to our sharing the supernatural sonship of the Son.

It is St. Paul's task to proclaim to the world the great mystery of God and Christ: Christ in us and we in Christ. A holy compulsion fills him. He cannot escape from it. In his epistle to the Ephesians he describes his secret in a condensed form. Right in the beginning he states the main theme: “God chose us in him (Christ Jesus) before the world began (from all eternity), to be holy and blameless in his sight, to be full of love. He likewise predestined us through Christ Jesus to be his adopted sons that all might praise the glorious favor he has bestowed on us in his beloved (Eph 1:4-6).

Being in Christ Jesus means, in accordance with St. Paul, suffering and dying with Christ, being buried with him, rising with him, living with him, being glorified with him, governing with him, sharing with him, being incorporated into him and made like him (cf. Rom 6:3-5; 6:11; 8:18; 2 Cor 5:15).

The mysterious two-in-oneness between us and Christ is so deep that we may truly say that, in the ontological sense, Christ works, prays, lives and walks in us through the world. As the head and the members are one, we live in two-in-oneness with Christ so that we may say that the goal of our education is our “becoming Christ.”

By saying that “the life I live now is not my own; Christ is living in me” (Gal 2:20), St. Paul traces the concept of sonship to its elemental, ultimate roots.

We are mysteriously drawn into Christ's sonship and, therefore, his Father is also our Father. Unless we receive a new, divine life, unless we become children of God ontologically and essentially, it is understood that we cannot enter the kingdom of heaven. There is no substitute for sonship in this sense.

Becoming children means growing in likeness to the God-Man. The God-Man, the only begotten Child of God, should take form in us ontologically and form our lives. Is not Holy Mass a new Incarnation of the God-Man in us? Should not Holy Mass, therefore, be the great means of fostering this sonship in us?

We do not want to reach out for extraordinary expressions of genuine love for God. This should not hinder us, however, from believing that, as children of God, we are truly justified and able, in fact, in a certain sense even obliged to foster an intimate relationship to God, in our own way. The ontologi­cal foundation is the indwelling of God by grace. The words of Our Lord testify to this truth: “Anyone who loves me will be true to my word, and my Father will love him; we will come to him and make our dwelling place with him” (Jn 14:23).

St. Louis, the king of France, used to sign his personal letters Louis de Poissy, not Louis, King of France. Poissy was a little town near Paris where Louis was baptized. For this reason he preferred this place and chose this particular signature in his personal correspondence. When urged to explain the connection more clearly, he said: “I was baptized in Poissy and thereby received a dignity excelling that of king. There I became a child of God.”

The well-known French speaker Mac Garthy enthusiastically explained the meaning of this statement. Suddenly he stopped in the middle of his sermon, looked at his audience in surprise and then continued as though he were awakening from a dream: “Ah God, where am I and what do I see? Looking at you, my natural eyes tell me that you are servants, workers, business personnel, farmers, citizens, employees; some are poor, some are rich; some are of humble birth, some are of noble birth. But my spiritual eyes look beyond your bodies and see you in the light of faith. And so I see myself surrounded by a crown of noble personages, for you are princes and princesses.” Bowing before his audience, he continued: “I greet you with reverence in the name of your heavenly Father, you noble children of my God.”

Through baptism we have been incorporated into the life of Christ and thus became, in and with the Savior, children of the Father in a unique way. This obliges us to actualize, in life, the so-called sonship by acquiring a pronounced childlike attitude (cf. Rom 6:3).

As childlikeness includes two elements, namely, the state of childhood or the grace of divine life and the attitude of a child, fatherliness also includes two elements, namely, fatherhood and the attitude of a father. Fatherliness in this twofold sense is simply the very nature of God.

The Apostles had a tremendous drive for greatness. They wanted to become something great... What did Christ tell his Apostles? Whom did he give them as a model? Did he give them great men from Jewish history? What did Christ do? He took a child and stood him in their midst: “Unless you change...” What does that mean? Unless you change your ambitions, unless you direct your ambitions toward a different goal, you will not enter the kingdom of God; you will not enter my kingdom, and even less become its pillars. Unless you - as mature men - at the cost of serious ethical striving, acquire the noble qualities which a child possesses by nature, you cannot be my instruments (cf. Mt 18:1-5).

Childlikeness before the Father is not a transitory stage. Childlikeness before the Father is eternal youth.

Schoenstatt has thoroughly developed the “Father-child-relationship” in all directions as a symbol of the covenant of love with God and has made it the basis for the personal and the common life. In doing so, Schoenstatt follows the clear guidance of the Holy Spirit, who has spoken unmistakably through the “law of the open door” and, in theory and practice, showed us the ways of being children and of acting as children. He revealed these ways to us in Holy Scripture with such love and care that they clearly manifest his wishes.