Children are many things: responsibilities, bringers-of-joy, pooping machines, etc., but I have enjoyed thinking of my son as an invitation. I recently celebrated my first Christmas as a father, and during these Advent and Christmas seasons, I spent time meditating on the way my family is in an analogous situation to the Holy Family, by nature of our recent pregnancy and birth. The fruit of that meditation has been seeing the many ways that my son is inviting me into a different way of experiencing time.

As an adult, I am fond of the fantasy that I have less in common with a child than I once did; believing that I have grown out of childhood into a new way of experiencing time that is “grown up” or “mature”. The likelihood is not that I grew up, but instead, I was shamed or coerced out of childhood. For the world, children are only potentialities. The duty of school, and other child rearing institutions, is to, as quickly as possible, turn children into productive members of society. It shows a great impatience on the part of our world, and a complete misunderstanding of childhood.  As we grow up, we are constantly pressured into a way of counting time that is based on the idea of efficiency. In primary school, they wean children off breaks, playtime, and arts; making sure to replace them with a faster pace schedule that is attempting to prepare them for the real-world. We are trained with the virtues of this real-world in mind, taught to be competitive, an individual, and efficient. Time is money, money is private, therefore our time is private, and we cling greedily to both.

Being a product of this rearing system, I became acutely aware soon after we brought my son home that he did not care about my time. When spending time with an infant, a unique phenomenon takes place, their time becomes your time. Children exude a dependence that most people would find unnerving in a middle aged person. If an infant attempted to go through a day cycle with the virtues mentioned above, it would not work. Thomas is not made to live that way of life. Instead, my son, by way of being totally dependent, invited my wife and I into his life. He needs us to feed him, play with him, and lay him down to rest, plus much more. Our life is dictated and controlled by these rhythms. We start our mornings being awoken by him, schedule our days around him, and rest only when he is fast asleep. He requires us to ignore tasks, by wasting time playing and blowing raspberries at each other. Thomas’ time is our time. His life is totally for us, because he is totally dependent on us. I have found this to be the most difficult part of parenthood. The virtues that have been ingrained into us, the virtues that were getting us ready for the real-world, are totally inadequate when held up against the life of a child.

This leads me back to Christmas, and my meditating on the Holy family. An easy part to overlook during the Christmas season is the actual birth of Jesus Christ. God was first revealed on earth as an infant, meaning that Jesus went through all of the natural experiences that my son, Thomas, is currently going through. While I was meditating, I was also reading Rowan Williams’ book, Christ the Heart of Creation. Williams expresses that a theme essential to Bonhoeffer’s Christology is that “Jesus Christ, his work and person, are radically and entirely for us.”¹  Just like my infant son, whose dependence makes him for his parents, God shows that God is totally for us by taking on that same stance of dependence. The Holy Family came under the realm of the beatific baby dictator, and experienced time pontificated by the Holy infant. The family lived according to the play, eat, and sleep schedule of God—not through domination, but through the dependence of a child. I cannot imagine that made waking up any easier, or cleaning poop any less stinky; although, it has made me reconsider the way we should think about life and time. For Jesus Christ to be radically for us means he takes on a place of radical dependence. In Jesus’ dependence, he calls people into his life. This begins naturally as an infant, but continues to this very day by way of the Church being Jesus’ body on Earth. As my son draws my wife and I into his experiences in a way that his time becomes mine, this too happens with Jesus Christ and those followers who cling tightly to his life. Just like his mother and father, we are moved and energized by the rhythms of his life. Jesus invites us to experience true solidarity with each through him. In the true classic theist way, Jesus Christ is time and his life becomes the rhythms that help us to tell when now is.

This is solidified into what is called the Christian calendar. The calendar keeps time by being drawn into the story of Jesus due to his dependence, and then telling the story in our worship services. The life of Jesus is the structure that keeps together the harmony of the whole liturgical service and the life of the Church in the world. Each season of the year comes with readings, colors, and stories that help to place the Church rightly in the life of Jesus. This orients us in the life of Christ, guiding us, and keeping us from stepping off beat. Time in Jesus is in direct competition with the normal way we are taught to experience time. Instead of seeing time as something to be privatized, we understand our time in solidarity with Jesus and his body: the Church. While being in the life of Jesus we are trained not to pursue efficiency, but to wonder and play as children do.  We are in a place when our lives look like the Holy Family, as we fall into sync with the rhythms and patterns of the life of Jesus Christ.

Children should never be ignored. Jesus reminds us of this in the gospels when he says that those who are like little children are of the Kingdom of God. (Luke 18:16) This has been taught to me over again because of my son. He shows me by his life that we are not actually divided from each other. As he has drawn me into his life, I have been able to see the lie that time is experienced efficiently, privately, and competitively. When my son and I share time it is not a competition, but a bonding. We share in his moments of play, and both find his moments of frustration tiring. Just as my family is bonded by Thomas, so too the family of God is bonded by Jesus Christ. Jesus brings us into his life and we, his family, are given the great joy of experiencing his rhythms as our own. In this way, Jesus Christ is truly for us and in mysterious ways dependent on us.