8/14/2013

I'll take it as a compliment

Parents procreate their child without any certainty as to what they have wrought. That the child’s existence is contingent upon their creative action is undeniable. That their child’s identity is to some extent contingent on their parenting, their formative love, is likewise obvious. However, the child is also radically free. He surprises his parents. He is not a combination of them — he is his own world. His parents have created a mystery that moves itself, a self-determined creature, a being with a locus of freedom apart from even the strongest parenting. As such, the child appears as a synthesis of freedom and necessity, of that which is determined and that which is self-determined.
Parenting is an art, and I mean this as a fact, not as a compliment. Parenting creates the child, but it is simultaneously an act of humility towards the child, an act of formation that nevertheless recognizes the mystery of the child, the fact that the child — though utterly dependent on you for existence — is simultaneously self-determined. Children are works of art, for precisely the same reason that children are surprising. It is the joy of the parent to see his child acting in freedom, “coming into his own,” exceeding expectations — in short, as the work of art delights the artist by expressing its strange freedom, so the child delights his parent by expressing the same.
-Marc Barnes at Bad Catholic

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