The Adolescent Christ

What do we know about the adolescence of Our Lord? Very little indeed.

It is even possible that in the Jewish community of Gospel times there was no room for the curious and difficult period of transition which we call adolescence; and equally possible that because of His sinless nature the change from childhood to manhood occurred without turbulence.

Yet the very few hints we receive from the Gospel narrative do in fact point in the opposite direction.

The famous episode of the Finding in the Temple (it could equally well be called the Losing in the City) shows a real and painful clash between the page 585 intentions of Our Lord and the intentions of his parents. He was behaving in a way they had never dreamt he would behave.

And though the miracle at Cana occurred much later, when He was already a man, the nuances of Out Lord’s conversation with His Mother have troubled some commentators. They are at pains to explain that the question – ‘Woman, what have I to do with you?’ – had nothing harsh about it. Our Lord was using a normal Jewish manner of address. They may be right.

But many generations of the faithful have thought otherwise and detected a paradox – namely, that Our Lord could withdraw from His Mother’s love, that he could treat her almost as an outsider, that He could perhaps deliberately wound her feelings for purposes of His own.

There is a most interesting poem by the New Zealand poet R.A.K. Mason which has some bearing on the matter. It is called ‘Footnote to John II.4’:

Don’t throw your arms around me in that way;
I know that what you tell me is the truth –
Yes I suppose I loved you in my youth
As boys do love their mothers, so they say,
But all that’s gone from me this many a day;
I am a merciless cactus an uncouth
Wild goat a jagged old spear the grim tooth
Of a lone crag . . . Woman I cannot stay

Each one of us must do his work of doom
And I shall do it even in despite
Of her who brought me in pain from her womb,
Whose blood made me, who used to bring the light
And sit on the bed up in my little room
And tell me stories and tuck me up at night.

One does not expect to find theological exactitude in a poem. Even if Mason were a believing Christian (his position was roughly that of positive agnosticism with a nostalgia and respect for a vanished belief ) one could hardly ask him to provide a full-size portrait of the Christ of the Gospels.

What he does provide is a fictional Christ, an adolescent Everyman, dedicated and ferociously ascetic. And the Mother of the poem is not much like Our Lady; for Our Lady bore Our Lord without pain, and it is highly unlikely that she made a conscious attempt to hold him back from His ministry.

But taken simply as a statement of adolescent conflict, the poem is wholly admirable.

The adolescent cannot bear the effort of his mother to haul him back to the protection, and comfortable pieties of the nursery world. He admits that page 586 he did love her when he was a child (the statement presupposes an anxious question from the mother); but he exaggerates his own masculine uncouthness in order to set her at a distance.

He is a ‘cactus’ (a peril to anybody who tries to embrace him); a ‘goat’ (an outcast, a person with strongly sexual and aggressive impulses); a ‘spear’ (a brawler, a menace, a person dedicated to conflict with the world); a ‘crag’ (a person given over to bitter individual solitude) – and to be this in the beginning of his ‘work of doom’, his dangerous and perhaps fatal adult destiny.

Yet a deep part of him is still a child, a child lost in the adult labyrinth and longing to return to the nursery security which represents a spirituality no longer relevant to his condition.

How far is any of this descriptive of Our Lord? Certainly a large part of the pains of adolescence come from the fracture of the stable rock of childhood, the violent thermal atmosphere of strong needs and disordered passions.

The typical adolescent feels menaced by his own desires. Our Lord must have been mercifully free of this kind of conflict, since he was born without Original Sin.

Nevertheless He was human; and in all human societies the shift of men from childhood to manhood is marked by the painful severing of the strongest bond of all, the spiritual umbilical cord that joins a son to his mother.

We can legitimately suppose that as Our Lord became a grown man he too experienced this severance, and was obliged to set a spiritual distance between Himself and his Mother. It must have been very painful for both of them.

I have tentatively tried to identify the adolescent Christ. There is a kind of Catholic spirituality which refuses to envisage the possibility of any spiritual severance between Him and his Mother, because to the people who possess it the only possible religion is a nursery religion. They feel that the Church is our Mother, and that it is our duty to maintain intact our childhood attitudes towards God and towards human authority.

The great danger of this spirituality is that the adolescent Christian will inevitably feel that he is betraying it simply by growing up. I am not prepared to accept this negative point of view, since spiritual and physical growth is ordained by God for us, and growth is not possible without crises and separations.

What can we say then to the Catholic adolescent, troubled by bodily change, the upsurge of new and perhaps uncontrollable passions, a sense of spiritual solitude, and a developing faculty of intellectual analysis? Perhaps we could say something like this:

‘Take it easy, mate. These changes are ordained by God. We all know it’s a hard road to travel along. But just as the Child Christ was present in you when you were kicking in the bassinette or playing cricket in that empty section or kneeling beside your father at Mass, so now the Adolescent Christ has risen up and taken charge of you.

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‘The real problem is not whether you rebel or not. You have to push aside any attempt of others to make you stay a child, because you aren’t a child, and it would be a lie to pretend to be one. You have to rebel.

‘But there are two kinds of rebellion. You can rebel in order to become your own master. In that case you will have a bad boss. You will be trapped in the chains of your own needs and your own fantasies.

‘On the other hand, you can rebel in order to accept the rule of God in your own way. That is the core of adult freedom.

‘Without God we are at the mercy of Fate; with God, Fate is transformed into Destiny. You have some special role to play, some special road to travel on. Your special destiny is quite clear in the mind of God, and he will reveal it to you gradually as you grow up.

‘Certainly you have a right to reject, if you want to, all human versions of what that destiny should be. Your mother may want you to be a priest; but God may want you to be married. Your father may want you to be wealthy; but God may want you to be poor. Your girlfriend may want you to get married, to look after her; but God may want you to remain celibate, to look after a thousand sick and unwanted people.

‘Your teachers may want you to become an accountant; but God may want you to become a drummer in a band. The whole world may want you to be a success; but God may even want you to be a failure who glorifies him by the acceptance of suffering.

‘Never be ashamed of your nature. He gave you your nature, and even permitted the special weaknesses and defects of which you are so intimately aware. If you struggle against them, even if you continually fail to overcome them, they are then a part of His Passion which He endures through you, His representative. Your solitude is His solitude.

‘As long as it is undertaken for love of Him, our rebellion is His rebellion against the crippling chains of a cynical materialist world.

‘You were not born to sleep through life, pulling a blanket over your head, feeling safe because your mother is there in the kitchen making meals for you and persuading you not to miss Mass.

‘That safety is the safety of a child. You were born to fight and love and live. But try to be merciful to those whom you are obliged from time to time to oppose; for their anxiety is grounded in love, just as the best of your rebellion springs from love. Kia kaha. Be strong. Be a friend of the human race.’

If we can manage to recognise that the trials of adolescence – trials equally for the adolescent and those who have the diminishing talk of looking after him – are spurs and thorns given by God to the human soul in order to wake it to recognition of an adult destiny; if we can see in Our Lord’s separation from His Mother an archetype of the necessary separation of the adolescent soul from the family in which it was first nurtured – then we will be less anxious and more tranquil and understanding.

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If we could get our own will in the matter, if our adolescents remained ‘good’ and docile and pliable as they were perhaps when they were children, we would be doing them a grave spiritual injury.

God needs men to work for Him in the world, to extend His own Incarnation in space and time. He needs men who are capable of making their own choices. And the power of choice is not developed without struggle and conflict and danger.

Our secret wish that our adolescents should be safe, untroubled, unwounded, may correspond to Our Lady’s secret wish that Our Lord could remain safe, untroubled, unwounded, with her in the home of Nazareth. God has other things in mind for all of us.

I have not mentioned the problems of our girl adolescents, partly because they are already well documented, partly because the relation of a girl to her mother and father does not normally involve the same degree of spiritual severance as that of a boy, and partly because the archetype of female adolescence is Our Lady’ participation in the drama of the Annunciation.

An adolescent girl dreaming of her destiny sees it in terms of an announcement made to her by somebody else – a tap on the shoulder, a statement of love, an awakening from sleep.

The boy is in a somewhat different situation because he has to initiate his own awakening. Yet, since no boy is wholly masculine and no girl wholly feminine, there are resemblances and correspondences.

Many people try to understand adolescent spirituality. They talk about it. They write books about it. But they usually see it far too much in terms of adjustment or non-adjustment to the secular community. I hope I have been able to shed some light on it from a different angle.

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