child to face life with the certainty of being loved (hence complementing the task of the father), and, as the father responds to the gratuitous love that the wife incarnates, he helps the child to face existence, to grow free in becoming personally responsible for his own destiny. This asymmetrical reciprocity that is fruitful in a third person expresses the nature of gift at the anthropological level.
Experiencing the fatherhood and motherhood of his parents is essential to the child’s discovery of the positive sense of dependence on God and of the positivity of existence, for it is through his parents that the child can discover the utter positivity of God’s fatherhood. Thus, without fatherhood and motherhood, dependence (and hence sonship) would be slavery, finitude an unbearable limit, and life’s positive destiny dissolution in the One. The home is the place in which one can discover the truth of the freedom of the gift: autonomy (autexousia) and indebtedness.
The education to the truth of the gift that the father and the mother are to give begins by accepting the child as other. The gift is not a gift until it is received. This is the case first of all for the parents: they are to accept the child as a gift to them from another. The reception of the child requires them to affirm joyfully their own finitude, that is, their not being the ultimate origin of the child. If the parents were to present themselves as the only origin, the child would perceive himself to be just a reiteration of that human origin, and the gift of his very self would lose its freedom and novelty. If the parents were to distance themselves completely from the ultimate origin and deny that they are a sign of the divine giver, the gift, as F. Ulrich writes, “would be absolutized; it would be consumed in the things that are and coincide with them.”47 To receive the child as a gift entails the constant acknowledgment that the child is given to them and that they are a true origin precisely because the gratuitous and ongoing gift of their substance is a real sign of the divine love. The child thus needs to be set free if he is to discover being’s gift-ness.48
When the parents avow their relativity to God and to the child, when they teach the dynamic of the gift that is to elicit the personal response of the child to God by witnessing their own, the home is revealed to be a sign of the difference in unity that, as we shall see, constitutes being as such. Precisely because originary experience allows man to perceive the constitutive dependence of any finite being-gift (sign) on its mysterious source, it also shows that the mystery’s presence not only guarantees finite beings their proper alterity, it also suggests that being is communion. The home is a sign of this ontological “evidence.” Undoubtedly, this perception of being as communion revealed in experience is only reached thanks to divine revelation. Nevertheless, the dogma of the Trinity clarifies and strengthens what man’s experience witnesses to: the positivity of being and the unity of the many, which is at the root of that surprising experience that the more one loves and affirms another, the more one affirms oneself.
Within the home, the child is called to receive the gift of himself in its entirety. This reception means acknowledging one’s own being given to oneself and calls one to respond to the human and the divine givers. The fatherhood and motherhood of his parents constantly call forth the child’s personal responsibility. This responsibility, before being a duty, takes the form of a gift, because the original gift of himself to the child seeks to be reciprocated gratuitously. Within the context of the family we can see that, rather than through an abstract dialectics of freedom and nature, the reception of the gift is better accounted for as a loving response that gratuitously recognizes the other as other and wishes to be one with it. When, at home, parents codify every response, the gratuity of the original gift dries up and with it the response itself. Instead, the obedience that a rule of life demands is an incarnation of love. The “rule” is the ordering of the life together in light of its origin and its telos. Thus, the “rule,” as an incarnation of love into which all the members of the family are called to enter, purifies the reciprocation of the gift from undue attachments to oneself precisely because in requiring obedience in what may contradict an instinct, it ensures the gratuity of the gift. The difficult years of adolescence are in fact the growth into the truth of the gift; that is, the belonging to the giving source must become truly one’s own, fully free and conscious. One is called to discover what it means that “youth” is a true belonging to the source.
The gift that childhood represents would not be gratuitous if, besides being given to himself, the child were not endowed with the capacity to give. Generosity includes the giver’s giving to the gift the capacity not only to respond but also to give further. This is why the sexually differentiated body is nuptial: it is the way that enables us to dwell in the memory of our coming from another and of our continuous dependence on something we are not in order to be ourselves. Rooted in the memory of having been given, one can thus discover one’s true self in the gratuitous gift of self.49 The gift (child) remains filial inasmuch as he gives himself to others and becomes fruitful through the nuptial union with another of the opposite sex, exercising his given capacity to give further. Therefore, fecundity is not only the begetting, but also the maturing of the child. To give oneself is also to entrust oneself to others in search of the mysterious origin, the permanent source of one’s own being—a dangerous process since the gift of self to another may be rejected. In addition to marriage, giving further also has the form of friendship and work. Giussani’s synthetic definition of originary experience is also a description of the meaning of work: man’s activity as the fulfillment of a project is, in fact, the mystery of becoming one with reality in the transfiguration of the latter according to the ideal image that is suggested to the human being by reality itself, and dictated to reality by man through his creative capacity. Fruitful giving and receiving—as, for example, in teaching, healing, and building—has to do with a spiritual communication without loss. The giver (teacher) communicates himself to the receiver (student) through the gift without imposing himself on the receiver and in so doing collaborates in bringing something new (understanding) into existence.
The relation between the parents, and that between them and the child, reveals another crucial aspect of the logic of the gift: donation is not unilateral. It is not simply the case that one gives and the other receives, and then the one who receives will give further at a second moment. Thinking of the exchange of gifts in terms of passivity and activity could preclude seeing that giving entails a receiving in the giving itself, while the receiving entails a giving in the receiving itself. It is important, however, not to lose sight of the priority of the giving and the receiving in either case. While there is a receiving in the giving, it remains a giving, and while there is a giving in the receiving, it remains a receiving. To read the relation between the giving and receiving as purely reciprocal or interchangeable is tantamount to reading the logic of gift through the lens of a power that forgets its own having been given to itself. Equality between the giver, the gift, and the receiver is preserved only when the order and the difference are respected. Otherwise, gift would be ontologically inferior to the giver, and hence, not really a gift but a “fall” from the giver. In spousal love, the husband gives himself and, in giving himself, receives his wife, who, in receiving the husband, gives herself. Through the parents, the child is given to himself, and in so doing they accept him as given to them. The child receives the gift of himself in giving himself to the parents and others. Since the original evidence of being given to oneself remains the permanent determination of the gift that the person is, one does not grow out of childhood. To be sure, infancy fades away in adolescence, which disappears in adulthood. Yet childhood, as indicating the identity of the gift that acknowledges the priority of its being given, grows ever deeper. Leaping out of childhood not only represents a denial of the gift but also calls forth its opposite: chaotic being. We shall return to this later.
Recapitulating what has been said so far, the singular is a gift because it is given to itself from another that remains present in the gift without absorbing it into itself. The gift is called to reciprocate the gift to the giver with the same gratuity that characterized its being given to exist. In this dialogue that opens the possibility to respond, although never completely, in thankfulness, one discovers that one is with
