My systematic theo professor in college is a student & devotee herself of renown German theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, even, if I remember correctly, studying under him &/or his colleagues, including then-Cardinal Ratzinger. We read a lot of Theo-Drama in her classes and heard even more from it. Since then, I have wanted to read more of his work and recently have been working on a slim little volume called Unless You Become Like This Child. For a few years now, my spiritual program has focused on growing in trust of God, as a child trusts his parents.
I am especially enjoying and learning from von B's fifth chapter in Unless...: "Living as God's Children." There he begins by noting that "nothing...has ever more emptied the wondrous mystery of child of its value" as the modern positivist preoccupation with making ourselves [what we decide humanity ought to be in our opinion]. He continues by noting that the traits of the adult Christian living as a child of God are "most evident in Christ himself:" 1) delightful amazement, esp. at the gifts of freedom, the other, Creation; 2) thanksgiving, in implicit recognition that I owe my life to another; 3) embracing the mystery of the Church and my place in it; and 4) living fully in the present moment, like a child with time to play and SLEEP. I'll close with a particularly-relevant-for-myself quote re. that last point-
"Pressured man on the run is always postponing his encounter with God to a 'free moment' or a 'time of prayer' that must constantly be rescheduled, a time that he must laboriously wrest from his overburdened workday. A child knows that God can find him at every moment because every moment opens up for him and shows him the very ground of time: as if it reposed on eternity itself."
