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Selections from the play

Radiation of Fatherhood

by Fr. Karol Wojtyla (Pope John Paul II) • 1964

ADAM (soliloquy)

For many years I have lived like a man exiled from my deeper personality yet condemned to probe it.

Everyone carries in himself an unrealized substance called humanity.

I know who Adam was and who he is. He stopped once on the frontier between fatherhood and loneliness. Who cut him off from men; who made him lonely in the midst of them all? What if he became lonely of his own free will?

Why ask that he allow the radiation of Your Fatherhood to enter him so that he can refract it as a prism refracts light?

Did You have to touch my thought with Your knowledge that means giving birth? Did You have to touch my will with the love that is fulfillment? I cannot give birth in this way! In me love never fulfills itself. That is why You were disappointed in me. Did I not call from the start, “Leave me my loneliness”? I know I called in spite of myself. But even more in spite of You.

You did not make me closed; You did not quite close me. Loneliness is not at the bottom of my being at all; it grows at a certain point.

After a long time I came to understand that You did not want me to be father unless I become a child.

Why did you inflict on me the love that in me must be a risk? And now Your Son takes on Himself all the risk of love.

I did not want to accept the suffering caused by risking love. I thought I would not be equal to it. My eyes were too fixed on myself, and in such a situation love is most difficult.

When Your Son came, I remained the common denominator of man’s inner loneliness. Your Son wants to enter it. He wants to because He loves. Loneliness opposes love. On the borderline of loneliness love must become suffering: Your Son has suffered.

MOTHER (to Adam)

Do not be afraid. This must hurt. It is a pain like the pain of birth. A woman knows infinitely more about giving birth than a man. She knows it particularly through the suffering that accompanies childbearing. Still, motherhood is an expression of fatherhood. It must always go back to the Father to take from Him all that it expresses. In this consists the radiation of fatherhood.

One must enter the radiation of fatherhood, since only there does everything become fully real.

Think, all of you: one must choose to give birth! You have not thought about this. One must choose to give birth even more than to create.

In this consists the radiation of fatherhood. It is no metaphor, but reality. The world cannot depend on metaphor alone, the inner world even less than the external world.

ADAM

I have found, though, that I am not “lonely.” I am, much more, “closed.”

MONICA (the child)

In the spring I picked flowers for someone, for someone, for someone…
Daddy was not by me; Daddy was not on earth.
I want my daddy on earth, close, very close to my heart.
I must find him, pluck him out of the still picture,
And from all my hope give birth, give birth, give birth…

Many a time I took flowers, and when he was not in the room,
I put them on his desk and left immediately.
He would recognize my presence
From the flowers in the vase near his books.

[Adam and Monica are taking a walk to the forest]

ADAM

I still remain lonely.
Suddenly a rustle wakes me. I am not lonely, for I tremble.
A glistening, patterned body throbs in the grass,
pulsating with measured breathing. On the beaten trail
a viper
rapidly curls up and puts out its tongue.
Obviously something has vexed it.
I am not lonely, for I tremble.
My whole awareness throbs with this one meaning — viper —
that clings to it from outside.
At the same time another meaning appears, which clings from within:
child. One must protect the child!
I am immensely moved. I know that something has happened.
But I do not yet know exactly what.

MONICA

I know that fear has left me. You have taken it all upon yourself.
We are walking toward the forest; I am holding you by the
hand, as I have held no one before…
The viper disappeared in the grass somewhere; you must have
saved my life
What are you thinking about?

ADAM

I was thinking about your Father. He gave you life.

MONICA

Didn’t you give me a new life?

ADAM

No. I only took from you
what is His due. Only in your imagination can I be linked
with the idea of the Father. I can only be for you
that Great Meaning… Am I able now to give you birth again?
This is the framework.

MONICA

Fill it; fill it with yourself! You must fill it with yourself!
Do you know how I need you, how much I took from you and am still taking?
But my need for you is not the reason. I want to love without any need,
aiming directly with my heart at a meaning that is both simple and great
and in which man is contained, being unable to contain it in himself.

ADAM

“Father, father” — with what Meaning does this word resound?

MONICA

Has not the moment come yet when it could resound for me with you and for you with me?

[Adam and Monica happen upon a stream]

MONICA

I am putting my feet in the water. What a soothing coolness, what freshness, what rebirth!
Life enters anew into all my cells.
Ah, as I am being born anew from this forest stream,
I ask: Be water for me!
I ask: Be water for me!

ADAM

...my child. When I first decided to think of you as my child,
by that very fact I accepted the meaning of the word “mine.”
What happened?...
Something
quite simple yet eternal.
Some words carry weight,
even small words...Such is the word “mine.”
With this word I accept as my own, but at the same time I give myself
...MY CHILD! My child! “Mine” means “own.”

ADAM

The word “mine” — a tiny, simple word. How long I had to stand
on its threshold. How long I looked into it through all the logic
of existence... This word has an eternal sense...
Do you know that we must not accept what emerges only
on the wave of heart until we assume responsibility
for the truth of this word, the common simple word “mine”?

But what emerges on the wave of the heart
should not develop haphazardly, leading into blind alleys.
Every feeling, my child, must be permeated by light,
so that one does not feel in darkness, but in the light, anew.
One must transfix feelings with thought.

MONICA

When I think of you as mine, I do not follow myself, only you,
and at the same time I go into myself to find you there.
When I find you, I feel joy. But if I do not find you,
I feel pain, and that is why sometimes I cry in secret...

ADAM

We are born also through choice — then we are born from within,
and not at once but bit by bit...
So we are not born but rather become.
But at a particular moment we may not become, may not be born.
This depends on us. And that is why — bit by bit — I try to find credibility
in the word “mine” Do you also try to find it, child?
Giving birth begins with unity and aims at unity. In this love consists.
When you were conceived and your mother was to give birth to you,
first you had to penetrate the depths of her body, then to tear yourself
out of it with the first impulse of independent life...
If you are to be born of your father, you must first penetrate
the depths of his will... This is giving birth through choice.
And to choose means to accept what makes my world,
what is in me and what is of me... Are you able to accept it?
For already I carry you under my heart and know that I must give you birth,
because I cannot think of you as other than mine.

MONICA

Oh, do not worry about giving birth... I know it is the woman who gives birth.
Do not fear what I say: how differently YOU ARE GIVING ME BIRTH!
You want to give me birth like this all the time —
to introduce me to what is
and what has not yet come to be (and if it is somehow already,
it is thanks to you). Though born once,
I am also many times unborn and want to be born many times.

ADAM

Then I did not want to find myself in you. But now I want to.
Now if I am to find you in myself, I must find myself in you.
Do you know that if I do this, you are not altogether free?
For love denies freedom of will to him who loves —
love liberates him from the freedom
that would be terrible to have for its own sake.
So when I become a father, I am conquered by love.
And when you become a child, you too are conquered by love.
At the same time I am liberated from freedom through love,
and so are you;
at last I am liberated from loneliness,
which I do not want to exchange for love.

Love is always a choice and is always born by choice.
(This is the mystery of the word “mine.”)
If I love, I must always choose you in me,
so I must always give you birth and always be born in you.
Giving birth this way through perpetual choice, we give birth
to love.
(This is the mystery of the simple word “mine.”)
So you see that you cannot be free any more than I.
And you too, like me, must be liberated from freedom
through love.
For there is no giving birth without everything that is contained
in the word “mine .”

ADAM

Is it not true that in the word “father”
there is also fear?
I will never be only stillness but also storm.
Nor will I be sweetness only; I will add bitterness.
And though I try to be transparent, I will also be a puzzle.
And you will not always rest; sometimes you will be tired
because of me,
my child...
Am I truly in you?
Is my world also your world?
Or do you enjoy feeling only on the surface —
the gentle, warm wave flowing through your heart —
and do you not even think
that from that wave you must fish out the whole inner world,
the world I call mine?
The levels of emotion can, after all, slide past each other,
touching whole people, leaving them behind...
There are hours, sleepless nights,
during which I grapple with the feeling
that you are created outside me, that I do not give you birth...
The pain of birth is a joy, but the pain of not giving
birth to a child must be terrible!...

MONICA

Are those not the same hours, the same sleepless nights
during which I also cry, my eyes full of tears.
Why do you sometimes appear so distant, though you are
closest to me?
I realize that you cannot want me to remain outside the truth
of your existence;
I realize this more and more.

ADAM

Gradually I learn through you what it means to be a father:
it means having the strongest bonds with the world... So let
us shape that world together!

Fatherhood binds me not only to the child;
it binds me also to myself: I am bound within myself.

MONICA

Father, father, I am here!

MOTHER

People inhabit an earth that has two poles. They have no permanent place here. They are all on their way, which leads them from the pole of loneliness to the pole of love. I love Adam and constantly restore to him the fatherhood he renounces. I discreetly turn his loneliness into my motherhood. And this is how people liberate themselves from the heritage that forms the strangest community — the community of loneliness. Adam, too, liberates himself from it. I help him leave the circle that binds him to himself.

Among the many servants of history I am the least obtrusive. And I am not the light for those I enlighten but rather a shade in which they rest. A mother ought to be the shade for her children. A father knows he is in them: he wants to be in them and confirms himself in them. But I do not know whether I am in them — I only feel them in me.

ADAM

I admire the Bridegroom, yet I cannot transform myself into Him. How full of human substance He is! He is the living denial of all loneliness. If I knew how to implant myself in Him, if I knew how to live in Him, I would find in myself the love that fills Him. Love reveals the Father in the Son. How much he strives for every human being — as for the greatest treasure, as someone in love strives for his beloved...

MOTHER

Whenever a child is born, I find you anew, Adam. It is you yourself who are born then, and I come forward to meet you with the light I want to kindle from within. I approach quietly, discreetly, so that you do not hear my steps, and each time I tell you, “Adam, accept the radiation of fatherhood; Adam, become a child.”

The radiation of fatherhood passes through me, acts through my motherhood. And you, who have lost the clear vision of the Father, choosing your loneliness anew in every newborn child, must reconcile yourself with me. I am near. I am everywhere. I do not know myself how it happens, but this is so. I join the birth of every man, and through it I constantly meet you, opposing you every time. Oh, Adam, how tired I am of you. Truly, fatigue is the measure of our love — and through patience we come into the possession of our souls.

How does it happen that I see the father in you, even though you reject fatherhood? That I see the child in you, even though you do not want to be one?

You want so much to be lonely that the words “sister” and “Bride” are strangers to your lips.

You know where there is life, there must be a bride, a mother. I am she. This you cannot contain, but you must be contained in it. My tiny son, who is also my father: love always outgrows you but never leaves you. You do not want to be a bridegroom, yet I speak to you the words of a bride. You do not want to be a child, yet I keep giving birth to you. You do not want to be a father, because you choose loneliness, but I come to take it away from you. Love that outgrows cannot cut itself off from its soil. The soil of our love is every man. But it is the Father who is the Way and the Source.

I gather in me the RADIATION OF FATHERHOOD — and the dying of fatherhood:

When a child is born, you are born in it anew, and I rejoice in that birth. At the same time — Adam, Adam — I desire you to die in it. I desire your death, and in that wish I find the very nucleus of life. Because of that wish, you bear a grudge against me, and that is why you cannot understand my love for you. It is a love that outgrows you, and I keep coming back to you with that love: to you and your children I return with the Bridegroom’s death.

You resist it.

ADAM

All this I know. But is it enough to know? I choose loneliness to remain myself and nobody else. This is what my world is created from.

Do I really remain myself?

ADAM (with sights raised toward heaven)

Yes, it could happen in the end that You will put aside our world. You may let it crumble around us and, above all else, in us; then it will transpire that You remain whole only in the Son, and He in You, and whole with Him in Your Love. Father and Bridegroom. And everything else will then turn out to be unimportant and inessential except this: father, child, and love.

And then, looking at the simplest things, we will all say, Could we have not learned this long ago? Has this not always been embedded in everything that is?

Note: These selections from the play “Radiation of Fatherhood” have been drawn from the book “The Collected Plays and Writings on Theater” of Karol Wojtyla, translated with introductions by Boleslaw Taborski. The book is published by the University of California Press but is out-of-print and even used copies are exceedingly difficult to find for purchase. The book can be found at some public libraries, though; check for availability.