A word about terms…we might well say “heart”, instead of core. “Core” sounds so cold, so mechanical, so spatial. “Heart” is a warm and human word, by comparison. Plus, in the Hebrew vocabulary at the root of the Bible the term “heart” really does mean what we mean here, which is something like “the inner locus of wanting” (We don’t say desire because at times the flesh drives the heart with desires which are alien to the wanting, wishing human.) The “wanter”.
But the problem with ‘heart” is that our post-Romantic society hears too much emotion in the word. It implies a contrast with “head” and that contrast is dysfunctional. So “heart” has become almost unusable.
So, by “core”, I mean “the WANTER”. The child must want the father as much as the father wants the son. When he is 2 and 4, he does. When he is 7, there is so much more to want. This discovery of the external world, in all its glory, is an exact parallel with Eve’s noticing, in Eden, that the tree was beautiful.
We have so grown used to the child wandering away from the parent as he ages that have assimilated it into our normalcy. But it is not. It is not healthy or good to wander away from ones parents. It is healthy to grow up, and learn to keep the garden, so that in the evening you can show to the father all your good work and the two of you can then multiply his joy in the garden by your work as well as his.
TimothyOne 