« He must increase, but I must decrease »

These words of John the Baptist are generally heard in one direction only…

From the Son towards the Father, as long as we allow ourselves a few shifts in relation to the narrow context: within this, it is to Jesus that the word is addressed: “ »He must increase, but I must decrease, » : the one who must increase is “the one who comes”, the one who, through my interior realization” that he grows and that I diminish, I allow to happen, the Father.

I invite here to return this realization from the Father to the Son.

This is to evaluate a psychological interpretation.

If we stick to a strictly Christian framework, there is then no more inversion, since the one who happens is present in the one who is, and vice versa,

Father-Son, at the semantic level, the superposition in reality inscribes all the interior (and exterior) dynamics in a loop, an endless circle.

The father feels the Son growing, the child growing, he feels the son occupying the different space.

The father feels the son arising..

Him, who he is, the son, his being.

Him, what he is (the accomplished human who occupies the Father space.)

The tipping point in tension has accumulated sufficiently for the Father to realize that the great permutation between Father-space and Son-space can take place.

The hourglass can begin to turn around.

In terms of family balance, as in the balance in the Father-Son relationship, it is necessary that one lets the other happen, when the moment comes, in the same way a similar dynamic will take place within the being-father once a child is born.

“When the child appears”, the Father comes,
Before birth, the father is only a father in the making. He is born to himself as a father only with the birth of the child.

And the child, the one who still occupied a certain place within the father, is invited to “decrease”.

On the circle, we progressed until enough tension built up to be able to be born to ourselves as a father.

We could continue and reverse the relation again.

When the parent grows old, diminishes as a father and becomes, in a way, the son of his son,

The latter, having been through the inner shift, became his father’s father.

Conflicting relationships, both at the family level and at the level of the father-son relationship,
of internal conflicts in the individual are in reality the result of a misunderstanding of a lack of familiarization of an incapacity to apprehend the forces in motion during this phenomenon « He must increase, but I must decrease »

At this point and whatever field of interpretation one chooses (family, father/child relationship,

Intrapersonal conflict, spiritual dimension)

Accept, recognize the necessity (“we must…”) to decrease is to really grow.

In this full acceptance, recognition, the being transcends the circle. By truly accepting it, it escapes.

Without changing anything whatsoever.

Let us return to the evangelical context. When John utters these words, as he steps aside to let emerge the one who is, the one who comes,
Doing so, he shows his profound realization.

Franck – September 2023
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