When the Child Was a Child

(Ed. Note: Originally published at The Matthew’s House Project)

“When the child was a child, it walked with his arms swinging. It wanted the stream to be a river, the river a torrent, and this puddle to be a sea. When the child was a child, it didn’t know it was a child. Everything was full of life, and all life was one. When the child was a child, it had no opinions about anything. It had no habits. It sat cross-legged, took off running, had a cowlick in his hair, and didn’t make a face when photographed.”

 (From Wings of Desire)

It struck me, while recently watching my first child being born, that the moment at which I have felt closest to God in this life was one immersed in pain, blood, bodies stretched to their limits, and the dirty detritus of birth. I do not intend to make any rigorous theological claim by intimating that watching this small dark girl coming out screaming into the light and air and gloved hands of cool midwives was the closest I have ever felt to God. It is a thoroughly uncritical statement, theoretically naïve, and smacks of the blandest sort of pop psychology. But in my line of work I rarely get to say things that aren’t footnoted in triplicate, and it is a relief to be able to share something so obvious as if it were important.

For months we saw her through a lens darkly. There in the sonogram like a constellation of fleshy features in space. And then here, screaming beneath the hum of hospital lighting, there being wrapped in a white terry-cloth towel, bits of blood and earth-toned bobs stippling the creases around her swaddled head, black eyes squinting. But God was also there. Very clearly, almost matter-of-factly. It must have had to do with her birth as the culmination of a creative act, as if He proudly makes the rounds of first time fathers reveling apprehensively in a vague sense of sub-creation. It may be that God enjoys being present in that awful confluence of pain and joy that is childbirth, superintending that improbable set of conditions marked by the ages on either side of Eve’s apple.

And of course over the past weeks my mind has been moved by this experience, fumbling with the fact that the moment I felt closest to God was so marked by pain and the gross issues of birth. There is an analogy in here somewhere to those other times in my life that have been marked by this same paradox. There is an analogy to the process of art, to the strange ability of the Christian to catch those fleeting glimpses of God in moments of awful creativity. Life is not always clean and neat, and Christians should not advocate this myth in either the production or appreciation of literature, film, or artwork. Rather, we should be seeking those moments in which we can catch both God and the world with all its aches and imperfections in one gaze.

It was the presence of God that put the screaming of our smeared little girl into perspective; that clarified it and sharpened it. We perceived the strain of labor as a particularly post-Eden sort of grace. And we are surrounded by analogies to this process, both its beauty and its brutality. As a profoundly Christian and aesthetic experience, it has informed my sense of propriety.