Newborn babies move like shellfish thrown on shore. Their arms and legs wave helplessly. They struggle to roll over. They are out of their element.
But their faces! My wife Kate and I just had a baby, a boy, Benjamin. He’s a week old now. Last night I held him in my lap and stared into his sleeping face. He was solemn. His blonde brows were furrowed. His mouth curled the slightest bit down. Suddenly his brows shot up in a look of mild surprise. He smacked his lips. He sighed. His head rubbed against my hands.
What was he thinking? What do babies dream all those hours they sleep? Kate had an answer. “He looks like he’s in some deep communion with God,” she said. And he did. Like Benjamin and God were at that moment conversing beyond words, beyond thought.
If that’s true then life is a long, sad arc of forgetting. Before language, before a child invents me, there is communion with God, a way of being unburdened by this is me, this is mine.
At some point children break that communion. They become fixated on themselves (i.e. they turn two). Growing up merely deepens that break. Life becomes an endless project of self-realization, self-perfection. Relationships, especially long-term relationships like marriage and parenthood, chip away at that project. But it becomes tremendously difficult to persuade any grownup to stop thinking of themselves. Certainly nothing in American culture encourages selflessness.
When my daughter was born three years ago I was too preoccupied with the newness of it all to realize any of this. I was too nervous. Now I simply sit with Benjamin, admiring his face, feeling his warm skin against my skin. I don’t think about anything. We just sit. Perhaps he is helping me remember. Perhaps in his tiny, helpless way he is letting me in on that deep communion with God.
Jim Hinch is a senior editor at GUIDEPOSTS. Reach him at jhinch@guideposts.org.
