I feel an essay on faith trying to come out. It's been milling around my brain for some time now. I just need to find time to sit down and let it out. But as with many of the things I write, something funny happens when an idea is left knocking around my cranium. It seems to act like a magnet and I end up seeing connections to other issues or stories I see all around more.
As I've been trying to wrap my mind around my issue of faith, I attended Koko's choir concert last week. Sitting ahead of us were a young man and his wife. They also had a newborn girl with them. She was so dark and tiny. Her pupils were massive. For some time I forgot all about the concert and just focused on this baby. I tried to imagine the amount of stimuli those pupils were soaking up. I tried to imagine what it would be like experiencing all of those firsts - a first trip outside of the house or a first trip to a concert. Not to mention all the other firsts inside those previous experiences - the first time you see the color purple, the first time you hear a note, the first time you hear a chorus of voices, the first time you see a strangers face light up at the sight of yours. Amazing.
As I watched her eyes, her father shifted her and she gazed up at him. Instantly, and I can't tell you how, but immediately her eyes adjusted. They registered his face and recognized it. They came alive with familiarity. That triggered her lips to arc into a smile amid the tiny, yet plump, index finger inside her gums.
I damn near cried.
It seemed to me then that all that is good in the world - all that might be considered God, could be summed up in the little girl's eyes and smile.
Once when I was younger, I helped a newborn lamb breathe on its own. I cleared the membrane from its nose and blew air into them. While doing this, I cradled its rib cage - so tender and sensitive - and beating madly inside was its heart, thanks in part to my breath which had been carried to the lungs and into the blood and into that wildly pounding heart. Feeling that, I imagined, was like having my thumb on God's pulse.
Looking into that little girl's eyes was like seeing a wink from God.
As the concert progressed I saw the father whispering into his baby's ear, reassuring her that it was okay and she was safe and loved. I have no doubt - judging from the light in the baby's eyes - that the father is loved in some deep fundamental way that will radiate from him for the rest of his life - and as I've found out from the death of my own father - far beyond the end of his life.
I left that concert energized. My faith was recharged. The world was again a good place worth fighting for.
Then at lunch the next day I read this story http://www.startribune.com/467/story/1117417.html
If the scene I witnessed the night before was proof of the divine. Then this has to be proof of all that is unholy and nefarious.
1 comment:
Beautiful stuff. I had a similar experience not too long ago, but it was with a baby in a dream...my baby that I haven't had. I was holding it and had all these blankets wrapped around it, and I woke up so sad because in the dream there had been this essential, true feeling of LOVE.
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