Yesterday was Father’s Day, and I spent it at my sister’s
house in rural Ontario to celebrate the baptism of her youngest child. My father (“Poppy” as the other two children clamouringly
call him) came along, as well as my mom (“Grammy”) and two of my brothers. These occasions are always a special treat
because we see our Hannah and her husband and children so rarely. The children change drastically between
visits, although there is always that inimitable something that marks them,
reassuringly enduring although impossible to put into words. Sammy’s Sammy-ness. Ava’s Ava-ness. Natalie I met for the first time, her
abundance of chins and her turned-up nose and the blue eyes that already might
be darkening to hazel. The household is
as rowdy as you would expect with three children aged three and under, and no
doubt the presence of five adoring relatives rather catalyzed the tendency to
chaos.
Such an experience, all our lives bumping against each other
in that summery household, almost makes the bond of love a palpable thing. Perhaps there is a science that God sees in
it, invisible to us aside from its effects—as though, in peering into the
windows of the living room where we all congregated, what he might see would be
a very intricate sort of chemistry: each soul uniquely bonded to each other
soul, all of them interacting according to their individual natures and by
universal laws under various circumstances to produce a beautiful result, a
result that they feel but do not perhaps perceive as he does.
For instance, there was a moment when I was briefly alone in
the living room, and Hannah was within eyesight stooping to pick up a
purple-faced squalling Natalie, and the thought struck me that she and I have
been alive for the exact same number of seconds, although our first gulps of
oxygen were eleven minutes apart. I was taken with the realization of what a
rare relationship the two of us shared.
Meanwhile she was oblivious to me, cradling Natalie and smiling and
murmuring soothing words, feeling an utterly different sort of fierce bond with
this child she had made and carried and brought into the world. And Natalie was bonded to her, and I was
bonded to Natalie, in singular and powerful ways as well. Maybe what was a moment’s brief mute flare of
interacting and overlapping fellowship to the three of us was in the eyes of
God and his angels like color, or light winking off a wave. Maybe we are as unaware of the phenomena we
create as the elements of the periodic table are.
The idea takes me to Christ.
If that is true, what of the Incarnation, of divinity dressing in our
nature and entering the periodic table of humanity? That is what God did. A painter infuses his identity into a
painting, and God’s Spirit has indeed filled Creation with intimations of God’s
nature. But God went so far as to become His creature. He did not stop at portrayal, at artistic
rendering from a specific vantage point.
He entered the picture he was creating and created it from the inside
out as well as the outside in.
As I watched the minister of that tiny congregation in
Burgessville Ontario dip his fingers into water and sprinkle drops onto
Natalie’s crinkled forehead, my heart pounded.
My mind was still taken with the idea of love as a transcendent physical
phenomenon, and I felt an acute awareness of the mass of faces turned on
Natalie in that room, of their bonds to each other. Beyond that, though, I had a supreme sense of
God’s very presence: his Spirit in the words the pastor intoned, in the hearts
upon which the words fell. The knowledge
that the water on Natalie’s young flesh represented blood of all things: Christ’s blood, his claim on her that
transcended even the claim of a Creator.
The bond that the triune God was establishing in covenant with her
surpassed all the other powerful human bonds that existed in that
sanctuary. Marvelously enough, it was a
bond that he had also established with my own soul, and with most if not all of
the other souls present.
This world, this life, is richer beyond the powers of my
human soul to grasp, and the tantalizing glimpses I receive are a grace for
which I constantly thirst. I spend most
of my time blinded by the ordinary, allowing its veil to prevent me from
catching intimations of the true world.
It is so easy to despise the day of small things. When things are taking their “ordinary”
course, it’s hard to remember what matters.
In Robinson’s Gilead, the narrator speculates upon what relationship this present reality bears to ultimate reality. I love the conclusion he reaches, and my heart rises to the challenge he expresses:
“It has seemed to me sometimes as though the Lord breathes on this poor gray ember of Creation and it turns to radiance—for a moment or a year or the span of a life. And then it sinks back into itself again, and to look at it no one would know it had anything to do with fire, or light. …But the Lord is more constant and far more extravagant than that thought seems to imply. Wherever you turn your eyes the world can shine like transfiguration. You don’t have to bring a thing to it except a little willingness to see.”
