Infantile reflections

It is a profound thing to hold a baby in your arms. To cradle him, to rock her, to feel the soft warmth of tiny toes and wet red cheeks. I held my new nephew Kingston a few weeks ago, marveling at his flailing arms and wildly expressive face. It was strange to think that somehow that foreign being murmuring in my arms is tied to me and will grow in the passing days until in a flash he dates and marries and has a cooing baby of his own. And while watching and wondering at newness of life I could see as in a mirror my own yawns and pleading cries and slobbers of beautiful immaturity. And I wonder, does the warmth of tiny fingers gripping tightly ebb slowly as the days of growth and changing and understanding and jading and hoping and failing pass steadily by? And as the warmth ebbs, does the wonder and awe of new life dissipate into a fading glory never to be had again? And of a sudden, as if some odd epiphany had been casually tossed into the recesses of my heart and mind, I looked about at humanity and wondered if the glory of living breathing warm-bodied hot blooded white hot life might still pulse quietly behind the many locked doors we erect to store it away. And what a breathtaking landscape to behold, if only we had the keys to unlock so many doors with rusting keyholes and dusty doorknobs. And as I looked even at my own reflection, I could feel a different sort of human economics coursing through my veins, that what has value is the human herself, that whatever elements have combined together through mother and father to create, have indeed done right, and that the product is so, so good. Even in the bitter and ugly and forlorn and forsaken and malicious and perverse, the value seeps from the source, the life of man that is good, the worth drips from the fact that he is alive, he breathes, testimony of the Greater Things, the Other and Mysterious Things, the things that say no matter what we do, we are still worth something to someone just because we are. And in this I feel the many chasms and voids in the darker outcroppings of my insides slowly fill to brimming with a sense that the Other believes in me just because I am, because I exist in the presence of Truth and I am not found unworthy of attention within the gaze of God.