I’m one of those people who was terrified of babies until I had children of my own. When someone handed me an infant, I’d go rigid and act like I was handling a piece of ancient pottery. (It was a real shock to the system to see a nurse manhandle my firstborn when he made his shrieking entrance into the world. Unlike me, this lady was under no illusions regarding the durability of babies.)
C.S. Lewis once confessed, “I myself do not enjoy the society of small children.” Though I’m no longer scared of babies, I’m still sheepish around small kids. My reasons for this are pretty typical. Naturally reserved, I tend to guard my privacy, and I often take cover behind the social decorum of the adult world. But all those rules go out the window with kids. Deeply personal questions, stark confessions about inter-family dynamics, and clumsy gestures for connection—they all come flying at you like dodgeballs. Sitting with a book in my hands at the park with my daughter, my reading was brought to an abrupt halt by a soccer ball kicked directly at me. The culprit was a spry young boy whose bright eyes practically screamed, “Your move, old man!”
I can prattle on about being reserved and valuing my privacy, but the less flattering truth is that kids impinge on my freedom. Like most of us who make our homes in America, I’ve been shaped by a peculiar vision of individual freedom that’s predicated on the perpetual pursuit of being… somewhere else. Think of Jack Kerouac’s celebrated words from On the Road: “What is that feeling when you’re driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing?–it’s the too-huge world vaulting us, and it’s good-bye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies.” The next crazy venture beneath the skies is decidedly harder to reach when the specks in question get close enough to kick a ball in your face, soil their diapers, or ask a litany of philosophically freighted questions when they’re supposed to be turning in for the night.
Nobody had to tell me that freedom involves a journey without a destination and that the only way to properly embark on said journey is to break away from anything and anyone that might hold me back. These are assumptions I’ve absorbed by cultural osmosis. I can come across Kerouac’s lapidary phrase, “Home I’ll never be,” and instantly tap into its rich resonances. A friend could tell me that they were going to “find themselves” by hiking the Appalachian Trail, backpacking through Europe, or running with the bulls in Pamplona, and it would make perfect sense to me. The road brings adventure and self-discovery. Home is where people go to settle and die. You can find yourself on the other side of the world, but you certainly won’t find yourself in your house.
For all its horrors, the pandemic taught me the beauty of staying put. Like so many of us, my life was turned upside down in those years. I no longer dressed up for work and drove to an office on the other side of town. I no longer traveled. When it became apparent that this former way of life wouldn’t be returning anytime soon, I grew more and more agitated. I felt cheated out of my God-given right to be gone. I began to view the precincts of my home as a kind of desert. When would things go back to normal? When would I get to be somewhere else?
During this time, Eugene Peterson gave me a name for this elusive somewhere else I was perpetually seeking: Tarshish. In his meditation on the book of Jonah, Under the Unpredictable Plant, Peterson detects a habit of the heart in Jonah’s attempted defection from God’s call to Nineveh—a grass-is-greener mindset colliding with a quest for self-fulfillment on one’s own terms. As a young and ambitious pastor, worried that his gifts were being squandered in the plodding territory of the Baltimore suburbs, Peterson was in a unique position to appreciate Jonah’s plight. Surely there was a mismatch between him and this ragtag group of boring, non-committal people that crept reluctantly into his family home for Sunday worship. On three separate occasions, he sought reassignment to another church. Each attempt failed. Gradually, he began to discern, with a little help from St. Benedict, that staying put provides the necessary conditions for spiritual maturity. We can’t properly shape one another if we’re always on the move.
Dallas Willard says that a baby hasn’t yet learned to hide its soul. I take him to mean that in its essence a human soul exists in a condition of pure need before God, though the accretions of adulthood often mislead us into believing we’re relatively independent—that we can play God. An infant, however, is incapable of thumbing its nose at its makers. This naked need was, for me at least, part of what used to make children so unnerving. To gaze into the eyes of a helpless baby was to see my actual condition as a creature laid bare. Not for nothing did our Lord declare that the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these. Babies also call to mind the ineffable mystery of Mary cradling the infant Jesus—very God, very man—in her arms.
Maybe you won’t find yourself in the next crazy venture beneath the skies, but instead in your church’s nursery, surrounded by little people who haven’t yet learned how to feign the illusory independence our culture so extols. Maybe this unnerving environment contains all the conditions that are conducive to spiritual growth—a bracing invitation to see ourselves as we actually are coupled with the obligation of serving without the promise of receiving anything in return.
If the invasive questions, blissful unawareness of personal space, and alarming lack of boundaries don’t bring down your walls, a dirty diaper, a snotty nose, or a bloody knee ought to do the trick. Serve in this way and on these terms, and you just might just get yourself thrown in.
Image Credit: Edward Potthast “Children at Play on the Beach”
