Guest opinion: Births renew us all

A little more than a month ago, a colleague and good friend died unexpectedly. Quite suddenly, the rush and bother, “never-cross-the-finish-line” world of clock time shifted. Many issues that had appeared to be essential the day before were now of limited interest. Or value.

Death seems always, and abruptly, to introduce us to another dimension of reality – one that in the busy bustle of our daily lives goes almost completely unnoticed.

There’s an African proverb that describes every child’s birth as a “great separation.” According to this saying, at the moment of birth each of us feels torn from our Source, and immediately cries out for reconnection. We seem to know, long before we have words or explanations, the infinite dimension of life.

It is now December, the darkest (and busiest) month of the year. Older, but not necessarily wiser, most of us have long forgotten our experience of original belonging. Hectic beyond measure, we’ve assembled an assortment of activities, of means with no end in sight. And yet, even here we are surrounded with an unspoken longing, a hope of finally finding or achieving or arriving in a place that we intuitively know we must find. Never quite getting enough of what we don’t really need, we keep searching for a breadth and depth that don’t seem to be found in our daily pursuits.

I have a December hunch. I’m guessing that the scuttle and hurry of this month are intimately connected to our common yearning for this missing dimension in our lives. Charles Dickens, someone who seemed to grasp the tension between desperate reaching and a much larger reality, uttered the hint of an answer when he spoke to us of newborns: “I love these little people, and it is no small thing, when they – who are so fresh from God – love us.”

Is it possible? Could these little ones really be emissaries of a dimension we’ve lost touch with? During this darkest of months, have we intuitively turned to the “babe in a manger” because this freshness and inexplicable presence are able to remind us, as nothing else can, of who we really are?

“I have seen things,” the famous theologian Thomas Aquinas once said to a friend, “that make all my writings seem like straw.” I dare say, any baby we are privileged to encounter is just such a revelation.

A few months before his death, my friend was given the remarkable gift of a granddaughter. These days I like to think of how both of them are representatives of a Mystery outside of time, here to make awestruck and grateful mystics of us all.