A Father's Song
For Father's Day
Photo Credit, Bob Cole
The Wisdom of Children
Children are trouble, yes, they are. Let’s confess it. They take our food and water, our flesh and breath. They take our innocence into them, then leave us behind. They tire us to our bones.
Children are trouble, it can be admitted in the silence, because the Silence knows it already. God knows already how it feels to hold lightning in your hands.
Your life-breath swells each cell of your instincts to make a child and care for its light. Each white particle of bone wants to yield so the child can push through the shell of the parents’ small powers into eternal arms. You’ve felt it.
Your home expands to the child’s height and width. Whatever order you knew previously becomes disorder until you breathe order into the child’s own breathing. The child who needs you has come from the vast force that made the universe to be its newest example of mercy, the newest reason for justice.
When at the end of a long day the world quiets and you close your eyes and smile proudly at your child’s demands, habits, exploits, laughter and tears, do you hear, It’s all right that sometimes you bless this child blindly? Do your best to imitate Me with your children and they will gain the portion of freedom they are born to gain. This is what it means: each child has a destiny.
Children are trouble, yes they are, but they are also the fires we tend until they light up the whole world.
If anything means more to our brave bones than our children, our souls are not free. If we keep promises to our own time and rob our child’s time, we are not free. When the child is not our center, we will be nervous over the fire we tend, afraid it might go out, afraid it might spread too vociferously.
What’s more, seemingly a contradiction, if we keep our promises to our children’s souls but rob our own souls, our children will not be free; later in life, they will carry our iron burdens around. Natural law, merciful and just, frees both the master and servant from the bondage of fear and burgled fates of idolatry.
Let us pray for our children as we pray for the plants in our garden to take every nutrient they need. Let us pray for ourselves who give everything to our children and expect back nothing more than “Thank you” from the infinite forest into which we add this new breathing, this newest song.