After a weekend full of back-and-forth shuttling between our apartment and Northside Hospital Women’s Center, I drove to work yesterday with Tim Keller’s voice filling my car. Thanks to mp3 technology, I can hear his New York sermons here in Atlanta and almost feel like I’m back in my seat at Hunter College on Sundays at 6 pm. “We are all intimately related,” he told me, and after this past weekend I know by heart that it’s true.
Friday morning I got the call alerting me to my niece’s imminent birth. But imminent means something different to us than it does to babies, who like God are on their own schedule. I hung out in the birthing suite as The Sis got loaded up with IVs and monitors and the Brother-in-Law tried not to pass out. I watched as the anesthesiologist jabbed an industrial- sized needle into her spine and the Epidural began to flow. I sat by the screen that showed my niece’s heart rate and, when it began to drop, felt that my own heart would stop. I left the room with The Mom when they told us it was time to push, and I came back a couple of hours later to find one more person there.
She and The Sis both looked battle-weary. Baby Niece wore the scars of getting evicted from her nine-month home on her head, which was red and swollen. I wondered what that must have felt like–maybe like going from an underwater nap to a rave?–the very picture of a rude awakening. And then, being deposited into the arms of those who have waited for you for nine months and countless years, who have imagined your face and your voice and the perfect combination of two people that you would be.
Ten fingers, ten toes. Golden red hair and lots of it. Tiny purple fingernails. Hands that wrap around a finger and leave a permanent warmth there. A whimper that will make you laugh and cry. Ladies and gentlemen, my niece. The bomb.
We were worried about Steve the Dachshund’s reaction to this new creature. He’s never been a fan of small children, but we hoped that this one, being blood and all, would meet with his approval. He ran circles around whomever held her, jumping up then trotting away then coming back, tail wagging and ears perked. Then Sunday night, he jumped onto the couch next to the new daddy holding her. He poked his nose toward her. I looked for the flash of teeth, a sure sign that Steve would be on the next Greyhound out of town. Then I watched as he gently sniffed her sore head, licked it once, and plopped his own head on top of her perfectly beating heart. Sibling bond complete.
There’s something in the depth of births and deaths, neither of which respond well to planning, that resonates to the inner chambers of the soul, far past what words can convey. We are reduced to what began us in the first place: love. Nothing is purer, yet nothing is more defiled by day-to-day life and our flawed humanity at work in it. Then our flesh and blood opens her eyes for the first time and we begin to see–for an instant–just how highly we are regarded. All that was endured for us to have a place in this world–and not just by our flesh and blood. An eviction from paradise and a headfirst dive into a manger, which felt like–I don’t know, maybe a move from heaven to hell? All to cover over and fill in the countless connections broken by our own frailty, the ties that bond us to the pure love for which we were made. All so we would never cross the line from one world into the next and find no one waiting there to meet us with open arms.