For a girl raised a Catholic, even in the 1970s and '80s, there was always the possibility that one would 'get the call'. Although my dear aunty was a nun, being tapped on the shoulder by God to take up holy orders elicited fear rather than longing in me. A life of service (not to mention a life without boys) was not the future I wanted.
But in my 20s, as my religious affiliation shifted towards Zen Buddhism, the monastery began to hold new appeal. Life there would be calm and ordered, I thought. And, surely, more authentically religious. This assumption, like so many others, has been undone by becoming a parent.
What has been the most important moment of your life? When were you happiest? Those of us who have children often answer that it was when first holding our newborns.
There is a great rush of love and relief in those moments, but that's not all. Bringing forth a baby is a dizzying exposure to the deep core of our being, and in that most mysterious of mathematical equations — when amid sweat and cries one suddenly becomes two — the meaning of our lives is flung open with an intensity I doubt is often achieved by hours of silent meditation or theological study.
In the last few weeks I have been blessed to experience this with my newborn son. Gazing into his eyes I wonder when life entered those dreamy globes. We are born fully human but who can say exactly when we became so? And what kind of consciousness are we at first? One without language or memory, but also fully present and complete. My son stares back at me, alert to the sound of water, the touch of his father's hand, the need for milk.
Ah, milk and more milk. The whole messy anarchy of newborns is inextricably linked to their miraculousness. These tiny missives from eternity come swaddled in equal parts love and shit and grace and sick. Caring for a newborn I am astonished we ever let ourselves be tricked into a false reverence for transcendence: here at the foundation of all our lives is a deeply immanent experience of the sacred. Where then is the boundary between the holy and profane?
The parameters of this experience are not confined to the nursery. In loving her child a parent forms a new kind