July 4, 2006

It's 7am. Our infant son woke at 5am today (unusual for him as he normally sleeps between 10 and 12 hours every night--yes, we're blessed!) But he was quite wet and, then, discovered he was hungry too. So, I sat, with him cradled between my legs, sipping my first cup of steaming coffee (which I had prepared along with his bottle of warm formula) both of us very content.

As he was concentrating on his bottle, trying to hold it with his arms while tracing with his hands the wrinkles in the sheet that covered him, I picked up the book I had been reading for the past week and a half: Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini.--I don't want to summarize this book here, don't want to analyze it. Rather, I'd like to say simply what so fascinated me about this book and makes it one of the most powerful stories I have read in my life: it is the stunning, sometimes painful, yet--in the end--redemptive ways in which this story weaves together themes of maleness and fathering. As I'm writing this, I realize that there is no such thing as maleness and fathering per se. So, it is through the many facets of human existence--shame, guilt, loss, fear, courage, perversion, discipline, love, surrender, secrecy, denial, faith, respect, confidence, torture, hate, humor, wisdom, skill, creativity, ambivalence (and more)--that being male and being a father come into view.

In an indirect and--even to me--mysterious way, this book helps me connect with an insight I had just a few nights ago as I was sitting on the edge of the nightly Atlantic Ocean, watching white crested dark waves crushing against the shore, numbing my ears with their sound. I realized that I was filled with a sense of infinity. Then a picture from earlier that day, of my sons sitting in a big boat-shaped swing at the local amusement park, laughing euphorically as the swing--for just a few short seconds--brought them into perpendicular motion towards the earth. Arms raised, mouths wide open, hair flowing--remembering this while sitting by the ocean this moment of seeing them up there tasted bittersweet. The relentless infinity of the ocean allowed me to see the precious finiteness of that earlier moment, yet that earlier moment then fed back into the relentless infinity of the ocean. Life forever--they are my sons, but just for a moment, I am their
father, but just for a moment, they are my boys, but just for a moment, they will be men, but just for a moment, I love them, but just for a moment, they will succeed, but just for a moment, they will fail, but just for a moment, they will surrender, but just for a moment, they will assert, but just for a moment, but just for a moment, but just for a moment, but just for a moment . . . life forever, infinite.

Another insight rose from this: I cannot believe in God without material momentousness. It is through my ears, my eyes, my skin, my mouth and nose, that is through continued experience of the finite, that I hold on to--yes, that I behold--the infinite. When--with all my senses-- I touch my sons, when I hold them, when I lift them up . . . I am touching God. When they hug me, talk to me, punch me, run towards me or away from me . . . God touches me.