Born Again

Dear Valor: Letters to My Son (#3)

photo by our beloved and inimitable Tina Zorzi

Dear reader,

I wrote this letter about two weeks ago, waiting for our baby to be born. He arrived before I could post it, two weeks early, last Thursday January 30 at 8:20pm, 8 lbs 7ounces, 22 inches long, gorgeous, glorious, butterfat, beautiful. More, so much more to come. But I wanted to share this letter for now, my last written words to him before he joined us here on the outside, earthside.

In joy,

Andrew

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Dear baby,

We’re less than two weeks away from your due date. Sure enough, you found your way into an ideal birth position, head-down. Your mom can literally feel your head settling into her sacrum. Must be a crazy feeling. How did you do it? How did you know? There’s an intelligence to this whole process, way beyond our understanding or control. I can forget that sometimes, the intelligence of it all. When I forget it, I start to feel scared, as if we are at the mercy of some random, uncaring, accidental phenomenon.

But none of this is accidental. You were (are) intended. And not just by your mother and I. You intended yourself, didn’t you? The intelligence intends you. There are no accidents here in the womb of the universe, a womb we never leave. This can be hard to believe, I’ll tell you know. Difficult to trust. Especially when the pain comes. I don’t know what it will be like to trust, to believe, hearing the roars and cries of your mother as she bears down to give you birth.

We’ve got the birth tub out on the porch, at the ready. Still gotta figure out how to fill it, get it up to 100 degrees. And I should probably install the carseat in case we do have to go to the hospital—they won’t let us take you home without it. I gotta clean the windowsills. Sweep the basement. There’s a good bit yet to do, which is nice, because underneath it all, I feel the vulnerability of being human more than I ever have, which is to say that although I do have some influence, I don’t have absolute control. I can’t guarantee anything here, none of us can. And so as we prepare, we also pray, let go, supplicate ourselves to the intelligence that is always guiding us into the perfect position for the many births we are meant to experience over the course of a day, of a life, those passages we don’t even realize are upon us until suddenly we’re in some kind of birth canal getting squeezed and pushed and born yet again.

There will be more, kid. Many more. But the biggest passage is upon you now. Well, there’s another big one we call death, dying, but we’ll get to that later, God-willing, much later, and God-willing I’ll get to it first and we’ll learn about it together then. There’s so much I want to learn with you. Learn for the first time. Learn all over again.

I want to learn again about what it means to be sacred.

See, I feel like I have a pretty good grasp on this one, but what if I actually don’t know shit about it, about the sacredness of the human being, of being human? What if you are about to teach me the truth, baptize me in the river of your holiness? Maybe I’m about to be born again. Maybe I’m about to get saved.

The Christians are right, but some got it twisted (quick sermon here—sorry, dad’s a minister, we’ll keep it brief): We actually do need to be saved, but not from our sinful nature. It’s the opposite. We need to be saved from the idea that we are not sacred. This idea—that we are something other than sacred—is the original sin that has been creating real problems for us out here, a hell of our own making.

Hell is what happens when we forget who we are. We can fail to see and respect who we are, but we cannot fail to be who we are. Who we are is who we are. And who we are (it’s worth repeating) is sacred.

It’s not often easy to remember, but you will make it easy for me, I think. For me, there’s no debating your sacredness right now. No forgetting. Of course you are sacred, floating in mama’s womb. I mean, my God, what else would you be?! And when you are born, and my beloved takes you into her arms, and I see you there for the first time on her chest, feeding from her breast, there will be no question of who you are, of who she is, of who we are. Sacred will be the flimsy word to indicate the indescribable, incontrovertible fact of the matter.

A fact which will continue, into every new day, for every day of your life. A fact which will begin to fade into the background again as we start wading into the sleepless nights, and the dirty diapers, and what it feels like to hear you cry, and then perhaps fade some more as we move into tax season, and then before I know it I’ll have to go back to work, and it might fade some more into my daily commute and emails and meetings, petty squabbles and imaginary fears, and eventually I’ll probably start scrolling headlines again, and once you start scrolling headlines it’s pretty much impossible to remember the fact that we are sacred because God almighty look at what we’ve done, look at what we’re doing, surely we are lots of things but “sacred” definitely isn’t one of them, at least we can all agree on that, right?

Wrong. This is why we need you. Why I need you. You are the sacrament. I approach the altar now, ready to take you and be born again.

Godspeed, son. Or are you my daughter? Whoever you are, I am here for you, and I always will be, in all the births to come. See you soon.

Love,

Dad