Kiddo,
When ideas arrive, they rarely arrive all at once. Instead, they come in pieces or impressions that hint at something interesting. Sometimes they’re a flash of an image, sometimes a vague concept. At times a notion curious enough to investigate to try and uncover the themes they represent. Ideas and their origins are difficult to define clearly, which must be unsatisfying to people who ask, “Where did that come from?” It’s an explanation but not much of an answer, as they say.
One night, many years ago, an idea came to me with a clarity I had never experienced. It was early March, your mom, and I just brought you home from the hospital. I stood by your crib for a long while and watched you fall asleep; your face warmed in the twilight, then cooled by a waning moon. You were cocooned tightly in a small blanket, the most precious, innocent being in the world. I felt as though my life before that moment was a shadow, a dream that never happened and everything lay before me uncharted and unknown as if I had set sail on a strange, new ocean.
The animals in your mobile danced in a curious parade, led by a pink giraffe, a striped rhinoceros, and their friends a purple bear and a polka dotted lion. The little stars around them stole light from the moon and reflected it back across both of us in a speckled light – our own little menagerie.
In that peaceful moment I thought about our future, and the place you would occupy in my life. I looked forward to all the times we’d share together, all the places we’d go. I was mesmerized by those little reflections, each a moment in the passage of time, in and out of existence and intersecting until they merged together to form an image of you in a far distant future, where I saw you reflecting on my place in your life. How profound a stillness can be when you are given a window into your own absence in the world. But your soft, gentle breathing kept our universe in motion, and it kept me tethered to it. I wanted more than anything to stop time, then see it expand out in front of me at the speed of light – all at once, in every direction.
It’s hard to imagine anyone deserving a moment so perfect, harder still to hold that moment in suspension and truly understand its implications, but as soon as I focused on it, I felt it slipping through my fingers like sacred water. When my grasp of that moment was lost to me in the dark and I was left only a hint of its perfection, I closed the shades of your windows as if they were the draperies of heaven.
Goodnight moon.
With the rhinoceros drifting off to sleep, and the polka dotted lion off to hunt in the night, an image came to me, powerful, mysterious, and beautiful.
I saw the foot of a blood-soaked cross, under a heavy, mottled sky. In the center of this image, in the rocky dirt was the Virgin cradling the Son of Man. She held His pierced hand to her breast and pressed her cheek against His forehead, both of them speckled in blood – streaked with rain. Behind them were two figures, a Roman soldier, and the disciple whom Christ loved. In the dim gray background, faint shadows of men taking down the cross.
The counterweight to iron and lash and blood and violence, her gentle face. Her sorrow, a silencing of the rain and the shouts of men. From deep within that sorrow, I saw a trace of acceptance and hope emerge, a loss unimaginable quietly transforming into a hope indescribable, and this image breathed a life beyond itself, a transition into and beyond the dimensional world, and I knew in that instant; this image would never leave me.
I wanted to capture and share it, but there was a something missing – nothing mechanical, or anything having to do with capturing this scene. What was missing was rooted in a deeper understanding of what I was seeing and knowing only that this understanding was vital to the execution of this work.
What was she trying to tell me? What did I need to understand? Those elusive insights left me frustrated and without an ability to move forward on this work for many years. Over those years, I watched you grow, each early Spring another year and on through each reflective Winter. I thought often about that moment when my life was forever altered by your arrival, and within those memories, the ever-present face of the Virgin.
When mortality made its presence known reminding me of life’s unanswered questions and unfinished work, I found the Rosary. But those mysteries were dusty relics in an old museum, encased glass. They were difficult to see but as I examined them more closely over time, the dust dissipated, and they seemed to come to life. And one day, as I traveled bead by bead to a place called the Skull, I saw her face exactly as I saw her in your room that night. That same sorrowful look traveling quietly along vast currents of time, her with her child – and me with you.
So simple a parallel of parent and child, and I finally understood that she was not giving me a mystery to solve, she was showing me a very natural expression of lives entwined. This quiet reflection of parent and child and death and life.
I found myself traveling backward in time to find you in your crib asleep under the light of that old moon, farther still to find that Child in a manger under a star born of that same light. And this light that once illuminated the firmament, is the same light I see now in memories, both bright and subtle.
And I traveled forward in time to that far, distant future and you were there, and I was not. Your transcendence from my life made possible by a Child who made my own transcendence from this world possible. And I saw within the continuum of His life and yours, the whole of my eternal life.
And I saw in you both an innocence in contrast with the complexities of the world of men and my own life. An innocence I longed to be a part of, one I was called to return to, an innocence I had lost along the way without my own permission.
The centerline of all these connections was the transition of loss to hope in her gentle face, and she unique in all of human history, heralding those events for everyone, everywhere – even me. And this scene, that I wanted to capture needed the stories before and after to express the movement in her face. They needed the continuity of Christ’s life on earth, just they needed her simple strand of beads and you.
I suspect the dark quiet of spring serves as a conduit for whatever energy transmits an idea. Maybe a time of renewal mixed with the stillness of night seeds a person’s thoughts? Maybe this vision was traveling throughout time and space only to find you and me. Maybe the whole of the universe wanted to welcome my little girl into the world.
Why this took so long for me to understand, I don’t know. Life can take us to places where the passage of time is left unattended. It can overwhelm us with the mundane and the necessary. And though our lives are manifestations of His plans, we seldom examine our connections to those plans. And the years go by…
I am writing this to you as a backdrop for this work, so you understand your unique connection to it, and to give you something of me to contemplate in those long years when we’re apart. I am a poor servant in the expression of such things, but I‘m content in the knowledge that He often uses the poorest of tools to do good works. It seems to be one of His signatures.
Finding my way here required an understanding of the life in which this scene was made manifest, that through the progression of all human stories which ultimately reveal the intentions and designs of the Christ, I might grow along with them and obtain the understanding necessary to create useful works and find humility in their execution.
I think about our lives together and all the places we’ve been, and the understanding of that centerline between death and life, which every moment of our lives can truly be. So, I thank our Mother for this is a mother’s gift, one of compassion, mercy and gentle patience and I am grateful to find myself on the road of her kind intercession.
Our perspectives are born of the revelations in our yesterday’s passing. I look forward to spring and another year with you in my life and a summer beyond this stubborn winter. Still the afternoon’s soft failing light illuminates you dressed in white, arm in arm with your husband. You were so beautiful that day.
A much younger man reminds me of his long-ago wish, to see you then as I do now – all at the speed of light. I’m glad his wish is granted at last, but he will never know that the speed of light is only truly measured in the reflections of an old man.
I love you.