How we become human

Nothing has taught me so much about God as having my own children. Living, breathing analogies to our relationship with him are with us all day long.

So. I am sitting on the couch next to Daniel, now 4 months old. I am not usually home on a Friday morning and haven’t had much time to spend with him since last weekend, so I am enjoying just being with my son as I prop him up, “sitting” in the corner of the couch against a pillow, smiling at him, looking into his eyes, saying things in the voice reserved only for babies. And he smiles back! Why? Obviously he doesn’t “know” in any verbal sense who we are or that we love him. And it occurs to me for the thousandth time that someone once did the same for me, and this is how we become human.

Another human gives us their person, their attention, and by a process mysterious and almost completely opaque to scientific investigation we become persons. (Or to be more precise, we become much more psychically healthy persons than we would be otherwise.) And all this comes through love, which in turn comes through the five senses, and perhaps something beyond the senses—the soul. The baby grows happy and healthy and ready to deal with the world by the love it receives through being warm, fed, hearing mommy’s and daddy’s voice, and being seen by them—and in many other ways and with other people.

I can’t help but think that Jesus helped his own disciples become like him through the same way. Through his presence. In uncountable ways, many of them confounding, confusing, and apparently crazy, God’s love came through and changed them. Verbally and non-verbally, I bet. How can you become like someone if you’re not with them? If only I had enough of his presence to disciple a person like that—but I have enough trouble being a reasonable husband and dad 24x7!

I know I need to be in his presence more. For he is also drawing us out into personhood through love. But I can’t literally be held in my Father’s arms and get that kind of attention I give Daniel.

But perhaps God is giving me even more, something even better. Perhaps with faith and holy imagination I can experience it.

I can ask. And I am encouraged by remembering our Lord’s teaching that that through faith all things are possible, and that if a son asks his father for bread, he will not give him a stone.