Our (Mid)weekly blessing this week comes from Chuck, inspired by father’s day and our little one. It is a blessing in disguise, as it comes in the walking. Much love, Almut
I first learned to carry Hannah in the hospital, where the nurses kindly showed the new Papa the various tricks of how it is done.
You support her weight evenly, ready to contain her if she moves, surround her for protection, and bend into her as though you would draw her into your heart.
It is a meditative pose, holding your child as you would a scripture in Lectio Divina.
Feeling her warmth and breath, it was closer communion than I have ever had with another human.
I carried her like this in the rose-dawn light, on her first day out of the womb.
Almut was blessedly asleep after long labor.
Hannah cried and I took her from her bed and carried her, watching alternately her and the sun through the eastern window as it rose on her first day.
And I sang to her morning prayer. “Oh God, open my lips and my mouth will proclaim your praise,” two psalms, the Lord’s Prayer, and at the end, a blessing.
If this is the last memory I have in my life, I believe it will be enough.
For her first year of life, almost every evening I walked her to sleep, pacing back and forth in our small cottage and listening to Lyle Lovett’s “Step inside this House.”
In summer I would walk outside with her, sometime through the neighborhood, after the mosquitoes had gone to bed.
In her second winter, after we moved to a bigger house, I would strap her into a carrier on my chest, put on a large overcoat with a grey silk monastic hood, and walk with her through the wintry neighborhood like an icy apparition, slowly singing evening prayer, or listening together on my cell phone, still to Lyle Lovett.
Under the hood, we would exchange breath in the warm space protected by my shoulders, the coat, and the hood, her head nestled against my chest. Sometimes snow would fall on the hood.
Often frost would form on the edges of the coat, fed by our breath. Sometimes she would go quietly to sleep in peace.
Other evenings we would both arrive home grumpy after a long walk in the twilight, neither satisfied but both sleepy.
And so I have learned what it is to carry an unexpected, holy gift and to be aware of her, even through the fatigue and grumpiness of everyday life.
This is a glimpse, a metaphor, an imperfect image of what it must mean to be a father in the full sense.
Or, if you will, Our Father, which is itself an imperfect image of some deeper loving mystery. (Almut has written beautifully about this in her father’s day post this week)
This story opens up wounds in my psyche that were never there. And its deep sweetness is enveloped in an unknown sorrow.
I have often said to Almut that I don’t know what it is like to have a father, though clearly I did have one.
But I can’t say what that was like, or what I was missing. Because it wasn’t ever there for me to notice that it had disappeared.
I was a loner child, enjoying time alone. My father had other things to do, and I only saw him in spurts of visitation.
I cannot say what it is that I missed, but I know how to carry her. And it is in giving that we are made whole.
And so today I invite you to take a walk with someone, or some thing, or some dream that you love.
You can be the father to this person, this calling, this dream. Be present to them.
Perhaps you can be the Father you did not have, now cradling the fatherless child.
Be God’s Fatherly arms, God’s care.
Carry yourself, your dream, your friend, your spouse, your child.
Carry them gently in your heart, leaning into them, sharing breath — ruach in the Hebrew — that gives you both life and that forms the image of the Father for whom we all yearn.
Be gently and graciously aware of the gift you carry.
Ready to respond if it moves, surrounding it for protection, singing a prayer.
This is one thing I have learned about being a Father.
It is to be an imperfect, wavering reflection of the Father who holds us all, walks us all gently to sleep, even into our last and final sleep.
Leaning into us. Sharing our breath. Ruach … the breath of life.
Peace to you on this pilgrimage.
Chuck
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More Readings from The Cloister
🌿 From our Gardening as Spiritual Practice Series in the archives:
Coming up at The Cloister
This Fall we open our Cloister Path — a way of walking our inner rooms as we would the rooms of a monastery, season by season, room by room. Alongside it, seminars and quiet intensives are gathering: hours to sit with a single thinker, a single practice, a single question, and let it do its slow work in us.
I am excited to share more in the coming weeks :-) And to hear what you think.
I think this post was the most beautiful I have ever read. Whether our earthly father did not measure up to these standards, know that our heavenly one does. Thank you, so much!
thanks for sharing this Chuck. you are a loving father and Hannah will know that in her bones