Church Voices

Waaay back in my first full time job (FACS for those keeping track) I met a woman who changed teh way I thought about children. Or rather what children do to their parents. I was young and had a fairly simplistic view of the world, and had it in my mind that young unwed mothers were destined for a life worse after baby, than before baby. This woman, who’s name I can’t even remember now, so we’ll call her Abby, was one of the few people who worked as late as I did, and, since it was call center work there was a lot of time to waste later on in the evening when the calls died down. I knew pretty early on she had a kid, and she had to work hard to provide for both of them. A few weeks of gum flapping later and she confided to me that if she hadn’t had her son then she wouldn’t have stopped a lot of the self-destructive habits she had made a part of her life. In other words she rose to the level of responsibility required by motherhood.

It seems silly now, but that was a completely different view of the world that I had never considered might exist. This little paradigm shift is, perhaps, a baby step towards this one. The basic premise is that having children does something to you. It creates an awareness of something greater than yourself. In other words, Godly people don’t have babies, people who have babies become Godly people. From the article:

First, there is the phenomenological fact of what birth itself does to many fathers and just about every mother. That moment — for some now, even that first glimpse on a sonogram — is routinely experienced by a great many people as an event transcendental as no other. This hardly means that pregnancy and birth ipso facto convert participants into zealots. But the sequence of events culminating in birth is nearly universally interpreted as a moment of communion with something larger than oneself, larger even than oneself and the infant. It is an elemental bond that is cross-cultural as perhaps no other — a formulation to which most parents on the planet would quickly agree.