MAMA CHIMES IN: The Infant on the Cross

by Ellen RM Toner

Back in 2010, I started teaching British Lit to 10th graders. Lots of good plays, novels and poems, but far and away the thing I was most nervous about and way over-prepared for was Hamlet. I mean, it’s Hamlet. For the rest of their lives, or at least for a good long stretch, everything these kids knew or thought about this play would grow out of how I showed it to them. I was their introduction to it, and I sure as hell better not screw it up.

Sonya is a snuggle-bug. She’ll be totally passed out cold, and as long as you stay in the same room, preferably right next to her, she’s good. She doesn’t really sleep at night unless one of us is holding her. As she’s not even 5 weeks old, we figure she’s entitled to such behavior. But what that means for us is lots of walking and rocking and singing in the wee hours. Circling through the downstairs rooms the other night, I was singing her one old folk song after another, and wondering if The Twa Sister Ballad, like so many other songs I love, was maybe a little dark and depressing for a newborn. And then it hit me. Oh my gosh. I get to teach her ALL THE SONGS. When she grows up and goes off on her own, hopefully she’ll spend some time with music-y people somewhere along the way, and she’ll be able to say, “Oh yeah, my mom used to sing me that song,” and it will have sunk into her subconscious and helped to form the way she sees the world, the way she comes to know beauty, silliness, joy, love, and yes, sorrow. For the great gaels of Ireland are the men that God made mad / For all their wars are merry and all their songs are sad. There are few things out there, I’d argue, so very cathartic as a good sad song. Except of course a good tragedy (thanks, Shakespeare!).

Last Sunday we heard the reading of the Passion at Palm Sunday Mass, and it hit me again, as Sonya uncomprehendingly heard the words for the first time, that one day they will be as familiar to her as they are now to me. The rituals of Holy Week, the somber liturgies and aching meditations on the greatest tragedy (and comedy!) the world will ever know, will all be a part of the fabric of her life. And I wanted to wrap her up and run out of the church, because it’s one thing to talk about the vicarious catharsis of songs and poems, but the suffering of Christ on the cross is one that she will have to learn to share in, to accept, to embrace, to own, or she won’t be whole. And I have to be the one to show her that. Hamlet is so… trivial.

I’ll be honest. Even though I have 4 younger siblings and 20 nieces and nephews, I always kind of thought babies had it made. Eat, sleep, and the giants all around you cater to you, clothe you, change you, carry you… but wowza. Sonya has to work so hard. Everything she does is brand-new, and most of her daily required activities turn her entire person bright red in her straining efforts (yes, you know what I’m talking about). She had to have a little surgery on her mouth when she was only 5 days old, and now that her incisions have healed, we’re finally beginning to teach her to nurse, with lots of training wheels, because her poor mouth isn’t as strong as it should be. And I wish that there were some magic trick to make this and everything else all easy for her, because she gets so frustrated and angry and sad and doesn’t know why or what any of it means. But this is her first step to learning the Cross, to becoming whole, and all I can do is try to help show her the way forward. That’s life, kiddo. But, as I discovered after 7:23 on February 22nd, more truly and overwhelmingly than ever before, Good Friday is always followed by the victory of Easter Sunday. It’ll all be okay, sweet girl.

On Joy (or, My Cup Runneth Over)

When I was a kid, we had one of those big green garbage cans that you roll down to the end of your driveway on Thursday morning for the trash fairies. I don't know what they're actually called, because my dad—a meticulous grammarian, word-lover, and nationally respected scholar of military ethics—always just called it the green thing. This past Wednesday evening, as I was rolling my green thing down to the end of the driveway after going through the house turning off left-on lights, it hit me again: I'm a dad now.

In truth, of course, I've been a dad since a piece of me fell in love with a piece of Ellie and the Holy Spirit gave those pieces a Sonya-soul. But it feels a lot different to hold a child in your arms than to look at a lump in a belly. It feels different to look into eyes that have just recently beheld the Lord God saying, "Hey, kid—here's a universe. Go play." And yet, it's bizarre how fast we accustom to things. After untold millennia yearning for the skies and dreaming of flight, we finally invent the airplane; and a few decades later, we're slumped in the stratosphere reading the paper and sipping our tea, bored.

Sonya's a beautiful girl, and endlessly funny. But we've got Baptismal certificates and Social Security numbers to figure out, dental complications to deal with, jobs and laundry and shopping to do, and through it all we have to keep striving to grab the odd snippet of sleep. There's not much time to sit and luxuriate. And come to think of it, that is probably all to the good. (I've had occasion before to note that God is actually pretty smart.) I don't have room in me, yet, to encompass the fullness of this joy and this vulnerability. So He parcels it out to me at unexpected moments, quite often when I'm thinking about something other than myself. There's a reason we have Purgatory. The solar empyrean would scorch us blind if we didn't have time to adjust.

Tonight, though, my beautiful wife is dozing at my side and my beautiful daughter is dozing in the crook of my arm. My idiot cat is curled up on my legs, John Wick is on YouTube mowing down endless waves of superhumanly loyal incompetent henchmen, and my PBR is nice and cold. I do not deserve all this. Domine, non sum dignus. But I will try. I will try to be worthy of this love of which I have blundered my way into stewardship. I know, believe me I know, it'll hurt and be hard, but I'll try to keep trying, I'll try. And for tonight—for this tiny momentary glimpse of Eternity—I am a very happy man.

The Last Ship

“There’s trouble in Midgard again,” said the Watchman.  “They need a Hero.”

“Very well,” replied the Director.  “This is a job for Chase Hardrock.”

“But sir, Mr. Hardrock is out on leave.”

“Balls.  Send in Bob—from Accounting.”

“Er. . .  yes sir.”

And so, Bob from Accounting set out on his great Adventure.  The Galleons had sailed when he came to the harbor, and he barely caught the last ship for Midgard—a little sloop called the Joy and Hope.  “Thanks for waiting,” he puffed, as he came bustling up the gangplank.  “I almost forgot my calculator.”

The grizzled old captain gave him a strange look.  “You won’t be needing that, son.  Where’s your Sword of Power?”

“My—my what?”  Bob nervously adjusted his tie and clutched at his folders, half-suspecting another practical joke.

“Little man, do you understand what you’ll be facing on Midgard?”

“Well, er—not specifically, but it sounded pretty serious.  Some kind of auditing nightmare, no doubt–maybe another tax evasion scandal.”

“I’m afraid not, my friend.  You’ll be facing nothing less than the very Lords of Hell unleashed upon Earth:  demons of flame and dread, serpents whose gaping jaws will scrape the land and sky, slavering hounds asnarl with dire and glittering fangs of malevolence.  The ground itself will tremble beneath the tramping feet of the legions of the damned, and against them, for the sake of all mankind, you will stand alone upon the field of final battle.”

“Oh,” said Bob, rather faintly.  There was a long, long silence.  “Well. . . I guess I’ll just have to do the best I can.”

On Meeting Sonya (or, How Much More)

I didn't know it was possible to fall in love so deeply and so fast. It couldn't be, unless Love Himself had made me His lightning rod. Our long-awaited treasure, Sonya Magdalena Rose, finally saw daylight on February 22nd after a short but grueling night labor. To the grass and trees, that dawning was the same as any; but not for me.

I find myself addressing herself primarily in rhetorical questions—"Do you want to see Mama? Do you want to go see your Mama?"—and parallel phrases—"My beautiful girl. Oh, my sweet girl." I've observed that nearly all parents instinctively do this, but I'm thinking of one parent in particular. In the Psalms, our Father speaks almost entirely in rhetorical questions—"Who may ascend the mountain of the Lord? or who can stand in His holy place?" (Psalm 24:3)—and parallel phrasing—"Powerful is Thine arm; strong is Thy hand, exalted is Thy right hand!" (Psalm 89:13). I take this to corroborate my suspicion that God is loving her through me. I know I love this girl more than my own capacity for love allows, and therefore I must have been infused, enfathered by the Father, made into a vessel of Himself whereby He graces her. The angel called Mary "full of grace" because she never sinned; but from the time of her Baptism up until her first real sin, Sonya too will be full of grace. Like Joachim and Anne, Ellie and I are the stewards of a holy soul, and only the Lord can love her as she should be loved. So He fills us with His love, to love her with.

But oh God, this infusing does not come without cost. To excavate my soul, to make room in my shallowness for the depth of His love, my Father has to dig and tunnel and blast. He has to break through the floor of my being and carve new caverns in the breathing, bleeding, weeping bedrock. Before her birthday, I thought I'd be crying when I first held her in my arms; but at that joyful moment, I only felt tired and pleased. It wasn't till later that day, when she started to cry the heart-rending wails of a hungry child, that I broke into sobs. And they were sobs of grief, because at that moment I realized what it meant to hear my daughter's pain. I will see her heart rent so many times in the years to come, and every time will rend my own. This deepening capacity for love must mean a widening vulnerability to sorrow.

And oh God, I accept and embrace it forever with all my strength. Cliches exist because certain things are simply universal. A hundred people have told me in the last nine months that, as difficult as pregnancy and parenthood may be, it will all be worth it when I hold my baby girl. It's utterly true. A trillion men have looked into a daughter's eyes and said they've never seen such beauty. It's utterly, utterly true. I've known this girl for a matter of days—hours—and I would suffer and die for her with praise-hymns in my heart.

As a wordsmith, Jesus was very fond of the phrase "how much more": "If you who are sinners know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in Heaven give good things to those who ask Him?" (Matthew 7:10). And if I, most decidedly a sinner, can love Sonya this much, then how much more does He love her? Another rhetorical question—but one that He answered on the Cross.