The Never-Children Are His Always Children
One still-born baby is one baby too much for a mother. Their unrealized futures, like the Northern Lights, forever a wonder, forever beyond reach. The mother carries the child around in her mind, never abandoning the baby. Yet there is a blank space. Where is the child crying for her, looking up at her? There is only putu, as the Inuits say, a hole. There is weeping. The earned sorrow of it. Grief sifting through mother-life and father-life. Still-born babies are never-children.
“And so, the Lord God formed man of the dust of the earth, and breathed into his face the breath of life, and man was made into a living soul” (Gen. 2:7, trans. mine).
Our children come from the earth. From out of the earth. We don’t need to frack, God will dig them up. Every whittled cell, all the flaky platelets, and each carved limb is in his imagination before he speaks and his words dredge children into existence. But many children are born wearing a dead man’s coat. The lining disintegrated by sin. He can’t open his mouth to talk. Mother remains still and father listens but the earth takes him back again.
They look for a fiery chariot but nothing happens. There’s a lone trumpet, faint, but distinct. A funerary tune, but the notes bespeak hope. The consequence of such chariots. No communal talking, no curated catharsis. Now is the time for ceremony, ritual, Memorial Sunday. Every Sunday will be Memorial Sunday from now on. The parents enter, the congregation rises, several dozen, maybe a hundred or so. Angels and archangels, tottering elders and wheezing grandparents, all the little children under foot. We need someone old here too. Not seventy or eighty years old. That’s grand but not old. We need one who was there at the genesis of our beginnings. The one who conjured the dirt. The hands that sculpted the first man. The breath that bellows life. We need the vigorous one, who meets us at the end of our lives, that joins our Memorial Day rite, pushing morbidity out of the gates. When that happens, even the still-born say goodbye to winter, for spring has come gliding.
“The Spirit of God made me, and the breath of Almighty God enlivened me” (Job 33:4, trans. mine).
The God of mercy causes blossoms of hope to erupt where there’s breathless, feverish dread trying to swallow our imagination. When cold has bottomed out our conversations, he heats up talk of resurrection to full crackle on a pan. “Wait by the fire,” he says. “Watch the dark, you’re open to attack. The beast will try to take advantage of your vulnerability, but I will ward him off until dawn comes.”
He promises that everything is temporary, even the never-children will sing and dance again very soon,
With God on our side we will make it through the night, when so many others haven’t. He promises that everything is temporary, even the never-children will sing and dance again very soon, when the good God’s gentle hands undo the rope that suspends us from the gallows of blank memory and crumbling dreams. Then, the child will find his mother under the tall Cedars of Lebanon on the Mountain of the Lord. Then, still-born sons and daughters will meet their fathers on the first night of eternity at Jesus’ table.
So please, Lord, protect all the never-children and let us hear the bell from the far-distant church where they are gathered to sing the same calling-song we sing today, even unto ages upon ages. For in Christ, this world’s never-children are his always-children, because he isn’t a God of death, after all. They breathlessly await the resurrection-reunion, as thirsty to see us as we are them.
“These things I have spoken to you, that in me you have peace; in the world you will have dis-ease, but trust me, I have overcome the world” (John 16:33, trans. mine).
written by Donavon Riley. Donavon Riley is a husband, father, pastor, hosts The Banned Books and Warrior Priest podcasts, has authored three books, written hundreds of articles, is a mixed martial arts instructor, a story-teller, and friend of trees.
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