Trailing clouds of glory: Thoughts on motherhood and new life

I knocked on the oversized wooden door in the maternity ward of the hospital, eager to meet my little nephew. My brother opened the door and ushered me into the cool, dark room where the new family had spent some of its first hours together. I greeted my sister-in-law and exchanged a few words with the new mother. And then I saw the bassinet, cradling the newborn boy. My heart suddenly swelled with the realization of the miracle I was witnessing. Here was a brand new life—never before known to the world—making his first appearance, encased in the precious frame of an infant. A miracle of creation had been performed. Someone had just come down from a more eternal sphere into our fallen one, “trailing clouds of glory” (William Wordsworth, Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.) And the air was still charged with wisps of that glory.

I listened to the instinctive, yet experimental, whimpering coming from lungs not yet quite used to this thing we call air. I peered into the tiny face, eyes squinted shut in a sleep that blocked out his strange, new home. I watched my brother pick up this tiny child—his new son—and hand him to his wife. And I knew they must be experience the same awe I was feeling—except to an even greater degree, as they were the ones who had participated in the miracle and would now have the privilege and responsibility of caring for the tiny child. I marveled at the miracle of this new creature, at this new human making his debut. He was alive. His little toes and fingers fully formed. His tiny heart pumping blood through his newborn frame. His ears taking in the sounds around him, not yet fully registering what they meant. All of the processes necessary to sustain existence functioning in this 21.5 inch frame.

In short, my nephew is a beautiful little miracle.

There is something holy and full of light in a child’s entry into the world. That hospital room is sanctified by the miracle and becomes sacred ground. I think few things can put life back into perspective as quickly as does that feeling present in a newborn’s first hours of life. Because that’s a reminder of what this is all about. It about families—parents and children bound together in love and purpose. In a hospital room like that, it’s so easy to feel that “the family is central to the Creator’s plan for the eternal destiny of His children” (The Family: A Proclamation to the World).

I think Lev Tolstoy, one of my favorite Russian authors, understood this miracle of new life with a particular keenness. And not only that, he had the ability to capture so beautifully (I won’t say accurately, having never stood in a place that would give me license to judge) in words that feeling which new mothers and particularly fathers experience at the entrance of their sons and daughters into this world.

In War and Peace (a quick little read if you have an hour . . . joke) Tolstoy describes the birth of a child as the enactment of “the world’s most solemn mystery” and all who are present as Lise is giving birth feel “an awareness that at this time they were in the presence of some great, unfathomable mystery” (Volume 2, Part 1, chapter 8). As Lise delivers her child, her husband Andrey is waiting anxiously outside the door. At the first cry of his new son, Andrey jerks in surprise and asks himself, “Why have they taken a baby in there? A baby? Whose baby is it?” After that split second of heart-warming confusion, however, “the delightful meaning of the baby’s wail dawned on him (and) he, choked with tears, leant on the window-sill with both elbows and cried like a child sobbing his heart out.” He felt the solemnity of the miracle that had been wrought. He sensed the sacredness of his new role of father, and this so transcended his normal feelings and thoughts that he could do nothing but weep.

Surpassing in beauty even that account is the birth scene Tolstoy sets forth in Anna Karenina. In Part 7, chapters 13-17, Kitty gives birth to a son. Levin, Kitty’s husband, finds himself desperate to help his wife, yet unsure of what he can do to help the miracle be performed. With a keen perception indicating an understanding of the essence of life, Levin muses, as he awaits the birth of his son, that he feels something akin to what he felt at the death of his brother the previous year,

“But that had been grief and this was joy. But that grief and this joy were equally outside all ordinary circumstances of life, were like holes in this ordinary life, through which something higher showed. And just as painful, as tormenting in its coming, was what was now being accomplished; and just as inconceivably, in contemplating this higher thing, the soul rose to such heights as it had never known before, where reason was no longer able to overtake it.”

The ordinary fabric from which we weave our lives is transcended by those events which pierce the veil—by the beginning and the end of mortal life. It is in these moments that we can move beyond the mundane and perceive that our lives are actually comprised of something much more holy, much more refined than we had ever dreamed. In a beautiful tribute to motherhood and womanhood, Levin felt that “the whole world of women, which had acquired a new, previously unknown significance for him after his marriage, now rose so high in his estimation that he was unable to encompass it in imagination.” He saw the beauty and power of his wife as she joined with God in the creation of this sacred mystery, and he was in awe. He likewise felt humbled by his own awareness that he had become a father to this “a human being who had never existed before.” This realization of his sudden fatherhood awakened in him “an awareness of a new region of vulnerability. And this awareness was so tormenting at first, the fear lest this helpless being should suffer was so strong, that because of it he scarcely noticed the strange feeling of senseless joy and even pride he had experienced when the baby sneezed.” The transcendent depiction of the child’s first moments of life is beautifully juxtaposed with a mundane sneeze and the very real fear of the child’s helplessness. Such is the miracle of a new life.

I think it’s difficult to truly understand motherhood and fatherhood without thinking about our first parents in the Garden of Eden. The circumstances in which God created Adam and Eve are sacred. So sacred, in fact, that hardly anything is told to us about how the great parents of the human race were formed. But we do know that “God created man in his own image” and that that the all-powerful Creator of heaven and earth “breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul” (Genesis 1:27 and 2:7). Think about that—their bodies were created in the very image and likeness of the God we worship. He Himself gave them life and breath. If that doesn’t speak to the sanctity of a human life, I don’t know what does. Our initial creation as humans bore the touch of divinity.

I love the title of Eve as “mother of all living” (Genesis 3:20). After her perfect creation, wrought by God Himself, she was prepared to sacrifice of herself to bring forth the race of mankind. She was ready to become the literal mother of God’s spirit sons and daughters. As the first to undergo the pains of pregnancy and childbirth, I wonder what thoughts crossed Eve’s mind as she pondered the miracle that was being wrought within her own body. What a weighty, solemn task. And yet a beautiful one. A holy duty that Eve would pass on to all of her daughters—the ability and right to become bearers of the souls of man; the opportunity to participate with God as a joint-creator in the miracle we know as life. I think nothing parallels the type of sacrifice Christ made for us as that of a mother for her child. Just as Christ gave His life for us, so, too, does a mother sacrifice her health, her body, her time and energy, and sometimes her very life itself to give the gift of life to another. The spirit of this sacrifice magnifies the holiness of this event and allows the hand of God to be seen even more clearly in a child’s birth. And Eve left to us this heritage and example as the bearer and nurturer of the family of mankind.

After this new and frightening sacrifice on Eve’s behalf, I imagine with what awe and wonder Adam and Eve must have welcomed their first child into this world. What thoughts must have filled their hearts and minds as they realized they had partnered with the Divine in the creation of a new human soul. What heavenly manifestations likely heralded this, the first of many births into mortality of God’s beloved children. I’m sure the responsibility to rear and nurture this child was humbling and overwhelming for Adam and Eve. Without physical parents themselves, I assume there were many times when they through their hands up to heaven, wishing they had a precedent for how to deal with a teething child or a pouting toddler or a rebellious teenager. Yet, the God who orchestrated that miracle of human life guided them and they raised a family. And that family grew, each couple bringing additional children—additional miracles—into the world in like divine manner.

As I stood in that hospital room, a witness of the miraculous ongoing creation of human life, God in a very real way reminded me of the sanctity of life. If the entrance into the world of a child is attended by such glory, what does that indicate about the worth of the entire life of the child? Surely a child is not born just to be an infant forever, eternally compelled to be reliant upon the capable hands of mother and father for every need. Surely a child is born for more than just those first hours. Even during those early moments of life, a mother holds her child in her arms, begins to build his castles in the sky and dream of what feats he will accomplish. She sees in this divine infant not merely a tiny individual who is alive for that moment, but a son or daughter of God who will grow and develop and continue to be glorious and magnificent.

Each of us was once a babe in arms. Each of us was once a reminder to those around us of the divine and of the worth of a human soul. And that divinity has not lessened with our age. Our greatness and worth and potential did not end once we were carried outside of the hospital’s walls. We may have learned to hold our own spoons, to wipe our own tears, but the mark of divinity has not left us. Regardless of how quickly the sacredness tangible in those hospital rooms fades into cares about cleaning and tantrums and homework and—on a much larger scale—wars and political ideologies, that divinity has never left a single one of us. We are children of the God of heaven. He sent us to earth trailing those clouds of glory. And He sent us to succeed. To thrive. To learn. To grow. To further His work and His glory.

The hospital room, the cradle, mark only the glorious beginning of a divine journey on this earth. And I’m grateful for the transcendent moments when new, glorious beings join us on earth to remind us of our mutual divine heritage and purpose. And I’m grateful for mothers who make that miracle possible.