Teach your parents well...

The way, the truth and the light...

Yes, it has been awhile since I last posted a blog entry. It is not as if I haven’t tried to do so. It is just that the last eight weeks have been so filled with quiet wonder that it has taken me a little while to process the lessons my son has presented to me. Indeed a baby does change everything. The biggest change for me has been one of perspective. In the past eight weeks it has dawned upon me that the very things I spent the majority of my adult life running away from; relationships, marriage, family and children are now the most satisfying events I’ve ever known in my life.

I can not begin to tell you how many years I spent in the hippie search for purpose and meaning. I partook of peyote on the mountaintops of New Mexico; I studied the many philosophies of the world seeking the ultimate truth. I involved myself in the political causes of social protest and ideological revolution. I partied like Timothy Leary on steroids and pursued the pleasures of the flesh like Admiral Byrd looking for the North Pole. I savaged the natural world looking for the great truth of reality.

Marriage, family and children represented to me the loss of individual freedom and the ruination of the spiritual quest I believed to be the most important aspect of the human experience. Even the Apostle Paul urged Christians to avoid marriage if at all possible in the search for God. (1 Corinthians Chapter 7 verses 6-9) Marriage ended the walk along the spiritual path. Family distracted one from the single-minded devotion to the quest for spiritual enlightenment. Children were the anchor that weighed one down in the drudgery of human toil until the soul lay abandoned and forgotten in the quagmire of the mundane world. I ran from the life of a married man like frightened animals flee before the onslaught of a forest fire.

Then came the moment I watched as my son entered the world and the deep truth of life at last revealed itself to my humbled eyes. Looking down upon my son just before I cut the umbilical cord I saw the infinite vine of life stretching forth from an ancient yesterday and growing forward into an infinite tomorrow. The Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end; I saw God as he has always revealed himself to the world, in the body of a newborn child. It was the miracle I’d waited a lifetime to witness but believed would never manifest itself in my life.

Here is a marvelous truth. Marriage is not the end of the spiritual path but rather it is the beginning of it. As you walk along the road of marriage you learn the greatest of spiritual lessons; commitment and devotion, faith and belief in one greater than yourself, the greater love found only in loving forgiveness and the joy of daily service to another. Marriage is the sacred ground upon which the holy temple of family will come to be built. A child is not an anchor weighing down the soul but is instead the vessel which will carry the union of two souls in marriage into the infinite universe of tomorrow. Heaven is reflected in the eyes of the child resting in your arms as your eyes fill with the tears of gratitude to have been so blessed with the gift you hold. It is a miracle I can not deny the reality of.

Marriage, family and children, the very institutions I avoided for so long in my life have turned out to be the very best events in which I have ever participated. I have one last confession to make before I return to holding my son in my arms. I did not understand the true nature of God until with one snip of surgical scissors I harvested from the vine of life a small portion of him to love and nurture as my very own.

The smartest thing I’ve ever done in my entire life was to accept the apple from the tree of knowledge my wife held out to me...

Life in the garden of Eden.