Would I Be Loved?

Based on a passed-down, chubby-faced baby photograph I have, I can say that from the beginning I greeted the world with wide smiles, with a child’s inquisitive open eyes. The photo in a gold-plated frame graced my parents’ bedroom dresser for decades, two locks of hair curled and pasted down on my forehead for posterity. I’m pushing myself up from my tummy on my baby-fat-laden forearms; someone off-camera—my mom? my dad?—had caught my attention. Made me happy. Made me feel secure.

I see, captured in a flash of a moment in a department store or photographer’s studio how I sent out little signals, bids for connection, theorists call them, testing the nature of the world in which I would find myself, a world both precious and perilous. Would my little sphere prove safe? Every child wonders, as I did. As much as I have lived since, I still wonder about the nature of this world—especially when things happen that seem random or heart-rending.

One philosopher speaks of our human “thrownness.” Any person is tossed “into a world we didn’t make, a world we don’t know, surrounded by strangers to whom we are in turn a newly emerged stranger.” I arrived with no say in the matter, surrounded by people with whom I could be connected, unconnected, disconnected.

As a friend of mine put it, thinking of his young children and the pressures they face, the perils they navigate, “I feel the world is a cold place, and it’s easy to spiral into loneliness.” Someone once asked if the universe is ultimately friendly. Is there any personal quality at all? Anyone’s life is “a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness,” wrote Vladimir Nabokov. “The cradle rocks above an abyss.” He didn’t see much to inspire longing and relating.

But I see more than an abyss of vastness and impersonal motion. I get whiffs of the personal interpenetrations at the heart of the world in which we live and move and breathe. As a baby I didn’t have the words, but I most certainly had tears and giddy smiles to find how much of life is so fully relational, how it entails an exchange of energy and offering of self and receiving of gifts (and snubs).

With what I know now, what I eventually experienced—the joys and broken signals, the smiles and missed cues—the answer cannot ever be glib. But if lobbed into the world, I see now how I was also caught. I landed. I was given a homeplace, a family, a household.

Even here, looking back at my uncontrolled beginnings, I catch glimmers of the relatedness of the world where I’ve alighted. Signs writ large. I’ve become with the years less inclined to attribute circumstances to fate or logic. I think of myself as a relationalist, longing to find the substance of closeness, the interconnections that support life. And if true for life, surely also for our longing for spiritual reality. No wonder someone spoke of humankind’s “ache for cosmic specialness.” I have felt—and still feel—that ache.

Which says something not only about the world I came into, but the larger presence behind it all Who is busy at making, shaping, forging. The picture tips me in the direction of perceiving a relational God, a sketched out scene of a divine community of personal agencies known in classical Christian faith as the Trinity. Here is a portrait of God as more than force or energy or even presence, but love. A God extending an invitation to relationship.

You know the questions that burned in me, O God: Would I be cherished? Greeted with kind responsiveness? Are you—can you truly be—a solace and safe place?

If there’s one thing I’m seeing, God, about who I’ve been from the beginning, about who you made me to be, it’s that I am not myself by myself. If we were made in your image, “You” happened before me. I want to experience more of that goodness.

“Your eyes beheld my unformed substance.

In your book were written

all the days that were formed for me,

when none of them as yet existed.” (from Psalm 139)