Credit Where Credit Is Due

When people tell me my son is beautiful, my purest reaction is to stand shoulder to shoulder with them and say, "Yes, he is," in perfect awe.

This is no parental pride on my part but a hushed resignation of authorship.  Who am I to have born this child (or any child)?  One cannot credit him to skill.  There was no control on my part, say to place the eyes so, or to form the will so.

No, my son is an entity completly independent of myself.  He was before I knew he was.  It was not my knowledge of him that made him.  It was no conscious decision of mine for him as him to be made.

The helplessness of my role in his making draws me near to the mind of God.  Before Him, a shining sun, I am the feminine, the maternal, the reciever.  I am free when I resign claim to ownership. 

Not free of responsibility and accountability, certainly, but free to feel the weight of that which I have had a part in creating--in the kind of startled way an artist, moved in a midnight rapture, stands back in the greying dawn and beholds in wonder, as for the first time, the vision of his masterpiece.