Last week, on the two month anniversary of our daughter’s wedding, Lisa and I celebrated our own anniversary. Sipping on ice-cold glasses of wine, our conversation revolved around a shared incredulity. “Twenty-nine years! It doesn’t seem possible!” We noticed that we’re getting close to having lived more of our lives together than we ever lived apart. It doesn’t seem possible until I look into the mirror and see that the guy my wife married is some silver-haired dude with wrinkles and some new freckles that resemble age spots! To get the full effect here, please cue up Macaulay Culkin’s famous, “scream” in Home Alone (1990). It seems that one of the benefits that comes with the silvery mane of an elder, has to do with people looking at my family and asking how we managed to put together a life marked with something that others would like to find in their own families. The present article is the beginning of my efforts to provide at least a partial response to “how we managed” that.
Believe it or not, this is not deflecting! I want to situate my reflection within the poetic metaphor found in the Torah that I explored last week (Genesis 2: 6). Return with me, now, to the image of how “Creative, Life-giving Breath pulses and blows through us, from one to another, forming, shaping, and recreating us in big and small ways.” This week, I’d like to start with the question, “What does this Creative Breath look like in the course of an ordinary life, in an ordinary family?”
It looks like a twelve-year-old girl, who is prone to anxiety, acting on an idea to transform a sleepless night. She steals into her dad’s room at two in the morning and shakes him awake inviting him to lay out under a summer’s night sky to identify constellations. What does Creative Breath look like? It looks like that same father woken up at two in the morning with a simultaneous awareness of his tiredness, and the frenetic workday schedule that begins in just six short hours. It’s that Breath blown down through the ages that rolls him out of bed, and pushes him beyond his sleep concerns to find luminous connect-the-dots patterns that will forever be etched into a forming interior castle that his daughter will use as her home base. It’s the place she will learn to go when she needs to soothe down her anxious heart. It will eventually show up in a discreet tattoo of tiny stars on the oblique side of her nineteen-year-old tummy that will make her previously tattoo-hating father shed joy tears when she reveals it.
What does this Creative Breath look like? It looks like my little family of five gathered on a ninth story hospital balcony awaiting our turn to say goodbye to my comatose mother-in-law on the weekend of her accident. Within the next hour she wouldbe disconnected from life-support. While looking out over the city lights, it was as if my wife had become the child, and my children had become the parents as she sobbed in their arms. Just like that, a Creative Breath blew through a family. That Breath nudged my children further down a developmental bridge toward the more differentiated, compassionate shores of adult living and loving. There was no trumpet blast announcing this transformation. There was no flash of light, or TikTok camera capturing it. It was as subtle as the wind that whispers through a rooftop garden. That’s the way it is with Divine Breath: subtle, quiet, and usually known only in retrospect through reflection.
The two examples given above suggest that there is a kind of everyday mysticism blowing through each and every stage of the family life cycle, and each and every day of our lives. Maybe one way to think of sharpening our senses to detect Divine Breath blowing through our days, is to think of it as a homecoming to a forgotten capacity. An observant adult, with a front-row seat to the life of a small child, will notice a kind of inborn expectation children have that there is something wondrous hidden around every corner. The question is, can we adults return to the audacious hope we once possessed, that there is a poetic power in our days that points beyond the surface of the events? What disciplines do you use to shed the thick skin of adult disillusionment from time to time? How do you make yourself more available to the thrill of that Breath blowing through your life… like you used to do before the wounds… before the lockstep hypnosis of life in our culture?
I’m partial to a homemade daily exercise of Beauty Checks. I like to close my eyes, and look back over my shoulder at the last twenty-four hours. I try to locate tiny experiences of moral, physical, or spiritual Beauty. It may be some kindness, humor, or love that came my way, or came through me to someone else. I try to take a second to savor it in my body. Then I end these little two to five minute exercises with an explicit prayer of thanks to God.
I’ve heard it said that if you take a step toward God, that God will run toward you. With that in mind, once you have set your mind on an intentional “second naivete,” almost any method will work for you. Perhaps your recipe for detecting transforming Divine Breath is more explicitly formal in its religious content. Maybe your approach is more unthematic and secular? Here’s the truth. Whatever special “something” people have noticed in my family has to do with discerning where that Sacred Breath is blowing through our lives, and setting our sails to catch it, and move to its flow.