This evening A. tells me there is something very wonderful about children, and something to be learned, too, in the pleasure we derive from their presence. Just yesterday I spent a great deal of effort trying to ignore three such creatures, unruly little boys and all brothers, who slipped into the chairs where I sat working and astonished me with their loveliness. That is a fact. I mean, I was astonished. The hunger in their warm brown eyes, which seemed to me a kind of defiance against the idea that anything could possibly be called ordinary — this amazed me. The sound of their light feet rushing to my side, so that I wondered for a moment if gravity ever felt offended by youth — this also amazed me. And anyway, even without all that, I would have been amazed, and I have been. There is something wonderful about children.

Thinking about it now, I guess it’s fair to say that few of us question an infant’s right to exist. Her smile (or what we take for a smile), her marvellous tiny fist, or the series of nonsensical syllables she strings together with a hiccup and drool — but no, that is not quite right. We love a child before she has done anything more than breathe. So I realize I am missing the point, which is that the sheer fact of a child begets wonder. I looked up sheer in the dictionary and found that it can be taken to mean “nothing other than.” My point is that nothing other than the fact of the child is enough to rouse our deepest interest, our delight and care, even our most holy love.

I shouldn’t generalize. But that is certainly how I feel.

John Ames talks about this in Gilead. He says in a letter to his son: “All that is fine” — referring to the child’s looks and manners — “All that is fine, but it’s your existence I love you for, mainly. Existence seems to me now the most remarkable thing that could ever be imagined” (53). There is a lot in that book about fatherhood, prodigal sons and all that. It is really a book about love. I’ve been thinking about another line in the novel. John Ames is feeling the ache of his age, the fact that he won’t get to watch his son grow old. “I wish I could help you carry the weight of many years,” he writes, “But the Lord will have that fatherly satisfaction” (210).

Fatherly satisfaction. I am thinking about that. I am moved by the thought of anyone being God’s child in that way. Of course, in one sense, there is a growing up to do — good works prepared for us, let us go on, and so forth. But what child grows out of being someone’s child? “We somehow get so cynical about his love.” That is what A. says to me this evening, and of course, it makes sense. We feel our loss the moment we ourselves are ushered into existence and schooled in the ways of the world. We fail our own children as our parents failed us. Still, I let A.’s words sit in the quiet of the summer night. I think to myself that even when we forget we are children, he does not forget. I don’t think he ever ceases to think of us the way we think about our children at our very best and at their very worst. This joy we derive from the sheer fact of them.