The other day my nephew, who is also my godson, sent me via social media a photograph of his firstborn daughter, Hannah Sophia, all 8 lbs. 5 oz. of her. It is one of the more beautiful photographs I have seen in quite a while.
I suppose because the baby was born Caesarian section there is none of the rough treatment of the birth canal and the child is therefore already absolutely gorgeous. Most newborns resemble either Winston Churchill or Mao Tse Tung. This one is a tiny cherub getting ready to charm us all. She is gazing up in her innocence and that faint look of surprise and reticence newborns have, as if to say, “Whoa, wait a minute… I’m not so sure I want to be out here yet.” They also have that look that says, “Any minute now you can pick me up and make the world OK for me.”
It is always moving when one of God’s creatures is introduced to the world. As hard as it may be someday, still we know that this is life in all its vibrancy and this infant will slowly, surely and, we hope, safely encounter it.
People are entering little Hannah’s world as we speak. And the invitation to make that world OK is accepted in joy, sacrifice and preoccupied attention by her mother and her father. Of course, the grandparents are in there, too, and the crowd of aunts, uncles and cousins is also gathering around. Every expression that little face makes will give hours of enjoyment and reflection upon God’s utter goodness.
Just about the same time as I saw Hannah Sophia’s photo, I received another photo in the grab bag of Facebook images. The subject of this photograph was my niece and goddaughter Sylvia, who now has a couple of grown children of her own. Her daughter had wheeled her out into the sunlight and they are photographed together. The daughter, Julie, is looking eerily like her mother 25 years ago.
Sylvia’s is a different face. The face I knew, having lived with my older brother and his family a couple of different times and having been around all his children much of my young life, is now barely recognizable as the pretty, well featured, friendly face I recall so well. Into adulthood this niece of mine stayed, as we say in the south, an awful pretty girl. And the face, the oh-so-handsome face, regardless of what was going on in her life – and she generally had a lot going on, a lot of hurdles to leap and challenges to face – remained, though preoccupied, still youthful, pleasant and welcoming. But now it is not that face. Now, behind the smile for the camera, is the face of suffering. It is a face that has been enduring the ravages of cancer, a face not focused on bright possibility but on a mysteriously dark probability. It is a face her loved ones find difficult to see, a face still surprised by the evaporation of energy and promise, and it knows there is none around her to make the whole set of befuddling, heart-wrenching bodily assaults just go away. No one to make it all OK. Finding comfort becomes a much more sophisticated endeavor that she has little of the wherewithal to accomplish. It is the face of one’s last days on earth.
One face reflects the greatest joy there is; the other face a resignation to the greatest sorrow. The only rational way to express an acceptance of these faces that came to me on the same day is that God surely resides in both of them. The child in Bethlehem and the man on the cross, I must remember, are one and the same.
I know, too, that beauty is not always joyful. Perhaps our language is loveliest when we say hello, but there can also be a sublimely moving aesthetic when we say goodbye. They both can be eloquent musical refrains. In the first few seconds of life we gather and seek to touch the tiny hands and feet, and soon we baptize the child with our water and our prayers. In the last seconds we anoint our loved one, her hands and her feet for the journey in a baptism of tears and another welcoming initiation which is taking place – one we dream of, one we all reach out to, one we all will face at one time or another.
It is only one tale and the two faces are ultimately the same character, a character created in love and animated in love and, finally, surrendered in love. They are human faces, both beautiful in their own way. Both of them lift my heart. And both of them break my heart. Open arms for one and a blown kiss for the other. Hello, my lovely Hannah. Goodbye, my lovely Sylvia. May God be with you both.
Postscript: Little Hannah Sophia is a now a lovely, lively, baptized Roman Catholic Christian. And my beautiful goddaughter Sylvia has returned gracefully to her Creator.
Fred Gallagher is an author, book editor and former addictions counselor. He and his wife Kim are members of St. Patrick Cathedral in Charlotte.