We welcomed our first child—Anna Theodora—into the world on May 11th, 2020. These are some initial reflections from the joyful haze of those first few weeks.
Windows to the Soul
By Lisa Kutolowski
Anna first opened her eyes during a prayer of blessing. Within the first hour of her birth, when it was clear mama and baby were well, the midwives and birth attendants left for an hour in order to give our new family time to take each other in. She was active and fussy for a while, unable to settle in enough to nurse. As Mark began to say a blessing over her, she immediately quieted down, opened her eyes, craned her neck to see and looked intently at him throughout the blessing. In the midst of all the disruption, confusion and chaos of birth, the intention of blessing seemed to her something familiar, something in this bizarre world she finally recognized.
Anna’s eyes were deep, dark and unfamiliar with the shadows and glow cast by the candlelight. They seemed to see beyond—sensing the deep, spiritual realities and presence of her surroundings rather than seeing the physical world in the way we adults understand sight. The eyes are the window to the soul (Matthew 6:22) and through Anna’s eyes we both could feel deeply how she knew more than we did. She had access to the Spirit and was united to God in a way we have forgotten in all our growing up. Indeed, her pure innocence, presence, and union with God is the very state to which we seek to return, for the undivided heart of a newborn is the aim of prayer, faith and spiritual practice.
By the end of her second week, something had noticeably shifted. As her eyes adjusted to the incarnated world and her skin, lungs, and limbs started to figure out this airy environment, it was as if she grew younger. Whereas before she felt foreign to this world—an emissary of Spirit—she now felt of this world, just very new. She, like all young children, still carries the gifts of innocence and presence, but it now feels like the simple innocence of one who has not seen evil rather than the wisdom of one who has known the goodness of unity with God. And so, her human journey begins.
Mirroring Divine Radiance
By Mark Kutolowski
I’m filled with wonder by what Anna brings forth from people. From me, from Lisa, from friends, family and even strangers. There’s something of the gentleness, vulnerability, innocence and radiance of a newborn that seems to awaken these same qualities in the hearts of those who they meet. This gift of ‘mirroring’ is one of the great blessings an infant brings into our families and communities. It’s like a sort of spiritual ‘reset’ – in the radiance of a newborn, we who may have lost access to our own original goodness can regain contact with this aspect of life.
I experienced this in a profound way the first time I left our property after Anna was born, about five days later. I left to harvest some wild edible plants (fiddleheads and wild leeks), and when I was at my harvest sites I felt a keen sense of heightened sensitivity. The sight of trash on the roadside cut more deeply, bringing up tears of remorse. The light shimmering through a drop of water on a leaf sparkled more intensely and the pungent odor of the wild leeks filled my whole body as I cut some stems. I had become more alive, more sensitive to life, through the gift of our little one’s sensitivity and closeness to the origin of life.
I love seeing how certain people soften in her presence. Friends that are normally stoic giggle and grin. An elder who has lost their memory and has difficulty in conversation holds her and is fully presentas they gaze face-to-face, both simply being in the present moment. When we’re in town, I can see the light in strangers’ eyes when they catch sight of her. It gives me joy to see the power of baby override the awkwardness of pandemic etiquette as people meet her. (‘Don’t worry, I’ll stand six feet away, but I just have to take a look!’)
Anna’s gift to us, as her parents and as her community, is to mirror divine radiance, innocence, vulnerability and openness to life. This can help us to reconnect to these same divine qualities within ourselves. That is one of a baby’s gifts to us. What about our gifts to them?
Over the past six weeks, I’ve begun to think that one of the greatest gifts we, as adults, can give back to an infant is to mirror back to them a similar access to the indwelling presence of God. When a child comes into this world, they bring a simple, unconscious union with God, from whom they came. As William Wordsworth wrote, “Trailing clouds of glory do we come/From God, who is our home:/Heaven lies about us in our infancy![1]” As we grow up, we lose this unconscious, original awareness of union with God. The very next lines in Wordsworth’s poem are, “Shades of the prison house begin to close/Upon the growing Boy”. Yet, there are adults who have taken the spiritual journey and discovered a new, conscious intimacy with God. From this conscious union, we can ‘mirror’, from an adult consciousness, a similar state of intimacy with God back to an infant. We can radiate fullness and light back to the child from our stance at the far side of the ‘forgetfulness’ of egoic consciousness.
I’m convinced that the presence of one or more adults who are awakened to intimacy with God offers a sort of psychic ‘bridge’ for an infant between the world where they came from and our world of bodies with the inherent limitations and restrictions of incarnate life. When a child, unconsciously bearing union and light, sees and feels this same quality in an adult, it’s as if we’re saying to them, ‘Welcome! We see you – not just your body, but your spirit. This part of you can have a home here in this realm. Come, be here with us.’ Without this, how is the child to know that its experience of union is a part of being human here in this place? I suspect the depth of ‘forgetfulness’ that comes with growing up is related to how well the adults of a child’s community have access to intimacy with God. We all must take the journey of psychological individuation. Yet, I suspect there can be far more graceful, gentle journeys both into psychological individuality—and beyond individuality back to conscious union—when a child has spiritual elders with them throughout their journey.
For me, holding this awareness with Anna has become a spiritual discipline. There are times when I remember and I can mirror eternal presence back to her. Sometimes I’ll even quietly say ‘I see you’ or ‘I know (or remember) where you are from’ to her as I hold her. Other times, I can get caught up in the work of tending to all the cries, wiggles, poops and pees that are a part of Anna’s physical needs. It is easy to narrow my focus to only the physical and emotional parts of her being. In these realms, she is very young and utterly dependent on our care and I can forget that these needs are not the totality of her being and experience. In the realm of spirit, we are equal sharers in the divine image and likeness and her access to this truth is more direct than ours.
The infants in our lives give us gifts from beyond, calling us to remember who we truly are. Those of us who have some conscious access to our true nature can likewise give infants the gift of recognition, affirmation, blessing as we mirror the same divine light from our adult level of conscious awareness.
I pray that Lisa and I may keep our hearts ever more open to God, to be present with Anna in the depths of being. I pray too that we may have the grace to honor, bless, and learn from the gifts from beyond that she has brought into our home and into our community.
[1]From “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood", 1804