Humpty Dumpty

This morning my (almost) two-year-old daughter thrice discovered the results of disobedience.

In the first case she took her chocolate Easter bunny out of the Easter basket after I told her to put bunny and basket back in the refrigerator. She dropped the unfortunate confection; it broke in two; and she burst out crying. Of course I pointed out to her that it would still be in one piece if she had listened to daddy—

A little while later she brought to me pieces of her mother’s work (cell) phone, which she knows quite well is off limits to her.

“It’s broken,” she said.

She had managed to remove the battery cover, upon which the battery had fallen out. Of course she did not know how to fix it. Daddy put the phone back together and after appropriate disciplinary measures, my daughter resumed playing.

Not so long after, the same little girl came to me, a big crocodile tear rolling down her cheek, and confessed, “the cover came off the ABC book.”

“OK, Mary,” I said, “where is it?”

When I found the book and cover it was clear what had happened. The outer paper cover had been glued to the insides of the back hardback cover and had been ripped off, taking strips of the paper that had been glued to the inside of the hardback cover with it.

Now my daughter has been warned repeatedly about taking the covers off of books, and she was generally saddened by the destruction of a book she liked. I took the opportunity to explain again the consequences of disobedience. It often causes good things to fall, come apart, and be broken. After my lecture, which little doubt did more good for me than it did for the precocious toddler, she helped me glue the cover back on the book, and then we read it together.

Motor Mouth

Walking in the woods you come upon a sports car. The sports car has a powerful working motor, which upon testing can be used to propel the vehicle to great speeds. Now, who in their right mind would believe that the powerful motor, let alone the car, had come to be by chance? Everyone would conclude that the engine was designed to propel the car.

The Rossman (T4) Motor is a powerful molecular machine that packages DNA into the head segment of some viruses during their assembly. According to Michael Rossman, its discoverer, parts of the motor move in sequence like the pistons in a car's engine, progressively drawing genetic material into the virus' head. This motor is proportionally two times as powerful as an automotive engine. Like an automotive engine it is a complex machine that works for a particular purpose, packaging DNA.

In many ways the Rossman motor is like the automotive engine of a sleek Sports Car found in the forest. It thus seems reasonable to conclude that the Rossman motor, like the automotive engine found in the forest, was designed to fulfill its function.

The Wind in the Willows

Into the woods her grandfather planted
We sauntered, leisurely, along the stream
By willow roots sunk deep into soft earth
Thirsty for water—she came here often.
Unexpected the storm swept off the step,
Waved through grasses, danced branches, and pelted
Green leaves, the flung shelter to which we turned
From rain. I’m just a village girl, she said.
I suspect living elsewhere is dying.
I only heard your voice calling me home.

O Darwin Tree

O Darwin tree, O Darwin tree
How wonderful your branches be
That through chance and necessity
Transmuted have a Christmas tree.

Mutation-Claus, Mutation-Claus
Danke schoen for scented logs
That rise and fall in northern bogs
By your paws and iron laws.

Mistletoe, the oaks of Bashon,
Tow’ring cedars of Lebanon,
Edenic groves that please the eye
By blind survival lifted high.

Frankinscence from Boswellia
Sweet Myrr from the Commiphora
Treasures fit for a king of kings
On witless camels minus strings.

Old man fate got lucky one night
Fortune’s daughter unfolded life
Mother nature, the Darwin tree
Blossoming still through you and me.

A wondrous chance the body’s form
By chance the wood to curse it on
By chance the vine, its bitter fruit
By chance the teeth, the bread to chew.

O poison tree, so acidy
I found you under an evergreen
Scrawled in verse by a dumb monkey
He smirked and washed his hands of thee.

Flowers

I gave my daughter her first flower a few weeks ago. A woman in the check out line at Trader Joes said to me, “You must be in love, you are always buying flowers.” I wonder how many of us are here because girls like flowers?

I for one feel uneasy about this state of affairs. Giving flowers seems a little like offering a girl someone else’s poem. Their potent meaning transcends one’s creativity.

My daughter, though, did not seem overly impressed. She pulled apart the petals and stuck them in her mouth. There seems to be an infantile urge to rip things apart and chew on them. Is analysis a sophisticated expression of this primitive instinct?

Once while courting the woman who later consented to be my wife, I rowed her out on a river with a copy of Shakespeare’s sonnets. We analyzed poems line by line and chewed upon each image. “Can’t we just enjoy the poem?” she asked. My Baconian dissection was ruining something beautiful.

The Scottish dissenter George MacDonald diagnosed the mishandling of created things in his Unspoken Sermons. While God does allow His child to, “pull his toys to pieces. . . , he were a child not to be envied for whom his inglorious father would make toys to such an end.” For, “it is through their show, not through their analysis, that we enter into [the] deepest truths [of the things God cares for]. Thus, “to know a primrose is a higher thing than to know all the botany of it--just as to know Christ is an infinitely higher thing than to know all theology, all that is said about His person, or babbled about His work”; This is so because, “the truth of the flower is, not the facts about it. . . . but the shining, glowing, gladdening, patient thing throned on its stalk.” One knows a flower by its blossom.

What is uncovered by the flower that unites all three of Botticelli’s Annunciation paintings? It is a white lily brought by the Angel Gabriel to the Virgin Mary. In two of the paintings, light pours over the petals and illumines Mary’s face. While Mary's rose-red dress in the third painting is that worn by the Madonnas in Botticelli's Madonna of the Rosegarden(s), the bend of her body, which appears blown back by the force of Grabriel’s rapid arrival, mirrors the form of the lily held by Gabriel, to which it forms a parallel curve. In addition to the words voiced by Hosea to the Almighty’s beloved, a scripture lover who ponders this sign of God’s favor might recall a peculiar dramatic song:

Beloved: I am the rose of Sharon, the lily of the valleys.

Lover: Like a lily among the thorns, is my darling among the maidens.

This is of course an excerpt from the Song of Songs, dramatic poetry that initiates listeners into the mysteries of love. Among other things, it reminds hearers that there is a difference between a flower and thorns. Above all guard your heart, says the teacher of the Proverbs. For like the blossom that unlocks the door, the heart itself may be belong to a love story that is higher and deeper and wider than prying hands grasp.

One day, Lord willing, I may walk my daughter down the aisle to give her away. If she is anything like her mother, she will be carrying a bouquet through a church filled with flowers. Hopefully she will not mindlessly rip apart the petals and chew on them. I do hope that she will be grateful for their beauty and perfume, costly gifts indeed. The man up front had better!

The Shining

One of my favorite Christmas carols begins by invoking a heavenly choir: “Oh holy night, the stars are brightly shining.” Brilliant imagery raises the mind’s eye to the heavens, sonorant consonance jingles the vowels and resounds them like a bell tower’s chiming, and the whole step from the “ly” of “brightly” tunes the ear to a higher pitch. The effect seems akin to the pull of star-shine itself.

And what glitters above does seem to exert a pull. The other day I jangled a belt near my six-month-old daughter, who had rolled upon her side on the floor. The sparkle of the silver buckle in the light caught her eye as a lure attracts a fish, and the tiny girl took the bate. Her hand shot out and grabbed the buckle; and then, so long as she pulled back, it was a simple matter of reeling her in. She was spun around, onto to her bottom and then, as the belt exerted a bigger pull than her own, her hands and her head were lifted up. The moment she saw my face at the other end of the belt, she grinned from ear to ear.

In Psalm 14:4, starlight is pictured as a belt gone out to the ends of the world: “The heavens declare the glory of God. . . their voice goes out into all the earth, their message to the ends of the world.” Here shining is a kind of call. This call goes out on a rope, for the word translated “voice” is the Hebrew word qav, which means rope or line. Is the firmament here akin to a golden cord, a shining string that calls the eye and draws the mind to contemplate the all-seeing, all encompassing, weighty Presence? But are stars that say such things giving us a line? Are we to swallow the message hook, line, and sinker?

“The stars are not liars,” says the unicorn Roonwit in C.S. Lewis’ Last Battle. As impressive as they seem, Eustace thinks a star is just a flaming ball of gas," for that is what he has been taught in his progressive school; Wikipedia calls them “massive, luminous balls of plasma.” But the star Ramandu, like my seventh grade Latin class, has thought a little more deeply about the word is: “Even in your world, my son," Ramandu tells Eustace, “That is not what a star is but only what it is made of.” My student, a boy named Peter, could have told him the same thing. In our discussion of the Latin verb esse, Peter declaimed vehemently that if I cut off the legs of a table and pasted them to the side and top at strange angles, it would be a table no longer. A boy named Jensen went further. He said that what a table “is” has something to do with its “function,” or its “purpose,” the sake for which it is made. But what is a star’s function or purpose? Why is that ball of plasma doing its massive, luminous thing?

Is it possible that the ancient psalm is right, that the answer is shining night after night; that there is no language in which its meaning is not heard? To wit, this question is said to be meaningless to modern science, which seems to be deaf to the call of the stars and blind to their shining belt, not to mention certain wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation produced by thermonuclear fusion. Or as J.R.R. Tolkien says:

He sees no stars who does not see them first
of living silver made that sudden burst
to flame like flowers beneath an ancient song,
whose very echo after-music long
has since pursued.

Just days before a helicopter landed on his head, Navy Helicopter-gunner Mike Shafernocker looked up from a Vietnam shell hole and saw the sky. His mother found this poem amidst his belongings:

Look God, I have never spoken to you,
But now I want to say, "How do you do".
You see, God, they told me you didn't exist,
And like a fool, I believed all this.

Last night from a shell hole, I saw your sky.
I figured right then, they had told me a lie.
Had I taken time to see the things you made,
I'd have known they weren't calling a spade a spade.

I wonder, God, if you'd shake my hand.
Somehow I feel you will understand.
Funny, I had to come to this hellish place,
Before I had time to see your face.

Well, I guess there isn't much more to say,
But I sure am glad, God, that I met you today.
I guess the zero hour will soon be here,
But I'm not afraid since I know you're near.

The signal, well, God, I'll have to go,
I like you lots and I want you to know.
Look now, this will be a horrible fight,
Why, who knows, I may come to your house tonight.

Though I wasn't friendly to you before,
I wonder, God, if you'd wait by the door.
Look, I'm crying...Me, shedding tears,
I wish I'd have known you better, these many years.

Well, God, I'll have to go now, goodbye...
Strange, since I met you...I'm not afraid to die.

The message has gone out to the ends of the earth, and in a weary world, a soul had felt its worth.