Buechner on the challenge and blessing of children

Jacob wrestles the angel by the ford of Jabbok in this engraving by Gustave Doré

A good friend of mine and his wife had their third child yesterday. When he texted me to let me know, after the initial round of pleasant surprise (“It’s time already?!”) and congratulations we reflected on how his life is about to change—has, in fact, already changed. Having three children is a delight and a challenge. A new member has joined the fellowship and new adventures are about to unfold that would have been unimaginable even a few weeks ago. And of course some of these adventures are the children themselves.

It’s hard and it’s an unceasing joy. I never understood, prior to becoming a father, how both could be true. A challenge, a struggle, and a blessing?

Reflecting on this later I remembered a passage from The Son of Laughter that moved me terribly. As I wrote a few weeks ago, Frederick Buechner’s novel is a poetic, imaginative retelling of the story of Jacob and his lifelong struggle with God, whom the characters reverently refer to as “the Fear.” It is part of Jacob’s lot to live in the promises made by the Fear to his grandfather Abraham, something it proves exceedingly difficult to do in the hurly-burly of life in the tribal world of the Patriarchs.

In this passage, Jacob, so who has run away from his father Isaac (translated literally as “Laughter” throughout, hence the title of the book) and his brother Esau; taken up with his shifty uncle Laban; worked long years to earn marriages first to Leah and then to Rachel, his beloved; and fathered ten children (so far), sits among his tents and flocks and wives and teeming brood, overwhelmed:

I was like a man caught out in a storm with the wind squalling, the sand flailing me across the eyes, the chilled rain pelting me. The children were the storm, I thought, until one day, right in the thick of it, I saw the truth of what the children were.

One boy was pounding another boy’s head against the hard-packed floor. Another was drowsing at his mother’s teat. Three of them were trying to shove a fourth into a basket. Dinah was fitting her foot into her mouth. The air was foul with the smell of them.

They were the Fear’s promise. That is what I suddenly saw the children were. I had forgotten it. They were the dust that would cover the earth. The great people would spring from their scrawny loins. Kicking and howling and crowing and pissing and slobbering food all over their faces, they were the world’s best luck.

I started to weep. Just a trickle at first, the tears hot on my cheeks, salty at the corners of my mouth. Then it was as if I couldn’t catch my breath for weeping. Laban came over and pounded me between the shoulders. He thought I was choking to death. Rachel took my head in her arms. Leah held my feet. It was as close as the two sisters had come to each other for years.

A deep hush fell over the children. They stopped whatever they were doing. Their eyes grew round in their heads.

“You are so—so noisy,” I choked out at them.

They were the Fear’s promise to Abraham, and I had forgotten it.

It was with Abraham’s ancient eyes that they were watching me. “You are—so hopeless,” I said. “So important.”

Their silence, as they listened to my sobs, was Abraham’s silence as he waited all those years for the Fear to keep his promise.

While I and my friend are obviously not the recipients of the specific promise the Fear made to Abraham, this is the truest and most succinct depiction of the challenge and the blessing—and how wonderfully overwhelming both are—of children that I’ve come across. Thank the Fear for these noisy, hopeless, important ones.

God is good, and he remembers even when we forget. Rachel—who has had to see child after child born to her older sister and rival, Leah—reflects on this later in the same chapter:

Rachel’s womb was opened at last, and when she gave birth to my son Joseph, I told her it was Reuben and his mandrakes that she had to thank. Still exhausted from her labor, she reached out and placed her hand across my lips. “No,” she said. “No, no, my dear.”

They had laid the child at her breast though it was still too weak to drink from her. Her cheek was grazing his round, bald head. His head looked too big for him, as though already it was full of dreams.

“I thought he had forgotten me, but he remembered me,” she said. “At last he remembered Rachel.”

Like my mother, she rarely if ever named his name, but I knew the one she was thanking without naming him.

The Son of Laughter makes these promises and hopes feel real, lived in, and I hope you’ll read it sometime. It’s one of the best things I’ve read so far this year, and the passage above is only one of several that moved me to tears.

Adding the third to your family—so that you and your wife are outnumbered—is exciting for all kinds of reasons, and I’m excited for my friends and praying for them. After the birth of our own third child I also reflected on the miracle of birth and life, that time with reference to Beowulf and GK Chesterton. You can read that here.