Barbra Streisand and Baby

I saw a special on Barbra Streisand the other night. She had an exhibit opening at the California Hall of Fame or something like that. As she looked around at the collected memories she commented that it was like looking at another person’s life, unfamiliar. When asked what her proudest moment was she said, “Giving birth to my son.”

What is my proudest moment? Let me think. I have some very proud secret moments. I have some very public failures too. In fact, I’m more aware of my failures than my proudest moments. Surely the list for successes is longer, but the failures weigh more. Weigh me down. It’s the power of suggestion. It’s the power of the mind. When I get stressed I get really bad headaches. That’s a trip. A mystery.

I am forever amazed at our capacities to deal with change in our lives. I used to like cartoons. I didn’t have a father for a long time, but now I do. My paw paw and I would eat at a buffet at least twice a week, but now I never do, and he’s dead. For six years I was in a different place just about every day, and now I sleep in my own bed each night. I used to have a ton of people wanting something from me all the time, now not so much. And on I could go, some serious and not so serious things.

I miss a lot of things that used to be in my life but aren’t anymore. Certain people. Certain places. Certain feelings. But life is survival of the fittest. And if we don’t accept the changes that come our way then we start to become most unpleasant. We drain the joy out of ourselves and eventually out of those around us. The artist allows this for his perverted sense of what he thinks a necessary conduit for good art. The narcissist allows this because he wants to, he wants to, he wants to. The average person just because of laziness if nothing else.

Our fear of change, our fear of things ending are a sign of our desire for eternity. It burns in my chest and keeps me shifting at night. If something is good, I want it to last forever. If it’s bad, then of course I want it to end as soon as possible. (That would be our sense of justice.) But it seems like the good things are always ending before the bad ones. And that’s the confusing part. That’s the hard part.

People suffer. People die. People grow apart. People hurt each other. The cost of living goes up. The safe neighborhood gets shady. This world and all therein are in a process of decay…or is it and are they?

I used to think people could change the world for the better in a massive way. I’ve never been a humanist but I thought man had enough good in him to do right by everyone and everything around him. From his mother, to strangers, to the redwoods, and dolphins in the sea. But I’ve lived and studied enough now to know better. I’ve done poorly enough to my neighbor and beyond enough times to know we are all going to hell in a handbasket if left up to our own efforts…but are we?

This is where eternity steps in. This is where all these suffering and endings, failures and endings, beginnings and endings, are put into their proper perspective. Survival of the fittest is not the most physical but the most patient, the most aware. A romantic image: a farmer, swollen hands, wrinkled face, plants, waits, harvests, turns up the soil, repeat, repeat. He’s been through drought, freeze, flood, and knows enough to know that eventually, at some point, at some time, a crop will be this year or next, or next, or next.

In the form of a baby, hope was born. Salvation for this cycle of suffering, boredom, and endings. Eternity came to us wet and naked and bloody and crying. He pierced our sense of time, our births and deaths. Our beginnings and our endings. Our pasts and our futures, in that ever present moment of his promises: that the maker of the heavens and earth loves us: that he desires to be known by us: that in our failures against others we are failing against him, but he forgives us: that through this little baby’s death the failures of all will not be held against them: that death is no master of the one who makes life: that we are invited to join in his plan of redemption for humanity and the things created: that we will fail him, but he will redeem our failures somehow all the same.

Through this baby, the one called Jesus of Nazareth, Son of Joseph and Mary, who would be born, killed, and raised from death, life makes sense to me. I make more sense to me. You make more sense to me. These proud moments and failures, these beginning and endings, these yearnings for eternity, all are put into their proper place. That is not to say that some things are not still mysteries. In fact, more things than not are probably more perplexing, confusing, and mysterious. In all that perplexity I soon find myself anxious. But it’s then that I hear the crying of a newborn baby, and my heart rests.

Merry Christmas.

Bradley Hathaway
December 18, 2010
3:13 AM