Sitting down at the keys is a rarity these days. The moment I began typing the first sentence of this piece, the door to my right creaked open and one of my sons toddled in, rubbing his sleepy eyes and climbing on to my lap. Through the door to my left, I can hear my beloved wife, bantering with our seven month old baby girl, Mary Beth, who coos and gurgles back to her. Although I can’t see them, I can imagine her little fingers curling open and closed as she labours through each sound as it climbs out of her little mouth, curled with a toothless smile. Sam, sitting on my lap, hears her, and his face lights up with a grin, an instinctive, effortless love welling up in his heart as he climbs off my lap to go and play with his little sister, who will delight in his very presence.
The cracks beneath the curtains brighten with an orange luminescence. There are six children still sleeping, and we’ll let them sleep for another hour at most. But one by one, they’ll spill out of the same doorway that Sam came through, bleary eyed and eager for breakfast, for sunlight, for the wonderful and terrible joys and challenges that the day will bring them. They’ll climb into uniforms, pack bags, fill their stomachs and have time enough to read, play, tinker, build and draw before the demands of the day draw them into the world.
The door creaks open again. Bede stumbles over and clutches my arm with a earnest embrace, his head heavy, the typing awkward. He soon walks away, finding his way to the couch and a picture book that’s been left there since last night. The time is six thirty, and I know I need to rise, to move, to change out of my workout gear and prepare for my own place in the world. There isn’t, at this point, a fitting means by which to write, daily. At least I don’t think there is. I shift around my routines, my means, but the wonderful, unforgiving burdens of fatherhood and family bleed into to more and more of the day, and I know I’m blessed to have them.
So there are less words, at the moment, but there will be a time, a means. And at the end of the day, it is ultimately inconsequential. As long as I serve as husband, father, contemplative, the rest can wait. I tend to the acreage, watering our elms, battling grass, soaking our new lawn. We work to nurture and ground our children in prayer, in community, in sound living. I labour to read when I can steal the time. I listen to books as I drive to work. I’ve committed to sound and song with a few good men.
I’m called away to consider the joyous abandonment in how Sam and Mary Beth are playing together on our bed. The time is 6:41am and I have to dress, to pray, to tend to the demands of the day. The wonderful, unforgiving, beautiful burdens, with beating hearts and cacophonous voices. They have their mother’s eyes. Some have music in their bones. Some can capture an image, or an idea in a drawing better than I can. Some run at angles with the world, and move in their own spectacular circles, just to move forward in hope, faith and trust. Some can run like the devil is on their tail. And he is, isn’t he.
So I’m going to get up. I’m going to move, and keep moving. In faith. In hope. In love. There are words now and then. But as long as there’s some silence. As long as there’s reverence. As long as there’s grace. I’ll keep moving.