Grieving Because Eve Did

Simcha has written a beautiful meditation on motherhood, separation, growing pains and faith:

Right now my little baby is snorkeling herself into a delightful stage, finally aware of the world, so full of exquisitely innocent jokes and glee, and it’s utterly enjoyable for all of us.

It’s also one of a thousand little cuts. She’s learning to be apart from me.

The final separation doesn’t come when a child moves out of the house, I know. It’s not only babies who are always leaving. We’re all always leaving the house of our Father. Every minute of our lives, we travel further away from our right home.

Everyone who lives suffers this gradual, inexorable shearing, this splintering, like a new rope stretched tight in foul weather, painfully unravelling strand by strand.

To love God our Father is to grow, surely. And, just as with my babies, to grow means a severing, from the beloved bad and sometimes from the beloved good in our lives. Like Flannery O’Connor’s souls processing to heaven: “even their virtues were being burned away.”

Here on earth, we can choose not to love, and suffer terribly . . . or we can choose to love and be loved, and to suffer terribly all the same. We are like seedlings somehow growing upside down, trying to hang on with spindly roots to the firm ground which is above us.

As we grow, and the stronger we become, the fiercer becomes the tension, the more aching the resistance, and the sharper the longing to be closer to our source, even as we grow further from it.

We were not made to be this way. How we experience love and loss is an inversion, a distortion. We’re used to it, but it only has to be this way because the world is fallen, and we are still falling: falling away from God, reaching our arms up to be rescued, and sometimes finding ourselves caught—but this falling-growing pulls, it tugs. We do not feel secure. The downward pull, the falling away, never stops, it never stops hurting.

Do you think I’m silly, to be so sad? I’m not grieving because my baby learned a new trick. I’m grieving because Eve did.

Read the whole blog post here.