Gentle Burden, Easy Yoke

Well hello! I didn't want to not post for this long . . . but I've been thinking about this for a long time so hopefully it will do for a month of silence.

I don't sleep well on vacation, ever, and this last trip, as I lay awake at some dark hour, my weary mind drifted gradually to Him:

You know how your life can have motifs? Mine have had several, from banal to sublime, from Bob Dylan to, well, the Infant of Prague.
The first time I saw Him was a statue my aunt showed me, a family heirloom, and it struck my hopelessly Vat II-formed senses as strange, to say the least. A Christ child doll with fancy dresses? How very odd! It was one of those images or experiences, though, that never really goes away . . . and He has popped up again, continually: in random churches that escaped "renovation," in Europe, through various friends, through Ste Therese de l'Enfant Jesus, through a devotion that our pastor is promoting. And as I lay awake that night with my baby girl (snugglesnugglenursenurse), I thought about it, about Him, the Christ Child.
About the love of a baby: that unconditional love. How a baby loves, and especially loves his or her mama, JUST BECAUSE YOU ARE YOU. I cannot emphasise this enough. It's something I've always struggled with, and something that has often been attacked: my worth just as me. Not because I did something great, or right, or because I was able to win a game of shuffleboard, or because I excelled as a rider or musician or writer or was "useful" and could clean the house or make dinner or watch the kids or get straight As or even be such a great friend . . . but just because I am me.
Children love you for who you are. They want your presence, your words, your imagination, your voice telling stories, your arms around them. They don't care, especially as infants, if someone else's mom is prettier or dresses better or does awesomer crafts or sews them clothes or buys them every toy. They just want you. They don't care if you're happy or sad or angry or tired: they love you and want you and need you just because you are you. And not just mothers: when Aibhie hears her brother's voice, she turns toward it and smiles . . . just because it's him.
Such a perfect and fitting image for the love of Christ! We who must live in this hyper-sexualized, anti-life, anti-child culture have completely lost, as a whole, the sense of joy in a child's love, and it is one of the most precious gifts we human beings have been given. True! And Jesus was a child, a real human child . . . and He loves me, loves you, gentle reader, with that pure, unquestioning, undemanding child's love. He loves you because you are you. And the demand that a child makes on us is to come out of ourselves, to be bigger than the insatiable selfishness that the world preaches, and love someone else more. Put someone else first. Someone who needs your love, who depends on you. You.
No, Christ doesn't "depend" on us quite like a child--except for how He says, whoever does it to the least of these, does it to Me--but He does ask us, in a straight-forward, utterly trusting way, to do what He asks: Not asks with the squawk of a thwarted infant, though, because here His divinity shines through. He asks with the love and knowledge born of being your Creator and Redeemer. And He asks purely through love.