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Zzzmdf's avatar

Unlike Klavan the Elder, all of our children were born via caesarean. One was an emergency after 48 hours of ineffectual labor, the staff leaving skid marks on the floor as my wife was wheeled to the OR. Minutes later my second daughter was safely in the incubator, and my wife’s uterus, still the size of a basketball, was being closed by the OB. Didn’t need any coffee that morning. Not much beauty to be had, but knowing that they were both safe was enough.

The others were somewhat less dramatic, but all filled me with an unhitherto experienced emotion; joy. The OR can be an ugly place, and after 48 hours of labor, my daughter (born on my birthday, so we are twins, 41 years and 7 minutes apart) looked like a bug-eyed monster, but yowling lustily. Within hours, the swelling from the labor disappeared, and she responded immediately to my voice, calming her cry. The birth of my first born, also a daughter, showed me what joy actually meant. Nothing else in my life up to that point produced the same emotion; not my proposal, wedding, graduation from school and achieving a lifelong ambition, nothing. It was a totally new and unique sensation, which my wife teased me about while she was still in the OR after delivery. I could not be swayed or vexed, and it was done sweetly.

In joy is an appreciation of beauty as well. Only with our own creation could I come to know this joy, a pale reflection of the joy that awaits us in the presence of our Father. Appreciation of beauty causes joy, but even ugliness (the operating room, with my intubated wife splayed open with her uterus externalized, a squalling butt-ugly infant) brings joy in the appreciation of life and new life. In time, the mere visuals of the moment fade into irrelevance. Joy remains, and with it the appreciation of the beauty. Would it have mattered if my daughter had remained “ugly”? No daughter is ugly in a loving father’s eye. And, no, she is actually quite lovely and loved as are all my children. They may never know how much until and unless they create some of their own.

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Scott Delaney's avatar

Indeed: “Inter faeces et urinam nascimur. And yet, out of that mess, that waste, that ugliness, emerges something more beautiful than anything else we know: l’chaim! Life!”

I’m a cop now, but I used to be a farmer: raising turkeys, hens, fish, goats, shrooms, fruit, veggies, and … people. I came to affirm Masanobu Fukuoka’s observation that “The ultimate goal of farming is not the growing of crops, but the cultivation and perfection of human beings.”

After all, that is the whole of creation’s aim, starting in The Garden, in the soil, the True Gardener breathes on dust to make for Himself an object of beauty.

It’s always the dead things that yield the most growth.

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