By Dave Andrusko
National Right to Life
Over the weekend, a friend forwarded this to me. I’m guessing she ran across it, because it ran last year. The entire post from “Jewish Mom: Inspiration from One Jewish Mother to Another,” is as brief as it is powerful.
The author of the blog writes of a couple, now in their ninties, who fled Germany when Hitler came to power. They were just teenagers at the time.
Last June they celebrated the birth of their 100th great-grandchild!
Hitler “attempted to wipe us out and here we have brought our 100th great-grandchild into the covenant of Avraham Avinu!” [Abraham], said the great-grandfather.
The birth, he concluded with great emotion, “is our response to Hitler.”
Of course, I thought of the poet Carl Sandberg who once famously wrote, “A baby is God’s opinion that the world should go on. … Never will a time come when the most marvelous recent invention is as marvelous as a newborn baby.”
Sandberg also wrote in a different context, “We may pull apart the petals of a rose or make chemical analysis of its perfume, but the mystic beauty of its form and odor is still a secret, locked in to where we have no keys.”
There are those who would reduce our bond with our children to a kind of utilitarian calculus, especially if the baby is less than “perfect.” But is so much deeper, so much more enduring, so much more foundational.
Such is the mystery of our love for our children, our ongoing affirmation that the world goes on.
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