The power of infants is their vulnerability

Tropical nights can be very dark. Stars that, in Canada, blur into the light blob above our cities, shine like the fabled Star of the Magi in the black dome that arcs over the simple dwellings huddled below.

No, this is not the old story about the Nativity of Jesus, in what is now Israel. It’s about the nativity of my granddaughter Katherine, then known only as Rediet. And it happened in Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, on the other side of the Red Sea from the lands where Judaism, Christianity, and Islam were born.

In 2005, my wife and I went to Ethiopia to support our daughter as she adopted an orphan girl. Rediet (pronounced “ready-yet”) had been abandoned at the gate of a mission school for the blind. She must have been born only days before; she still had her umbilical cord attached. Her mother — unknown — must have believed that although she couldn’t take care of her newborn infant, the Christian folks at the school would. And they did. Ten months later, their successors handed her over to us.

With an ear infection, unfortunately. The 10-month-old child was in constant pain. Couldn’t sleep. Couldn’t tell us what was wrong. Lay quiet only while held in someone’s arms.

An uninterrupted night’s sleep was obviously not in the books. For her, or for us. So we divided the night into shifts.

I don’t recall which shift I had. I do remember that it was pitch black outside. A nightlight in one corner of the room cast a pale yellow glow onto the ceiling. The city slept.

The darkness outside was so thick, it felt solid. The stars were pin-holes in the sky. No birds sang.

I cradled little Rediet in my arms. I tried to synchronize my breathing with hers. I crooned nursery rhymes dimly recalled from my own childhood: the Farmer in the Dell, Three Blind Mice, Frere Jacques... The language was nonsense to her; she had never heard anything but Amharic. But the rumble of my voice resonating in my chest seemed to quiet her. She looked up at me. I looked into those coalblack Ethiopian irises, and I knew, deep in my heart, that I could never do anything that would hurt this child. Never.

I missed that experience with my own children, somehow. Not that I would ever have wanted to hurt them. But there were dollars to earn, diapers to wash, bums to wipe, appointments to keep… “miles to go before I sleep,” as Robert Frost once put it. We didn’t neglect our children, but the opportunities to feel the wonder of their existence often got swept away by the rush of being new parents, of carving new lives for ourselves as well as our offspring.

I had to wait until I was a grandfather to recognize the power of vulnerability. Of utter dependence.

That’s the power of infants. The only power that infants have. Otherwise, they can’t feed themselves. Can’t move themselves. Can’t protect themselves. They are totally dependent on their parents. Or their grandparents, like us.

In a society that values rugged independence above almost anything else — personal, corporate, financial, academic — infants are an anomaly. They haven’t earned respect. They haven’t earned anything, in fact. They are, by any practical reckoning, a liability.

And yet their helplessness, their vulnerability, leads us to love them.

Loving an infant is an act of ultimate altruism. They can do nothing for us in return. In later life, they may not even remember an adult who showed them kindness, gentleness. We offer them unrequited love. We give it to them freely, even though they cannot yet make a choice to accept or reject it.

That, I believe, is the origin of the Nativity stories found in the gospels of Matthew and Luke. The two stories agree only that Jesus was born in Bethlehem, to a young woman named Mary, while she was still unmarried.

And that infant was utterly lovable. By his parents, who had nothing to give him but love. Also by uncouth, unlettered shepherds. Even by the most respected intellectuals of the time, the star-gazing emissaries of other nations.

Infinitely loveable at his birth. Infinitely loveable in his life. Infinitely loveable even in his death.

The nativity stories are not, and don’t have to be, literal history. They point us to a greater truth. You don’t have to be strong. You don’t have to be wealthy. You don’t have to be a commander-in-chief to be loved. You just have to be.

Jim Taylor is an Okanagan Centre author and freelance journalist. He can be reached at: rewrite@shaw.ca