Happy First Birthday, Baby J!

When I was living in Paris, my husband was a pastor at an anglophone church with a significant Filipino population.  My experience at the American Church in Paris is still the most important formative spiritual experience of my adult life (save, perhaps, childbearing), and the Filipino Fellowship looms large in my memories of that time.

One of the ways the Filipino Fellowship mentored me in the faith was by introducing me to practices of discipleship and worship that were foreign to me.  Some of them, I'm embarrassed to say, I initially dismissed? tamed? marginalized? by categorizing them, behind my benevolently accepting smile, as the quaint cultural idiosyncrasies of less-educated and slightly superstitious, but clearly devout, brothers and sisters in Christ.

The first time my cultural superiority complex was chastened was on the occasion of a significant First Birthday Party at the church.

The child we were celebrating had been born a little too early, and her mother had had life-threatening complications.  The whole church had prayed for mom and baby, not sure for several weeks whether either would live.  Thanks be to God, they both did, and the church enjoyed a special connection with this sweet child.  When her baptism and first birthday came, everyone was especially touched.

First Birthday Parties were a huge deal, for the Filipino Fellowship.  Undocumented immigrants, people who didn't know where their next meal was coming from, people who were nurses and teachers and bankers in the Philippines but had left to become domestic servants in Paris, people who sent every spare centime they had to their families in the Philippines, people who worked impossible hours to get by--all somehow found the time and money to throw elaborate parties on the occasion of their child's first birthday.

My beatifically superior smile was in place for the first few of these parties I attended.

"Gosh," I often thought.  "I don't think Dave Ramsey would approve of these parties.  I mean, maybe people who can barely pay their rent should, like, just bake a cake and call it a day."

Coupled with these parties was an equally easy-to-dismiss practice of insisting that the church schedule the child's baptism as close to the first birthday as possible.

This was occasionally an inconvenience--imagine a family that insisted that their child be baptized during a church service that was already filled to bursting with holiday rituals, visiting choirs, or special music whose liturgical importance seemed to take precedence over the mere scheduling of a little family photo op.

Besides, I thought--why don't they have it a few weeks after the birth, like normal Christians do?  (Because, you know, the people I went to church with for the first twenty-five years of my life were normal.  Everybody else was, you know, culturally conditioned.)

The Sunday little M was baptized and feted, I finally got it.  And I was ashamed.

Instead of my usual cluck-cluck-clucking behind the smile, I was thinking, "Wow.  She made it.  A year.  That's something to celebrate.  This once, I understand the party.  We weren't sure this one would make it."

And that, of course, was when I understood.

In a country where access to reliable medicine was still imperfectly and unevenly enjoyed, cultural practices reflecting high infant mortality had not yet been abandoned.  For the Filipino Fellowship, every First Birthday Party was a special one.  Every child was one they weren't sure would make it.  Every first birthday occasioned both relief and profound joy.  "Thank you, Lord, that we get to keep this one."

That was the day I stopped seeing those elaborate festivities as the syncretistic holdovers of an imperfectly converted aboriginal population (not that I even knew I was doing that) and started seeing them as moments of Christian discipleship.  These First Birthday Parties discipled the Filipinos in gratitude and thanksgiving.

Because the Filipinos still knew what Western medicine and governmental stability had allowed me to forget (or repress, anyway): that life is so very precarious, and its preciousness stems not from our control over it, our decision to invest it with meaning, our thinly-veiled sense of ownership over those whom we call "ours," but from our lack of control.  God's gracious gift of medical knowledge and power has not overturned the divine prerogative to give and to sustain life.

Each day my children are alive is testament not to my prudence and care, but to the everlasting love of the God who is the author of all life.  Their health and happiness is not my right reward for decent parenting or the inevitable outcome of a life of privilege, but the graciousness of the God who makes rain to fall on the just and the unjust alike.

And although I don't like to think about it, the converse is true as well: their deaths, too, must some day--Lord willing, a day far in the future--be testament to the love and graciousness of the God who calls them to himself.  For all that they were born of my body, they are not mine to keep.  They were entrusted to me to love, and given to me to enjoy, but they are not mine to control.

I've gotten to keep "my" babies for a combined total of 22 birthdays, and I don't think the gratitude I've expressed to God for that gift comes close to what a Filipino family expresses every time they have a First Birthday Party.

Today, a good friend celebrates the first birthday of her precious son, J.  (She has been blogging about their experience here.  I cannot recommend her blog highly enough.)

Like little M, he was born too soon, and like little M, he was upheld in prayer for those hard months (a bit longer than M's few weeks!) when his parents weren't sure how long they would get to keep this one.

Like M, his first birthday seems set apart from other first birthdays.  I don't recall crying over any of my sons' first birthdays, but I've been crying about J's for a week now.

I'm celebrating, of course, that he has made it to today.  I'm grateful that his family will get to keep him, that they will spend the day eating cake and fielding a hundred phone calls and putting cranky, over-sugared kids to bed, that they have as much reason as any of us parents to imagine his first day of kindergarten or which sport he'll play or what kind of girl he'll marry and what color their children's hair will be or how he'll thank them in the acknowledgements page of his dissertation or which Nobel Prize he'll win.

But I'm also celebrating--well, celebrating isn't quite the word.  I'm also remembering, with a solemn kind of gratitude, the impetus to prayer that his first few months of life were.  I grateful for--and Baby J and his mama will surely forgive the self-centeredness of my thoughts here--the stark, soul-searing light that his life has shone in my own, the divine word delivered through him that I am not in charge, not even of "my" children's lives.