and little money, the two sisters somehow made their way to Melbourne. A few nights later, at a party in the suburbs, my mother drank wine, talking loudly and laughingly about her marvelous birthday. Then, wandering alone through the house, she noticed some keys on a table and idly picked them up. She twirled the keys around her finger. She went out the front door and twirled them beneath the encouraging winks of the stars. She found the car that fit the key, a lovely red sedan, and climbed into the driver’s seat.
It was such a cool clear evening, such a perfect night for driving, my mother thought, as she turned the next corner, windows down and engine blazing. By the time she made it back to the party twenty minutes later, she had reduced her second automobile to a steaming wreck on the corner of a quiet backstreet three blocks away. She brought the keys back, discreetly placed them on the table.
I often think of that good, sweet-natured Canberra policeman who gave my mother her license for a birthday present. On the night of her birthday, I imagine the policeman lounging happily in his favorite chair at home, thinking of the girl with the dimpled smile, congratulating himself on his chivalry, never for a second imagining that he himself was, that night, the most dangerous person in the Commonwealth of Australia. For it was he who had made my mother a Driver, he who had single-handedly turned every other citizen and every vehicle for hundreds of miles into a potential victim of my mother’s birthday joy.
In the church today, are we not very much like the innocent-hearted policeman? We would like to make it as easy as possible for people to become Christians. Catechesis is too demanding; education is a bore; disciplined instruction in the Christian faith will only put them off. And so with a knowing wink we waive the requirements and sign the baptism certificate. We are charming, gallant, spiritually magnanimous. In our eagerness to make sure everybody is included, to reassure inquirers that the Christian faith is an easygoing undemanding thing, we are looking only at the dimples and the batted lashes. We forget the longer view, the screech of tires and the shriek of twisted steel and the long split-second when a windscreen becomes a million tiny diamonds in the sky. We even have the nerve to blame new converts if, some time down the road, they make a wreck of their faith.
After considering the matter carefully and objectively, I find I cannot blame my mother for the magnificent trail of automobiles left smoking in her wake: I blame the generous heart of a magnanimous policeman.
Childhood
The tiny, not the immense,
Will teach our groping eyes.
—Francis Webb, “Five Days Old”
1
Children ask questions. They appear innocent and naïve, but it is an elaborate ruse. They are involved in the deepest espionage, gathering intelligence and creating profiles on the dangerous foreign country where adults dwell.
2
When I was a little boy my mother took me into town on the bus, and as we came out of a store we happened to meet the Prime Minister. My mother always remembered the day, for we had seen the Prime Minister of Australia; I always remembered the day too, for it was the first time I ever got to ride the bus. Recently at a museum of fashion design, my wife and I were admiring a remarkable dress on a mannequin. Our little boy stood there, awestruck, and said: “But how does she think without a head?” The adult has been schooled in desire, and so organizes all perceptions according to an elaborate hierarchy of values. To the extent that the child has not yet learned the discipline of this hierarchy, he is close to the kingdom of heaven. Only the eyes of a child can see that the mannequin is more marvellous than the dress, that it is more wonderful to ride the bus than to meet the Prime Minister.
3
The child has a very limited capacity for Aristotelian abstraction. Seemingly identical slices of cake are not so many species of the genus “slice of cake.” To the child, each one is absolutely unique: thus the child wants this slice, and will grieve, shaken by sorrow and confusion, if offered an identical substitute. That is the flip side of the child’s inherent capacity for wonder: there are no types, no universals, only the particular.
4
The child loves the parent’s face. Imagine standing roughly at the level of other people’s kneecaps, and you will understand children’s almost religious and mystical adoration of the face, their insatiable hunger for direct eye contact with the adult face. The parent who never bends down low to speak with the child is reduced to the role of a mysterious deus absconditus, a pair of trousers that occasionally emits abrupt commands from distant heights.
5
The child sleeps. Adults imitate sleep with various degrees of convincingness, but the child really sleeps: in the car, on the floor, in the parent’s arms, sitting or lying, while playing and while eating. I have observed a two-year-old standing and resting his head on the seat of a chair, fast asleep on his feet like a horse. I have seen children fall asleep halfway through a mouthful of food, or halfway through a sentence. Children sleep because the world is their bed: a big all-encompassing ontological pillow. That is why so many children have trouble getting to sleep at night. When your existence is permanently enveloped in a commodious cushion, the thought of having to confine yourself to one narrow bed seems vulgar and artificial, like going to the beach and being expected to play in the enclosed sandpit.
6
The child in the womb kicks out towards the heart of the mother. All childhood, compressed like a spring, is contained within this kick. The child loves the mother too much, and pushes away to create room for agency. The parent feels this sudden stab of difference, and sustains it. The parent leans in close so that the child can kick out all the more effectively. The agency of the child and the bruised joy of the parent: they are two sides of the same thing.
7
God is the one “from whom all earthly fathers derive their name” (Ephesians 3:14). The joy and sorrow between parents and children is the echo in time of the Son’s sharp kick against the womb of the Father, the sorrow and joy of incarnation.
8
Jesus is the true child. The one who is eternally Child calls God “Parent,” and then echoes this call by becoming a human child, by fabricating within our world a child as an exact copy of its eternal form. Human history is an echo of this eternal call and response between Parent and Child.
9
We are children. Not everyone is a parent, but everyone is someone’s child. That is the secret of life and the foundation of religion.
Circus
Today my three children underwent one of life’s most important rites of passage. An experience that marks a human life forever. A moment that divides each child’s life into Before and After. A sacred, solemn, irreversible ritual. A trial of courage and virtue and strength of heart. A transition from the age of innocence to the age of wisdom and understanding and the fear of the Lord.
I am referring, of course, to the circus. For today—I record this so it will never be forgotten—my children went to the circus.
It all started innocently enough. It was a hot day, and they had gone out for ice cream with their grandmother. Driving down the highway, they saw rising in the distance a great tent, high as mountains, bright as sunrise, shimmering beneath billowing flags and golden spires, solitary and immaculate amid a wild debris of cages, cars, and caravans, a giant pinned to the earth by quivering ropes, smiling madly with its cavernous black maw while
