Perfect Love
This article appeared in our third issue: Curiosity. To order a copy of this issue (for $2) please send an email to thoughtmeadow@gmail.com.
Perfect Love by Rose of Sharon O’Donnell
She was washed into this world in a rush of light and garbled sound and has been overwhelmed by it ever since. This ball of earth, shaped by God’s fingers and tumultuous with his breath, startled her. Shadows danced and quaked. Music strained her soul. Hunger sank its teeth into her. It was too much. She found her own voice and wailed for comfort. She hid in my neck, nursed in my arms, and slept. But the world around her didn’t change. It kept flying through space and assailing her senses until, slowly, she grew to expect the world to poke and prod her.
She is now three and a half. She faces the wind and spreads her arms wide to see if it will knock her down. Shadows are full of things to be discovered. Music still strains her soul, but now it only asks her to dance. And though the world is dangerous and loud and sometimes smells like cows, she has found that it has much to offer her. So she swings between injury and discovery in almost every given moment. Sometimes, it tires her. And when she is too tired or scared to be curious she relies on the crude filing system ordering her mind.
Therefore the lives of ants rioting in the sidewalk cracks hang in the balance as she tries to figure out if these are good bugs or bad bugs. Good bugs don’t bite. Bad bugs sting or bite or leave itchy red spots. The locks on the file snap shut as one ant pinches her toe. She mashes her heel into the sidewalk. She doesn’t know about the ants and their unseen world of twining tunnels, their winged queen, the sacrifice of their own lives just so other ants can walk across a puddle. They are smaller than her and they bite. This is enough to merit violence. Her filing system replaces her wonder.
Curiosity is the answer to her indiscriminate violence. To stop and wonder at the gray spot in a thundercloud or the aphids on the columbines is a queenly thing for her to do. It is good to assume that there is a reason why and to wonder what it is. When confronted with ants, she must learn to ask, to search out the matter. Sometimes the answer might cause her to go cautiously around the teeming sidewalk crack. But sometimes—say, should she find them in my pantry—massacre would ensue with my blessing. Curiosity is the key to wisdom.
She grows. She dances and sings. She brings wriggling worms to her papa to ask what they are. She is jostled by wind and friends. The world sends her mail to be opened and packages that could hold anything. Where she used to startle in fear at a sound, now she hears a quail and imitates it. Where she used to cry with hunger, she now asks for more jam for her bread, knowing it will be given.
As she stretches the boundaries of her mind, she’ll find that her fears do not always mean that evil is near, nor do her joys always signify righteousness. I want her to know that questions should always be asked, but that the right answers are rarely obvious.
But in the end, the same breath that blows thunderheads is the breath that fills her lungs. The fingers that assembled the ants shaped her. The God who watches over her made her like Himself. He is the Knower and she is part of the known, and like the Knower she will always want to know. And this is good.
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