What Child Is This?

   We heard this hymn, we sang it, we heeded it or we ignored it, as we had over so many Christmas seasons.  At the end of last year, I found myself unable to sing or focus on any of the lyrics beyond the interrogative in the title.  The question posed in those four words--what child is this?--forced this new grandparent to ponder an event he thought he would never live to witness.  My granddaughter was born at the beginning of Thanksgiving week.  And give thanks we did.  The joy in our family was omnipresent and multi vocal.   We splashed photos and text all over facebook and reveled in the hurrahs. 

   She arrived hale and hearty.  Beyond her lovely name, Kinley Clare Sederquist--wherein the initials of her first and middle names give voice to my surname which her mother has retained--there is still an answer that needs be found in response to "What child is this?"

   She's a well born child.  Her parents are persons of character and determination.  They have already provided a stable sanctuary of care and commitment.  They will attend to her needs, help her to develop (in the words of Yeats) "a glad kindness," and show her that the soul "learns at last that it is self-delighting,/ self-appeasing, self-affrighting, / And that its own sweet will is Heaven's will; /."  Furthermore, her mother, Catharine Erin, and her father, James Thomas, will no doubt convey to their daughter that "she can, though every face should scowl/ And every windy quarter howl/ or every bellows burst, be happy still."  

 Those hopes and aspirations are forecasts for the future.  But the operative question is in the present tense.  And, strangely, it asks "what" is she not "who" is she.  And it refers to her with a demonstrative pronoun, "this."  So essentially the question is about the nature of the existence of the life that has emerged aborning.  From whence did she come to be, how did it happen and why did it happen?  These are not biological queries, or comments on generativity within marriage, though they can certainly be answered in that way.  "What Child Is This?" is a philosophical--ultimately theological--reflection.  What does it mean that she came to be? 

   I believe that the answer resides in the inextricably connected forces of mystery and the ineffable.  I have been aided in this reflection by the serendipitous discovery of a poem by Mark Jarman, an American writer whose work has been described by one commentator as "God-haunted."  The Jarman poem I turned to while browsing is an eponymous working out of an answer to our four word title question.   The poem is not, however, a treatment of the origin and nature of new life but the opposite.  The speaker is the grandson who, along with his father, ministers to the grandfather at the end of his days.  It's not long so I quote its four quatrains in full.

What Child is This?


Out in the parking lot, preseasonal,

the Christmas carol stops with a car engine.

And the lovely tune it is set to, "Greensleeves," 

continues, like a dimming light in a radio,

haunting us as we go on talking to Grandfather.


Hovering like adorers at his chrome crib,

Father and I might make him laugh, if he could stand

outside his coma, his scrawny doll's body,

reading the crack in our attention, the worry--

Will he remain like this through Christmas?
 

He might wonder that himself, waiting for heaven. 

But when he sighs and smacks his lips

the sounds are so personal, I jump. And Father,

snapping on his razor, sighs back to him

a commiserating "Yes," and tells me to keep talking.

And it's like talking to the one-sided past,

telling him he's released, his God is waiting,

and hearing only his silence, the razor shaving him,

and the old hymn yoked to the older folk song,

the cast-out lover complaining through the holiness.

 ----Mark Jarman.  The Rote Walker.  Carnegie-Mellon UP, 1981.

   So the end of life, as well as the beginning is suffused with mystery and the ineffable.  I love the last four words of the poem.  It is uncomfortable to admit, but I have developed a near habitual patios of "complaining through the holiness," even when miracles have occurred and are looking me in the face.  But when I hold this grandchild gift in my arms, this Kinley Clare, this child of my child, it requires no resolve to rid myself of complaining.  All I need do is harbor her holiness and praise her ineffable mystery with the words of the psalm: "Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life."