FIFTY-THREE
On p. 53 of GR, Sarah is telling us about the marvelous and miraculous moments when her firstborn son, Track, was born. She says, “The world went away, and in a crystallizing instant, I knew my purpose.
“As the nurse laid my son gently in my arms, Todd and I laughed and cried together. It was a profound moment, unexpected, overwhelming. In the space of a few minutes, we'd gone from being two individuals to being a family.”
What beautiful and profound words!!
I could discourse at some length on the Trinitarian implications of Sarah's final words in this citation. The adding of a “TERTIUM QUID,” a third element, that binds two other elements to itself and to each other in love would provide material for fruitful reflections. A child in its relations to father and mother bears a faint resemblance to the Holy Spirit in Relation to the Father and the Son.
I could reflect on the ancient literary pedigree of laughter and tears commixed and commingled, going back to Hector's wife, Andromache, in Book Six of Homer's Iliad. (Ah, glorious rainbow, when the sun of a smile greets the watery arc of tears, and generates a luminous iridescence of hope!!)
However, I would like to focus instead on these words: “The world went away, and in a crystallizing instant, I knew my purpose.”
I think that the soul of this sentence, and of its interpretation, hinges on the pivot of the term and image “crystallizing.”
"What does it mean for something to be “crystallized”? It means that something assumes a definite and symmetrical and permanent form." This form is like the definite and symmetrical internal structures of crystal. Also, since crystal is clear and limpid, there is the connotation of clarity.
Further, what does it mean for something to possess “symmetry”? In the literal sense of the Greek word from which our word descends, it means for something to be “measured” “together with” something else. Something can be in symmetry with itself, when its own parts bear a harmonious relationship to each other, like the two sides of a face; or something can stand in symmetry to something else, with which it stands in measured harmony.
So, what happened to Sarah at that moment? She became something that one can only be IN RELATION TO someone else. She came to be measured together with or in relation to someone else. She became a mom. There are certain realities or modes of being that can exist only in relation to something/someone else. There is no uncle without the nephew or niece. There is no shepherd (at least “in actu”) without sheep. And there is no mom without a kid!
So the structure, the order, the “teleology” of Sarah's life was set at this moment, and set with a limpid, crystal-like clearness of purpose.
The QUID, the “what,” of her life has not changed, essentially, from that moment.
However, the QUANTUM, the “how much,” has certainly changed!
She became a mother for the second, third, and fourth times, with the birth of her three daughters.
Then she became “mother” of the State of Alaska in becoming its governor.
Then she became a mom for the fifth time with the glorious birth of her little Trig.
Then, IMHO, she BEGAN to become Mother of all these United States the day Senator McCain chose her as his running mate.
Were are witnesses right now, in these very days, to the agony of parturition, as Sarah, and all of us with her, suffer under the vicious and utterly savage and unprincipled attacks of the Left; we are witnesses to the “pains of labor” that the Lady of the North Country must endure in order to fulfill what we believe and hope will be the crown and summit of a calling and vocation that began on that far-off day in 1989.
20 April, 1989: Sarah becomes Track's mom.
20 January, 2013: Sarah, God willing, becomes Mother of the United States of America.
On both days, the Glory of Laughter and of Tears!!!
