The curve of a rose petal; the sparkle in the beloved’s eye; the disjunct tune of a little girl’s music box; the small pink bow pinned in her hair; the sight of a young man helping his grandmother walk; the enticing cracks in her loaf of bread; and the delightful, dimpled chuckle of the baby they are going to see.
Beautiful.
Doesn’t something within you warm at these images? Is there not a hardened shell of your heart that cracks, stricken, and slowly peels away? Do you not begin to feel a curve at the edges of your mouth? Are you not filled with a sense of longing, and do you not feel that you have been pierced?
Pierced! By a baby giggle?
Yes.
It is something so tender, delicate, and beautiful that it hurts.
Why?
In some ways it is unexplainable. It makes little sense why the most beautiful experiences are often followed by a twinge of pain, or why sometimes they are wholly bound up with suffering.
Consider motherhood. A woman conceives a child and begins her wait of nine months. She probably has never experienced anything so beautiful as knowing that within her body she sustains and nourishes a child, for whom she will care the rest of her life. Nor, I warrant, has she experienced any pain so encompassing as the combined afflictions of morning sickness, the constant desire for food and yet the inability to eat, the semi-paralysis due to a pinched nerve, and in culmination, the intensity of minute-long contractions throughout hours of labor. But in the end, the delivery ward witnesses the most beautiful moment between mother and child in which she waves away the months of suffering and whispers, “It was worth it,” as the nurse lays the child in her arms.
Beauty and pain within motherhood are inseparable. The beautiful feeling the mother experiences as she hopes for the arrival of her child is touched by a pang of yearning and unfulfilled desire. Her joy at the knowledge that every morsel she eats goes to the growth and strengthening of her child is juxtaposed with nausea at the sight of red meat, loss of appetite at the whiff of a french fry, and a strange desire for ice cubes and pickles.
Somehow, she looks back at the empty pickle jars, at the heat waves suddenly rushing over her body accompanied by drops of sweat, at the desperate tossing and turning in bed for a moment of relief, at the angry flood of tears when her husband neglects to bring her a KitKat: Somehow, she looks back on all this and thinks it was worth it. And sometimes, she decides to go through it all again — once, twice, a half-dozen, a dozen times!
And what is the point of enduring this agony, but to dedicate the rest of her life to the very cause of her misery? What is the point, but to gaze admiringly into the sleeping face of her newborn child and envision the pains of nursing; the sleepless nights resulting in dark shadows under her eyes; the soreness in her shoulders from carrying a diaper bag; the colic, the rashes, the clawing at her earrings, and to laugh softly and say, “I love you!” embracing every minute of it.
Although she has suffered for this child, has contained him within her, even now holds him, foresees how much she still must do for him, she feels that it is not enough.
As she gazes into his face, contemplating the marvel of his beauty, of his birth, of her love for him, she notices a gnawing at the bottom of her heart that soon explodes and captures her entire being. Looking at him, holding him, is no longer enough, for even though she is with him, she misses him.
She has been pierced.
Motherhood captures at the most extreme level the pangs we experience with beauty. Perhaps only C. S. Lewis can describe the intensity of passion a mother feels when he writes concerning humans’ thirst for beauty:
“We do not want merely to see beauty. We want something else which can hardly be put into words – to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it.”
In a small way, whenever we encounter beauty, we experience a consuming pain, and a burning desire for more. This pain teaches us how to love. We learn that we must sacrifice our own comfort so that we may cling to something beautiful, although even the smallest beauty pains us.
I thrust my hand into a rosebush, not content with the drooping flowers that line its outskirts, but captivated by the reddest rose buried amid the brambles, I reach for its woody stem to pluck its head, and feel a pang.
I have been pierced.
