A few nights ago, I was walking home with my daughter from a nearby restaurant when we stopped at a light to cross the street. The day had been unbearably hot, but an approaching cold front was stirring just enough of an breeze to take the edge off the lingering humid heat. Below the horizon, the twilight sun was casting purpling shadows across the sky while the clouds above us shimmered like amaranth dreams.
Reaching out, I offered my daughter my hand and she took it. At the age where her parents are becoming “embarrassing,” Natalie often refuses, but not that night. Feeling her little hand in mine, I looked down to see her looking up at me, her face graced by a small smile. Whether it was a trick of the light or the margarita I’d had, she seemed both girl and woman at the same time, what I’d known and what she what was about to come. Watching her hair wavering in the breeze as her perspiring skin sparkled under the streetlamp’s sodium light, I marveled at my daughter’s loveliness. How’d she grow up so fast? Heading off to middle school next fall, Natalie’s no longer a baby – as her latest obsession with Sephora products can attest – but she still needs to be tucked into bed with her favorite stuffed animal before she goes to sleep, wavering between childhood and the world which lies beyond.
Waiting for the light to change, I knew Natalie wouldn’t cross until I led the way, but I also knew one day, and very soon, she would no longer need to hold my hand. Feeling her pull on me, I knew my daughter was already chomping at the bit, straining to race towards the future’s promise. Sometimes we feel like we’re being pulled towards a future we cannot see or understand but, as I’ve gotten older, I cannot shake the sense that, instead of being pulled, I’m being drawn towards that mysterious horizon, yearning to see what comes next. I want to see Natalie grow up, get old with my wife, travel to new places, learn new things – to become more that I am now. In short, I never want the party to end. My child’s desire to grow up so fast is just that – desire – our attraction to what’s good for us, towards that which is true, good, and beautiful.
Grasping Natalie’s hand, I remembered the shock of wonder I felt when she was born – that she was her and that beautiful her was here – which got me thinking how any of us got here in the first place. The Book of Genesis says God fashioned the world from a dark and formless void – nothing – and then proclaimed his handiwork as good. How did he manage that trick? I think our desire to experience the future offers a glimpse at the answer. If God is indeed existence, truth and goodness itself, then he is also indescribably and infinitely beautiful – a beauty so alluringly powerful that it evokes desire within that void of nothing, causing all there is to venture forth into being. Simply put, He’s too gorgeous to resist. As finite creatures, however, different from God’s “eternal now,” we can only experience that desire within “the moving image of eternity” which is time. For us God is absolute futurity, an infinity we can never traverse, but the very desire He evokes make us want to race across that distance between Him and us with abandon. We want to see what’s next, how it’ll all turn out, to become more – for the party to never end – which is, of course, eternal bliss. To steal a phrase, desire just isn’t the cause of our being; it is our being.
“Dad,” Natalie said. “Let’s go. The light’s green.”
As we crossed the street, Natalie let go of my hand but, when we reached the other side, she took it again because she wanted to. Sighing, I realized this was yet another gift in the long series of gifts that have been my life, and that my very desire for even more of these gifts is what’s propelling me across that infinite ocean of time. Now that I’m nearing sixty, I’ll admit the future sometimes fills me with fear but, at that moment, I caught a glimpse of its luminous promise, shimmering like the twilit clouds above.
“C’mon, Natalie,” I said. “Let’s go home.”
