Sovereign Mysteries

“Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery, like the idle, curved tunnels of leaf miners on the face of a leaf. We must somehow take a wider view… Then we can at least wail the right question into the swaddling band of darkness, or, if it comes to that, choir the proper praise.

“The whole show has been on fire from the word go. I come down to the water to cool my eyes. But everywhere I look I see fire; that which isn’t flint is tinder, and the whole world sparks and flames.” –Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

One thing conception unveils is God’s sovereignty. I don’t know that the beginnings of life is really anything that anyone understands. I remember in high school editing a research proposal about enzymes released by the egg on contact with a sperm. I remember looking at electron microscopy photos of that moment of fusion in cell biology, studying the statistics of chromosomal separation in third-year genetics. I remember the first time I saw part of a fetus, in an abortion clinic as a medical student. They sifted through the suctioned bloody contents and I saw materialize a single transparent, perfectly formed miniature bent leg and foot, floating in the red haze like a piece of glass.

I remember waiting for my period, two weeks after we’d decided to stop contraception, thinking that this couldn’t possibly be it. Then seeing two lines instead of one on Christmas day.

In the end the whole thing is a fearful, wondrous mystery. Who can understand this moment of union between two traveling cells moments before their deaths? Their rooting in some dark invisible cavern in my body? And the wriggling thing with bloated belly and waving limbs on the ultrasound screen? Who can begin to comprehend the changes that will happen in our lives?

As a pathologically self-reliant person, I think about the utter lack of control we had over this bit of life coming into being, over how my body’s already changed, and I’m reminded of God’s true sovereignty in my life. How he is the giver of all things, of how in the end I have given my life and body to him. It’s a sometimes scary, often comforting, but always humbling thing.

Week Eleven