Every Child a Wanted Child
The Meaning of Birth suggests that it is children’s weakness that fits them for the humility of being loved.
Review by Eve Tushnet
There’s a scene in the 1978 film Killer of Sheep in which a man and a woman stand beside their window and dance together to Dinah Washington’s rendition of “This Bitter Earth.” He is exhausted and almost, but not quite, detached; she clings, full of need and pity and almost, but not quite, despairing. When he pulls away at last she consoles herself with memories of her grandmother, and cradles the tiny shoes of her child. Killer of Sheep is part of the 1970s “LA Rebellion” of Black filmmakers based out of the UCLA Film School. It’s a family album: children scrambling over the ruins of abandoned buildings, throwing rocks; labor, including the miserable labor of the title; hard, helpless comedy, as in the epic struggle to replace the car engine. “This Bitter Earth” is one of the film’s most haunting scenes because it places sexual communion, the woman’s hands pressing the husband’s shirtless back, in this context of labor, oppression, and loss. This is a harrowed tenderness, a love unable to bear its responsibilities and shouldering them anyway: a mother and father.
When Giovanni Testori describes his own conception, in the conversations which make up the brief page count of The Meaning of Birth, he describes it pointedly as, “A day off work.” He is exploring the idea that there is “abandonment and liberation” in love:
My father worked, my mother already had other children; and then there, in that bed, where I was born, which is the same bed where I sleep now, the same bed where they died, where they loved each other, where they united their burdens and their affections, this love of theirs, and they became what is said also in the holy books “one flesh and one soul,” and they probably set free their trouble in their love, their pain in their joy. In their great joy and abandonment they experienced a joy that goes beyond what we know, what we understand, what we are familiar with.
For Testori this sabbath conception is a microcosm of what all conceptions inherently are. Love, experiencing its self-emptying helplessness, welcomes a new and even more helpless creature. The core of this slender book is the idea that dependence and love are inextricably linked. We no longer know how to be “wanted,” Testori and his interlocutor Luigi Giussani argue, because we can’t accept our own dependence. Believing our lives must be earned, we have lost the trust in a loving Creator who will never make us earn our living.
The promise faith offers, this book argues, is that this sonship is equally available to all.
Testori was a gay journalist and Catholic revert (he returned to practicing his faith after his mother’s death . . . truly the most appealing of Italian stereotypes), Giussani a priest and founder of the Catholic lay association Communion and Liberation. They recorded these conversations in 1980, at a country house near Milan. Although I would like to read another Meaning of Birth, in which the theological conversation would include women who have borne children, these men’s personal situations allow them certain insights: There’s an immensely touching late description of Christmas as welcoming “the children that aren’t yours, to whom you try to give everything you would give to your children.”
The Meaning of Birth does have some of the faults you might expect from country-house theorizing. I got angry at this book pretty often. I was impatient with it, as parents can be impatient with their children. Some passages are pretentious, unintelligible, banal. Some are punishingly abstract: “The point remains: the culture has escaped from the hands of the culture: the cells that we wanted to consider as a clump without God, in which there was no Father—therefore no longer as an act of love and creation—have created their own curse.” There’s a lot of supportive bafflegab about the wisdom of the youth, a certain amount of judgmental generalization about their parents, an extremely 1980 emphasis on “the state” as the sole force of dehumanizing control, and even an attack on “the retreat into abstraction,” which skids right past self-awareness to wind up at the observation that at least Stalin was a person with a face. Some of the conversations that changed my own life for the better were collages of insight and glibness, so I can’t judge, but it is good that the Catholic way includes many rhetorics, aesthetics, and spiritual vocabularies, because this one was mostly not for me.
And yet I also loved this book. Testori says, “Most of us are born from a moment of total love, from a moment of love which arrived at the point of no longer being able to know itself except with the help, intervention, and presence of God. . . . This is how I became a son.” The promise faith offers, this book argues, is that this sonship is equally available to all, regardless of whether their physical conception was an act of abandonment to love or predatory violence. And sonship is a condition of being loved because we are dependent, not in spite of that dependence. Alongside the “humility” of birth, the “sense of one’s limits,” there is also “the possibility of security.” We aren’t self-made men; nestled within that rebuke is a promise that we are loved before we make anything of ourselves at all.
This confidence wards off despair, which is this book’s great target. If we are responsible for justifying our own existence, we swiftly discover that we can’t. Giussani and Testori hope to make that discovery of our helplessness in itself a reminder that our life was given, not seized; we were wanted, even if we don’t yet know by Whom. To be grateful for this dependence, rather than resentful or frightened of it, offers “the possibility of being children and of being human”—and we can either be children, or be alone. When we forget this dependence, our “birth,” our status as children, we forget that we are loved. As Testori puts it, “[I]s not original sin the failure to recognize oneself as being wanted?”
A worldview grounded in the unchosen, unearned experience of birth can touch even unexpected philosophical fields. In a beautiful and incisive passage, Giussani moves from epistemology to a moral imperative, rising at last to a hymn: “In everything that reason does, there is nothing more reasonable than this sense of belonging to a design. . . . If man recognizes that he belongs to a design of God . . . he becomes an indispensable part of that design. . . . There is no longer anything useless, nothing unfortunate, nothing unlucky, nothing thrown out.” Reason relies on design and can’t operate in its absence; and yet that design incorporates all that is most helpless, silent, and unreasoning. And the Word became flesh.
In Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus warns, “Amen, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven.” The Meaning of Birth suggests that it is children’s weakness, their inadequacy to the tasks set before them—not sweetness or innocence, neither of which are prominent in my own childhood memories—that fits them for the humility of being loved.
Eve Tushnet is the author of two books on gay Christian life, most recently Tenderness: A Gay Christian’s Guide to Unlearning Rejection and Experiencing God’s Extravagant Love, as well as two novels, Amends and Punishment: A Love Story.
The Meaning of Birth was published by Slant Books on December 7, 2021. Fare Forward is grateful for their provision of a review copy. You can purchase your own copy through their website here.
