{"id":4943,"date":"2022-03-02T19:24:26","date_gmt":"2022-03-02T19:24:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/farefwd.com\/?p=4943"},"modified":"2022-03-02T19:24:31","modified_gmt":"2022-03-02T19:24:31","slug":"the-meaning-of-birth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/index.php\/2022\/03\/02\/the-meaning-of-birth\/","title":{"rendered":"The Meaning of Birth"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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Every Child a Wanted Child<\/h2>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t
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The Meaning of Birth<\/em> suggests that it is children\u2019s weakness that fits them for the humility of being loved.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Review by Eve Tushnet<\/em><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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There\u2019s a scene in the 1978 film Killer of Sheep<\/em> in which a man and a woman stand beside their window and dance together to Dinah Washington\u2019s rendition of \u201cThis Bitter Earth.\u201d 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<\/em> is part of the 1970s \u201cLA Rebellion\u201d of Black filmmakers based out of the UCLA Film School. It\u2019s 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. \u201cThis Bitter Earth\u201d is one of the film\u2019s most haunting scenes because it places sexual communion, the woman\u2019s hands pressing the husband\u2019s 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.<\/p>

When Giovanni Testori describes his own conception, in the conversations which make up the brief page count of The Meaning of Birth<\/em>, he describes it pointedly as, \u201cA day off work.\u201d He is exploring the idea that there is \u201cabandonment and liberation\u201d in love:<\/p>

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 \u201cone flesh and one soul,\u201d 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>

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 \u201cwanted,\u201d Testori and his interlocutor Luigi Giussani argue, because we can\u2019t 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.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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The promise faith offers, this book argues, is that this sonship is equally available to all.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Testori was a gay journalist and Catholic revert (he returned to practicing his faith after his mother\u2019s 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<\/em>, in which the theological conversation would include women who have borne children, these men\u2019s personal situations allow them certain insights: <\/em>There\u2019s an immensely touching late description of Christmas as welcoming \u201cthe children that aren\u2019t yours, to whom you try to give everything you would give to your children.\u201d<\/p>

The Meaning of Birth<\/em> 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: \u201cThe 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\u2014therefore no longer as an act of love and creation\u2014have created their own curse.\u201d There\u2019s 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 \u201cthe state\u201d as the sole force of dehumanizing control, and even an attack on \u201cthe retreat into abstraction,\u201d 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\u2019t judge, but it is good that the Catholic way includes many rhetorics, aesthetics, and spiritual vocabularies, because this one was mostly not for me.<\/p>

And yet I also loved this book. Testori says, \u201cMost 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.\u201d 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<\/em> we are dependent, not in spite of that dependence. Alongside the \u201chumility\u201d of birth, the \u201csense of one\u2019s limits,\u201d there is also \u201cthe possibility of security.\u201d We aren\u2019t self-made men; nestled within that rebuke is a promise that we are loved before we make anything of ourselves at all.<\/p>

This confidence wards off despair, which is this book\u2019s great target. If we are responsible for justifying our own existence, we swiftly discover that we can\u2019t. 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\u2019t yet know by Whom.\u00a0 To be grateful<\/em> for this dependence, rather than resentful or frightened of it, offers \u201cthe possibility of being children and of being human\u201d\u2014and we can either be children, or be alone. When we forget this dependence, our \u201cbirth,\u201d our status as children, we forget that we are loved. As Testori puts it, \u201c[I]s not original sin the failure to recognize oneself as being wanted?\u201d<\/p>

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: \u201cIn 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.\u201d Reason relies on design and can\u2019t operate in its absence; and yet that design incorporates all that is most helpless, silent, and unreasoning. And the Word became flesh.<\/em><\/p>

In Matthew\u2019s Gospel, Jesus warns, \u201cAmen, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven.\u201d The Meaning of Birth<\/em> suggests that it is children\u2019s weakness, their inadequacy to the tasks set before them\u2014not sweetness or innocence, neither of which are prominent in my own childhood memories\u2014that fits them for the humility of being loved.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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Eve Tushnet<\/strong> is the author of two books on gay Christian life, most recently<\/em> Tenderness: A Gay Christian’s Guide to Unlearning Rejection and Experiencing God’s Extravagant Love, as well as two novels<\/em>, Amends and<\/em> Punishment: A Love Story.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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The Meaning of Birth<\/strong> was published by Slant Books on December 7, 2021.\u00a0<\/em>Fare Forward is grateful for their provision of a review copy.\u00a0<\/em>You can purchase your own copy through their website here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Meaning of Birth suggests that it is children\u2019s weakness that fits them for the humility of being 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