Emergence

“Your body has many parts—limbs, organs, cells—but no matter how many parts you can name, you’re still one body…. I want you to think about how all this makes you more significant, not less. A body isn’t just a single part blown up into something huge. It’s all the different-but-similar parts arranged and functioning together. As it is, we see that God has carefully placed each part of the body right where he wanted it…. But I also want you to think about how this keeps your significance from getting blown up into self-importance. For no matter how significant you are, it is only because of what you are a part of (Paul’s first letter to the Corinthian church).

“(I am large, I contain multitudes.)” (Song of Myself 51, Walt Whitman)

Dear Kids,

I have let your three birthdays pass in succession without writing you a single birthday letter.  It's not the pandemic and I haven't forgotten. I just haven't been sure what to write. 

When I started the birthday letter tradition, you were so small that a year in your lives was a huge span of time, full of growth and milestones. That's not the case anymore, now that you're 15, 13, and 11. Your growing has slowed, while time seems to pass so much faster than it used to. How are you already teens or nearly teens? How am I already halfway (or more than halfway) through my own given days?

Given that, it occurred to me recently that thinking of one of you always prompts me to think of all three of you. Maybe a group letter will do. Maybe in twenty years, reading it won’t feel like too much of a cop out. Maybe you’ll say, Mom began to see something special in us together that year.

So, here’s a brief message for each of you, and then one for all of you.

Emelyn, my word for you is embrace. Your zest for life is a gift you arrived with. Born at the start of fall, what you loved most of all as an infant was being lifted up toward the sky so the wind could blow across your skin, so you could see the trees and finger their vibrant leaves. At nine months you had barely begun to crawl, but at ten months you were walking. By one and a half, you ran everywhere, arms back, head forward, billowy blonde hair taken up by the breeze your speed created. You loved any challenge—scaling the length of the stone wall that edged the property line of the farmhouse we rented, for example. I still remember you leaping off the top step at the front door of our little Cape on the first day of Kindergarten. “This is the best day of my life!” you exclaimed arms and legs stretched in starfish formation. Now, you often bring that enthusiasm in a more reserved way to your growing set of interests and obligations. You tackle life and responsibility head-on. You are curious and kind, enthusiastic and driven, creative and expressive. The trick as you continue to grow up will be balancing your natural joy and optimism in the face of convention and expectation. Let your joy always come first. Let your willingness to soar remain unfettered by the world’s weight. God planted your enthusiasm, imagination and curiosity in you before you were born. He did that for a reason. And it has been a gift to us, your family. You remind us how to stay open, of how to ask good questions and probe for needful answers. So, embrace is my word for you.

Audyn, my word for you is engage. If Emelyn is my sky girl, you’re my sea girl. Your natural curiosity, powers of observation, and reliable intuition give you an ability to understand intricacy. As a baby, you adopted a slower way than your big sister. You were quiet and cautious. You took your time—eating, walking, playing. You loved to take things apart and put them back together, and you seemed to know how without anyone ever teaching you. Legos. A computer fan. Knots. You name it. As a little girl, nothing made you more upset than being rushed. Now, you sometimes gently take a broken or jammed thing from my hands that is giving me no end of trouble. I’ll see you pause over it to examine how the parts fit together, or what’s awry, and then with your careful hands, you’ll right whatever it is that’s out of sorts. Sometimes, when the world is whirling around you, you like to retreat for awhile. Giving yourself permission to do it is an important muscle I see you flexing from time to time. But then, don’t forget to come back, to engage again with your surroundings and your people, because your superpower is something we could all use a little more of.  You are intuitive, nonjudgmental, and patient. Your ability to understand how someone feels without them ever uttering a word makes you compassionate and kind. You know how to use your words to carefully reassure or redirect without injury. Because you see deeply, you have little tolerance for injustice. Your temper fires up in the face of it. The trick will be learning to use it well. So, engage is my word for you.

Kaleb, my word for you is flourish. Like Emelyn, you have a unique zest for life, but especially a passion for people. As a baby, you’d place your hands on either side of my face and look right into my eyes with your piercing blue ones and utter your one and lovely syllable, “Waahhhhh,” which was the long, slow sound of contentment. You live in the moment with a joyful spirit that makes you quick to love and just as quick to forgive. You are fiercely independent, just like your sisters. Unafraid to take risks. Unafraid to show up exactly as you are. You love to help people, even when they don’t need it! Sometimes, people who don’t know you see your disability before they see you. It pains me to acknowledge that you will likely contend with the limiting force of this as you grow up. But as you do, don’t let it stop you from dreaming dreams and loving those around you. Love anyway. Dream anyway. Pursue those dreams and see where they take you. So,  flourish is my word for you.

What happens when Embrace, Engage, and Flourish live side-by-side in the same house? Pure magic, that’s what. Now notice that I’m not saying perfection. There’s none of that at our house. Oh no. It’s loud and messy and cranky here. Over Christmas break, you three were up in each other’s space in the most obnoxious ways, all vying for position, poking and prodding one another. So, we split you up for a day. Kaleb went off with a friend and Dad and I gave you girls an afternoon out together. The funny thing was, much of your conversation that afternoon centered on your brother—how much he would have enjoyed eating out, the things he would have thought were hilarious.

At the end of a busy day, you look for each other. Where’s Emelyn-Audyn?” Kaleb will ask when he walks in the door and doesn’t see you right away. That's the magic.

What you three have together is its own thing. You are a unit. A gang. A club to which I no longer belong but still keep a front row seat. As your mom, watching you interact and helping you work out life together is a privilege.

Recently, I learned about the principle of emergence. It’s the idea that a group of living things has properties the individuals don’t possess on their own. Many animals, for example, can do spectacular species-defying stunts in groups. A simple example is starlings. Ever notice just one fly across the sky? Of course not. If it even happens, it would be so unremarkable, no one would note it. But have you ever seen a flock of hundreds or even thousands of starlings move together from one power line or tree to the next in undulating formation? Of course, you have. It’s as common as a cloudy day, but it takes your breath away every time it happens. Neurons. Elements. Ants. Honey bees. Schools of fish. Teams of hunting dolphins. Even human-made systems like democracy. Life at its best operates on the principle of emergence. Author and activist Colum McCann says that “inside the principle of emergence all things matter.” That just means that when we look at units like families, or friends, churches, or schools, nations, and societies we can see that each member contributes to the whole. And, as the late Rabbi Lord Johnathon Saks said, our differences enlarge, rather than diminish us. Paul said something similar in one of his letters to the Corinthian church. “You are one body, but many parts.” His metaphor of the human body and its individual parts contributing to a beautiful whole reminds us that we each have an important role to play, that together we can be more than we are alone, and that our differences actually strengthen us as we love and serve God and each other.

Perhaps this all sounds a little too shiny for the world we live in. McCann notes that it's easier to be a cynic. The cynic lives in the cloud of his or her own understanding that the world is hard and difficult and likely to implode. Yet, he says, the optimist has to live with a passion on par with the cynic. The optimist must say, “So what if the world is a hard place to live? There is more. There is better.” That better happens when we embrace this principle of emergence—Paul’s metaphor, Whitman’s multitudes. The multitudes within ourselves. And the multitudes contained within others. Imagine what you three have to offer the world together.

Embrace + Engage + Flourish = ?

I’m not here to give you the answer to that equation. Only you three hold the secret. But the fact that you are three, that you are here—our miracles that almost weren’t because of Dad's cancer—well, that’s something, isn’t it? And that’s why I can’t seem to write a birthday letter to one of you without writing it to all three of you. You are still emerging into the unique individuals God made you to be. But you are also emerging into something far more complex and lovely as a threesome. Maybe it all feels messy and ugly some days. Afterall, the closer we lean in to one another, the more complex things become. The more warts we see on each other, the more our own warts are made evident to us. Live into that mess. Some days you will need to vie for your own space, wrestle to establish your own identity in our family unit. But on the other days, the ones where you three are in synch with one another, loving each other, exploring together, welcoming your gifts and warts in equal measure, forgiving one another over and over because that’s the sacrifice love requires of us—then on those days rejoice that there is a you that is both singular and plural. The story you [plural] are writing together is beautifully emerging and inextricable from the you [singular] you’re becoming.

Happiest of Birthdays to YOU.