Prints

Today as we walked back from art class in newly fallen snow, I watched the many tracks we passed. Wheels weaving to miss icy patches, boots in rhythm, rabbits here and there in the banks, and pellets of salt shunning the snow away from them. I love seeing our prints, whether it is in wet sand that is washed away by the next wave or in a field of snow that keeps our marks until the next storm. I also thought of the poem, Footprints.

The laminated picture mounted on wood of a sandy beach with vague footprints growing larger as it nears the foreground hangs in countless bedrooms and nursing homes, church basements and funeral parlors. The poem that accompanies it gives witness to how humans survive unbelievable grief. When the pain is so great, it is no longer Jesus walking beside his child, but Jesus picks him up and cradles him through the trial, whatever his age may be.

In the Moravian liturgy that I grew up singing and speaking week after week there was a refrain something to the effect of "Jesus carried the lambs in his bosom." It was not something I said outside of church, "Mommy, will you carry me in your bosom?", but somewhere in my cells, I knew what the liturgy was saying. I knew the comfort of being held in that place. When I was older, the word drew giggles as my friends and I glanced across the pews at each other thinking only of how bosom means breasts. The irony was that as I became uncomfortable saying it, the world began to tell me new ways to be comforted. I became overly aware of what I thought I looked like. I played the vicious girl games of gaining and losing friends, daily. I struggled to know when I could be comforted in that favorite place of children, and when I could be a brashly independent baby adult.

But in that uncomfortable word, bosom, there lurked the history of human compassion. The bosom is where life is sustained after birth. Where Moses was reunited with his mother, if only for his time as a nursling. Where Mary nursed Jesus as they stopped on their route home from Bethlehem. It is where kids want to curl up into beyond the breastfeeding years. It's the part we clutch when we are grieved, and the place we tremble when we find our selves in love.

The emotions that dwell in the bosom speak of comfort. It is the bowels, those entangled creatures to the south of the bosom, that give life to the moment before the starting gun is fired; that jar us out of the normalcy of paying the bill when a child can't been seen from the check out counter; that tempt us to stay home, sleep in, and keep quiet. Together, the bosom and the bowels, these embarrassingly real centers of life, are where our emotional footprints are put down. So often we don't see each other's, but once in a while we get a glimpse. Someone lets us in, whether they know it or not. And in that moment we are back in our parents' arms, where we first learned that we are not islands of individuals, but people, near and far, caught up together.