PAREDES
For years, since I lost my faith after reading about the Big Bang and Charles Darwin, I decided to be an atheist. Yes, it was a decision, an attempt of becoming.
Contrary to my declarations, deep inside I could not always be too sure about what not to believe.
In other words, I was more of an agnostic. But there was one thing I could be sure about: I was disillusioned, angry, and wanted to drop out of religion.
I replaced religion with science. Or rather, science became my religion.
I adopted the skeptical and empiricist frame of mind, doubting everything and taking only as factual what could be demonstrated by reason and material evidence.
I admit it worked out fine for me.
There was something comforting about not having to believe in all those mythical stories of gods, angels, demons and the whole morality play that ends with the promise of heaven or eternal damnation.
I stopped attending church and said goodbye to all those rituals and trappings of my childhood faith. Unbelief became my relief.
I thought magic and miracles don’t happen. All those strange things that occur in nature must have a scientific explanation.
Nothing is supposed to be mysterious to science. If there was anything we do not know now, soon scientists will find out. I have faith only in the human potential and nothing else.
When my wife became pregnant, we tried to follow every step of the process.
Of course, we were already familiar with the basic concepts of reproduction.
We’ve seen all the diagrams and even watched an animated film about how, out of a million competing sperm cells, only one manages to wriggle its way into the goal: union with the egg cell waiting inside the womb.
It’s amazing how this “chosen one,” carrying all the male’s DNA, is singled out and how it survives the chemical exchanges swimming through undercurrents of tunnels locking in like Apollo and Suyoz spacecrafts during the time of coupling.
As it unites with the egg cell, which also carries all the woman’s DNA, the genetic synthesis is also sealed, resulting in a new personality.
This microscopic drama happens at exactly that moment when two human bodies reached the climax of both their physical and psychological union, when chemicals and emotions are exchanged.
Yet, what we don’t see is the sharing of information, the permanent bonding of the couple’s genetic traits, feelings, and even unconscious memories, into one, that of the emerging child.
As the fetus develops, the woman’s body also changes.
The womb expands as it takes on fluids that form a protective layer and source of nourishment for the delicate tissue that is now starting to throb with life of her own.
The mother’s heart pumps blood into this tiny heart and yet they beat separately – two hearts sharing one blood.
Upon birth, the child, all soft bones and delicate tissues, slides its way into the holes and tunnels of the pelvic bone, which contracts or dilates according to the mother’s breathing.
It is a dangerous rhythm for a single untimely pause can cause a child to be crushed.
This breathing is the music of life.
Everything has been structurally prepared for this exit of the child from the womb, her physical separation from the mother, her entry into the world.
And yet, her survival at this few minutes of labor, now depends on the mother, how far she could take the pain, how far she could risk her own life for her child. Both lives are actually at stake at this critical moment.
How everything seems to fall in place in this whole process, from conception to birth, is something beyond the grasp of biochemistry, female physiology or genetic science.
This drama taking place in the womb is even more mysterious, more magical than the cosmic Big Bang.
I was awed at this perfection but even humbled at the thought of me being able to understand a little bit of the process of birth.
It makes one realize that the mind, in all its finitude, is able to recognize a perfect structure only because it itself a perfect structure.
The order of things points to the order within us. And that perfection could not just be an accident of the universe.
And that was how I regained my faith that there must be a source of this order and perfection, and we just have to accept that the instruments of human understanding are just too limited in the face of this great mystery of how they came to be.
Beyond what is observable, there is no way we can fully explain how a child gets to be born.
It’s a miracle that only a mother could experience. That the child is born in the mother is a spiritual bond that only they can share, a gift given only to women.
Fathers like me can only watch with awe as witness to this miracle.
The ancients rightly thought that women are more spiritual than men. In this sense also, I guess mothers own more than half the sky.