Lately I’ve been on this kick of reminiscing over my college years, when English was my major and my days were spent reading and writing, writing and reading. Last week my blog began with a quote from Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard. This week, my thoughts drifted toward a stanza from E.E. Cummings’ Somewhere I Have Never Traveled, Gladly Beyond:

 

your slightest look easily will unclose me

though i have closed myself as fingers,

you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens

(touching skillfully, mysteriously) her first rose

 

While the poet Cummings likely wrote those words with his love interest in mind, I’ve always understood them as describing a father’s love for his child, even when I first read them over 10 years before my first child was even born. Now, as a parent of three children, with more than 19 years of “dad” experience, I find Cummings’ words even more descriptive of a father looking at his child.

 

Before I had kids, I almost never cried (I had always “closed myself as fingers”); now I get choked up and the tears flow often (my kids have “unclose[d] me,” have opened me “petal by petal”). The last line of the poem also pulls at my daddy’s heart strings, especially as I recall the first sight of my kids while holding them as newborn babies: “nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands.”

 

Ultimately, whenever I think about myself as a father, I’m led to consider my own Dad, not my male parenting figure on earth, but my Father in Heaven, who calls me His child because of what His Son Jesus did in dying on the cross and taking on the punishment that I deserved. I wonder what He sees when He looks at me. I’m not worth His love, but He couldn’t love me more. He’s looking at His kid when He looks at me, His imperfect kid made perfect by his Dad.

 

Troy Burns