Born in a happy village

Vlog March 2025

Our daughter Thaleia was born on the 23^rd of January. As a new landlord I’ve discovered that babies make dreadful tenants: They’re unemployed. They don’t pay rent. They’re noisy. They keep insane hours and I’m afraid that their hygiene is deplorable.

But perhaps they make better teachers. G K Chesterton wrote an essay on the virtues of baby-worship. He argued that if we attend to how new babies see the world we could rediscover the marvelousness of all things.

“The most unfathomable schools and sages have never attained to the gravity which dwells in the eyes of a baby of three months old. It is the gravity of astonishment at the universe…As we walk the streets and see below us those delightful bulbous heads, three times too big for the body, we ought always primarily to remember that within every one of these heads there is a new universe, as new as it was on the seventh day of creation. In each of those orbs there is a new system of stars, new grass, new cities, a new sea…If we could see the stars as a child sees them, we should need no other apocalypse…Their top-heavy dignity is more touching than any humility; their solemnity gives us more hope for all things than a thousand carnivals of optimism; their large and lustrous eyes seem to hold all the stars in their astonishment; their fascinating absence of nose seems to give to us the most perfect hint of the humour that awaits us in the kingdom of heaven.”

My wife and I would like to thank you all for the cards and gifts we have received for Damaris and Thaleia. Thanks to you, our daughters have entered a community of love at St Mary Magdalene. It is as if they had been born in a happy village in the past, and this is a rare and precious experience today.

The Rev’d Dr James Lawson, St Mary Magdalene Enfield, March 2025