Oh, For Crying Out Loud!

When she opened it, she saw the child. He was crying, and she took pity on him. 

– Exodus 2.6

            We mammals are suckers for a crying baby. Any mammal; any baby.

            A “normal” human baby cries for a total of two hours every day. New York Times reporter Natalie Angier quips that a fussy baby cries a total of two hours every two hours! Either way, crying keeps babies alive. When scientists genetically engineered baby mice not to cry, their mothers never fed them, and they died. Researchers claim that the human brain reacts more quickly and energetically to an infant’s wail than to other kinds of noise. And it doesn’t have to be a human infant: a goat, a deer, a human – we instinctively rush toward the noise. Moreover, those crafty little darlings alter the endings of their screeches to prevent adults from growing accustomed to the racket and tuning it out.

            God designed newborn humans to depend on their parents for survival, so God also designed newborn infants to get their parents’ attention, and parents to pay attention.

The research doesn’t address gender, but my own observation indicates that mothers do this better than fathers. When our children were little, I could sleep through their verbal blitzkrieg; Becky jolted fully awake if they so much as cooed.

            Babies cry, women hear, and the race survives.

            Pharaoh’s daughter was a sucker for a crying infant; even when it wasn’t her infant; even when it wasn’t of her own race. “This must be one of the Hebrews’ children” came after “she took pity on him.” As a result, Moses survived; as a result, Israel survived; as a result, Jesus was born; as a result, humanity finds salvation.       The princess of Egypt did not know that she had fished redemption from the backwaters of the Nile; she merely took pity on an abandoned slave-spawn. We never know when the yowling of a hurt human gives voice to the wounded heart of the Almighty.

            Except that we do: Jesus tells us that our reaction to “the least of these” embodies our relationship with Him. The cacophony is not pleasant and just when we learn to ignore it, it changes pitch and awakens our spiritual adrenaline all over again. A Christian heart hears every cry as a summons to serve Our Lord. When we put pity before ethnicity and empathy before empire, we cradle Christ and pass God’s plan of salvation one more tenuous link down the chain.

            And when we don’t, we don’t.

            Calvin Miller imagines God holding the globe to Christ’s ear so he can hear the unbroken weeping of its fallen inhabitants. “They’re crying,” Earthmaker tells His Troubadour. “Year after weary year they all/Keep crying. They seem born to weep then die.” He calls His Son to enter the scene “microscopically/To love the little souls who weep away/Their lives.”

            As Christ ran to crying humanity, may God stir us to run to the crying Christ.

For more information, see A Baby Wails, and the Adult World Comes Running