To Gaze is to Love

Introducing Charles Langr, and the wild ride we've had together over the past four weeks

Hi friends — Charles Anthony Langr (also affectionately known as Charlie, Baby Charlie, Charlie Bird, Charlie B, Chuck, or Cal) was born July 9th. Labor was smooth, my epidural was amazing, and delivery was beautiful. He came out with a full head of hair and a peaceful, observant personality. He is a total gift. He’s so good.

Two days after his birth, we came home from the hospital and were so excited to have all of our crew back under one roof. But that night, Charles stopped breathing during what we now know was a seizure.

I’ve seen a lot as a parent, but seeing Charles have that first seizure was the scariest thing I’ve seen as a mom. Since that first seizure, he and I have had more ambulance rides and ER trips together than I’d like to count. We spent five days in the NICU and discharged only to be readmitted six hours later after more breakthrough seizures at home. After another week in the NICU, we discharged (again) and came home, hopefully (please, Jesus) to stay.

Needless to say, this wasn’t the postpartum experience I was expecting. Every morning that I wake up in my bed by Joseph with Charlie snoozing in the bassinet and all of our other kids asleep across the hall, it feels like Christmas.

We don’t know exactly what is causing Charlie’s seizures, but we’re down to either unexplainable infant seizures (which he will grow out of) or something on a genetic level (we’ll get our genetic panel results back in a few weeks). Right now he’s thriving at home, with over two weeks without seizures.

I have many, many thoughts about the past month, some of which might land in your inbox at a later date. But for now, I wanted to share just one of those thoughts:

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Last year, I read Saint John of the Cross: Master of Contemplation by Father Donald Haggerty four times. It’s a fantastic book that has radically changed the way I think about prayer, and it took about four reads through the 300+ page book (and many, many conversations with my spiritual director) to start to grasp what Saint John of the Cross means when he talks about contemplation and the love of God.

I regularly think about that book, but one line from St. John of the Cross and his Spiritual Canticle sticks out over all the others:

For God, to gaze at is to love…for God, to look is for him to love.

God looks at me and loves me. This isn’t a gaze that I have to earn, or a gaze that increases in love the more I do the right things. Instead, it’s a gaze that is always present, always attentive, always attuned, all knowing.

Prayer is simply time that I sit in the silence and desire to become more aware of His gaze. Instead of something on my checklist, a place where I go to DO things with the Lord, prayer is a place where I just am. I just exist with the Lord.

When I pray, it looks like I’m doing nothing. Some days it just feels lazy because I am actually doing nothing. I’m just sitting in His gaze.

But the Lord is doing something. He’s actually doing many things, most of which I don’t think I’m even fully aware of. He’s showing me places in my heart where I’m preoccupied with things that aren’t of Him. And as I slowly empty those places, He comes and fills them with His love.

Then, He invites me to love those He’s entrusted to me. He asks me to look at them with that gaze of love, to love them with His Sacred Heart, a heart wounded for love.

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The first night in the NICU, Charles had multiple seizures. Although we had our suspicions, we didn’t know that they were seizures until an EEG confirmed them. But with each seizure, we grew in knowledge of what a seizure looks like for Charlie. Once we knew what to look for, we began to watch closely, marking any signs with our NICU team so we could learn more about Charlie and what his brain was doing.

Joseph and I joked that our new hobby was playing a game called “Is this a seizure?”. Charlie would roll his eyes (like all newborns do) and we’d play the game. His left arm would jerk up and we’d play the game. He’d make a sound in his sleep and we’d play the game.

Is it a seizure? Yes. Yes. No. No. Maybe. Let’s look at the EEG results. Yes.

He had thirteen seizures in the first two weeks of life. During those first few days, Charlie would have a seizure and I had to make an active decision to watch those seizures happen. It broke my heart to watch him have a seizure. It was scary. I didn’t want to watch him go through another seizure, and another, and another.

And then I remembered that line from St. John of the Cross: To gaze is to love. So I watched. Over and over, I turned my gaze not to a seizure, but to Charlie. And I looked at him. And loved him.

I couldn’t stop any of the seizures. I couldn’t explain why he was having them—I still can’t. I couldn’t change anything about what was happening. But I could look at him with the gaze of love, and whisper to him that I was right there, watching him, loving him.

Charlie is not a problem that I need to solve, or something I need to fix. He is simply a person, my son. A person to love. A person to look at with the gaze of love.

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How often do each of my children ask me for this gaze, this love?

“Mom, look at me!”

“Mom, come look at this!”

“Mom, look!!”

“Look!”

But so often, my gaze is turned away from them. So often, I’m reluctant to turn my gaze from a variety of things: The chore I’m in the middle of, the book I’m reading, whatever has caught my attention on my phone.

So over the past four weeks, which have felt both like four seconds and four decades, I have intentionally focused on looking at this sweet family of mine, and looking in their eyes. At looking in their eyes when they wake up, gazing across the table from them during lunch.

Charlie takes two different medications twice a day for seizures, and each of them takes about thirty minutes to fully enter into his system. If he spits up during those thirty minutes, we have to redose the medications. So after I syringe a dose, I sit and simply look at him. For at least two hours a day, I just watch Charlie, gazing at him.

I don’t do any of this perfectly—only the Lord loves perfectly. But even on the craziest days, even on days where I feel pulled in eighteen directions, I can look at them with love.

And even on the days in the NICU or in the ambulance, when my little world feels like it’s constantly changing into something I didn’t expect, I can rest in the fact that His gaze is always on me, and He loves me.

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