Perhaps the best part of newborn life is when your child begins to emerge from the potato-baby phase and starts to interact. Yes, the new baby smell and milk-drunk floppiness after a feeding are also particularly delightful, but they are nothing compared to the first time your child smiles at you. These are moments that I regretfully forget unless I have a newborn. But praise God, I currently have a newborn and have been reflecting a lot on these interactions.

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Let’s set the scene: Baby Rose is lying on my bed and staring at the overhead fan. I click my tongue at her, and her gaze catches mine. She smiles the sweetest, toothless smile ever. Instinctively, I begin to talk to her in my high-pitched baby voice, “Hello, Rose. Hey Rosie girl. I love you.” And how does she respond? She raises her eyebrows, maintaining her open-mouthed smile. For this brief moment, I have the feeling that she knows who I am, despite not understanding what I’m saying, despite being incapable of truly understanding what ‘I love you ’ means, and the depths to which I mean it. I’m so taken by her wordless gaze that I simply smile back.

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As I stare down at this baby, I am nowhere but in this moment. I don’t want to be anywhere else, and I don’t want to do anything else. In this ordinary moment, our Lord, in his goodness and through his grace, is teaching me about prayer. “Contemplation is a gaze of faith, fixed on Jesus; I look at him, and he looks at me: this is what a certain peasant of Ars in the time of his holy curé used to say while praying before the tabernacle” (CCC 2715). Those words sum up this moment: “I look at him, and he looks at me.” We experience this gaze of love with our smallest children, and we are called to experience this same gaze of love with Love Himself, Jesus. Through motherhood, Jesus is walking me through and showing me the simplicity and power of contemplation. Right now, with four children and seemingly endless demands on my time, it is crucial that I take the time to remain in the gaze of my littlest one. And yet, how often do I respond to Jesus’ moments of grace, when he catches the eye of my soul and invites me to remain in his gaze for a moment? With his grace, I pray that I will learn to remain in his gaze more, just like my own child is learning to gaze back at me.