On Parents and Penguins

Last weekend, after an amazing dinner with our fab friends (see kandid kiwi), we sat down to watch March of the Penguins. If you haven't seen this I highly recommend it--but make sure you have recently ingested some caffeine. Morgan Freeman is a talking lullaby, and the penguins, the ice, the soundtrack, are all pure dream.

This documentary is greater than a documentary. It is an epic, a parable, a love story--an Odyssey of sorts, slow enough to catch all the details. It is the story of what it means to be a parent. These funny, awkward little birds are trudging miles to and fro, starving themselves, dying in the cold, laying down their lives, for the tiny, grey, bald, completely unknowing and ungrateful babies.


One look at the things when they first stick their heads out of the egg and the logical question follows: all for this?


But when the young penguins take the water for the first time, we hear the resounding echo of the parents: all for THIS. Period.

The conclusions are obvious and too cutting. And what follows is a song of Thanksgiving for my parents, who walked and froze and starved for me, and more songs of prayer: for my sister Kendall and her husband Ricky who march now to the place of birth and self-sacrifice as they make way for their first child, for the young parents I see and know at church who are deep in the throes, and for our march, someday, that we will be like penguins.