Whittaker Chambers on the Blessing of Children

Last Week’s National March for Life presents an opportunity to reflect on the meaning of children.

Author Whittaker Chambers, while not focusing on children, in his body of work highlights a truth about children often forgotten by our culture: they do not belong to us but to God, who has chosen to bless us with them not just for our pleasure but ultimately for their good and our sanctification.

Children require a unique form of self-denial that is antithetical to many of society’s ideas about what leads to ultimate happiness, but which ultimately deepens and enriches our lives in a way that few other loves can. It is through this self-denial, which many desperately try to avoid, that we are ultimately blessed.

Chambers is best known as a former communist spy who left the Communist Party. He turned over evidence regarding the guilt of U.S. government official Alger Hiss for whom he had been a courier. His memoir, Witness, detailed his break with communism and conversion to Christianity.

The introduction to Witness, titled “Letter to My Children,” is in part a letter of advice, testimony, confession, apology and ultimately, love. While meant to be a testimony to the whole world, the opening of Witness is directed to his “beloved children.”

Chambers manages to preserve this tender and fatherly tone while he discusses the crisis of the age and why men were drawn to communism. It is the letter of a man who does not just love but has fallen in love with his children. It is amazing how we fall in love with children. Children expand and deepen our ability to love other persons in a way that few other relationships do. And it changes our ability not only to love only them but to love everyone else.

What frees men from communism, Chambers writes, is the soul realizing the reality of God. For Chambers, the thing that set this realization in motion was marveling at his daughter.

“I was watching her eat… I liked to watch her eat even when she smeared porridge on her face or dropped it meditatively on the floor,” Chambers writes.

He notes that in that moment he looked in amazement at the complexity of his daughter’s ear and thought that “They only could have been created by immense design.” And though he did not know it then, his separation from communism and conversion had begun because of the daughter the Communist Party had pressured him and his wife to abort.

In Witness, Chambers describes a time when both he and his brother agreed that the misery that they felt as children disqualified them from parenthood.

“There was enough misery in our family line,” Chambers writes. “What selfish right had I to perpetuate it?”

This sentiment, combined with the pressure of the Communist Party, made him and his wife contemplate abortion. But upon her return from the doctor, he asked her if she wanted to have the child. If only more men would ask their wives and girlfriends that question. When she responded yes, he wrote:

“A wild joy swept me. Reason, the agony of my family, the Communist Party and its theories, the wars and revolutions of the twentieth century, crumbled at the touch of the child.”

In an essay warning conservatives not to become enamored with Atlas Shrugged, Chambers critiques the “sterility” of the novel, despite the hypersexual lifestyle of its protagonists.

Children, as he notes, cannot fit into the world of Atlas Shrugged, where the highest good is selfishness, and where self-sacrifice is weakness. We too live in a culture that abhors self-denial. We are told that we can and should substitute children with plants, pets, and adult trips to Disney World. It is so much easier because, at the slightest inconvenience, plants can be tossed, pets kenneled, and Disney is a nice break from “adulting.”

But, children require constant care and self-denial. Women are told that their children stand in the way of their happiness as well as their career and lifestyle. The sacrifice that children require will keep us from living as our “authentic selves.” But this will never satisfy because, in trying to avoid this self-sacrifice, we are avoiding what we desperately need. We are made in the image of a creator whose nature is always self-gift, self-sacrifice, so much so that He gave His Son so that we could become His children and, as a result, better love our children. We will never be whole until we can bear out this image.

Chambers recounts that in one of his darker moments, it was his son who followed him into their yard at night. His entreaty, “Papa … don’t ever go away” is what saved Chambers from committing suicide. And of the birth of his daughter, Chambers wrote:

“The child we all yearn for, who, even before her birth, had begun, invisibly, to lead us out of that darkness, which we could not even realize, toward that light, which we could not see.”

Chambers bore “witness” to many truths, one being that children are a great gift from an indescribably good God.