Isn’t She Lovely

By Bobby Neal Winters

I listen to the radio while I work in my shop. Actually, it’s not strictly the radio: It is a radio station on my Alexa.  In any case, it’s a classic rock station.  This is stuff I listened to in my twenties.  

It’s a good exercise to go back and listen with the years of a 60-year-old to what you heard when you were twenty.  At twenty, you may have just heard the chorus, and you may not have even understood that.

A week or so ago, I listened to Stevie Wonder singing, “Isn’t She Lovely?”, and I realized it’s a completely different song than what I thought I’d been listening to for the last forty years.

The difference hinges on the “she.”  If all you listen to is the hook in the chorus, you can be forgiven for thinking that “she” is the singer’s romantic interest.

No.  Far from it.

“She” is his newly born daughter.

Joy is rushing through his heart because of the birth of a daughter.  I’ve experienced this three times in my life, so I can connect.  Doubtless, this would’ve been part of my personal soundtrack at the birth of each of my daughters, but I didn’t understand the song.

This is a song that is, shall we just use the word, religious, and it takes a theological stance.

We have been Heaven-blessed/

I can't believe what God has done/

Through us, He's given life to one/

But isn't she lovely made from love?

The singer here recognizes that couples partner with God in the creation of human life.  He firms it up, by pointing out that in a loving family, a child is created in an act of love.  That child is a walking symbol of that act of love.

The part about being a partner with God in the creation of life was uttered first by Eve when she said, “I’ve got me a man with the Lord.”  This was reinforced when Mary gave birth to Jesus, who Christians hold to be the Son of God.

God’s part in the procreation process was reinforced in Biblical passages where women petitioned God plaintively to give them a child: “And God remembered Rachel, and God hearkened to her and opened her womb. And she conceived and bore a son...”

Whether you are religious or not, this represents the human understanding of the connection of sex with procreation and the continuation of the species.  God is Being Itself and we continue the Being of the human race by having children.

This point of view is deep within our culture.  It has to be or we wouldn’t still be around.

For those of us who grew up when the agrarian tradition was more prevalent, we learned that a bull was a “daddy” cow and the cow was the “mommy” cow.  A rooster was a “daddy” chicken and a hen was a “mommy” chicken.  Those are terms taken from a typical, traditional family that a child can understand. 

Bringing God into procreation is recognition that a child is not conceived every time a couple comes together.  The creation of the child was viewed as God’s blessing of the act.

As children have come to be viewed in some quarters as being an inconvenient byproduct of sex, it might be confusing to some why they were so sought after by the ancients.  Well, children were considered to be valuable in those days.  They could help tend the sheep, help tend the crops, and they could take care of you when you were old.

Beyond that, however, I do believe there is something primitive deep within us that yearns.  We have this collection of ancient voices within ourselves which speak below the threshold of hearing.  They attempt to direct us. Some have called it the collective unconscious, but I don’t know enough about it to go any further.  These voices are sometimes silenced by culture; sometimes they are redirected.  But they are always there.

Religion gives us language and context for this. It provides meaning where we might otherwise be faced with a reality that was just one damned thing after another.

So, I didn’t get “Isn’t She Lovely?” forty years ago.  I do now, and it is indeed lovely. A man, a woman, and if God wills, a new life.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like'' the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube. )