By the time you read this, my local airline will have abandoned its “open seating” policy of letting people sit wherever they want as they board the plane. The money crunchers have decreed that there are greater profits in being an airline where people pay more for assigned seats. I liked the open-seating policy because, once I put my bag in the overhead bin, I could check out the seated folks to see whom I’d like to sit beside. I’d tend to gravitate toward people who had a book in their lap. I have to say, it was otherwise with people who had a baby in their lap.

Midway through a recent flight I noticed that the row ahead had a couple with a baby and a young fellow—four people in the three seats. I had not noticed them! They were casually dressed and lovely. The young fellow was by the window, the two adults side-by-side, armrest raised, nestling and dozing with their baby, shoulder to shoulder.

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We heard from other babies in other rows of that airplane, which put me in mind of churches, another public place in which babies’ cries can fly through space. A high-ceilinged church which is well-constructed for sound to travel: what better place could there be for a baby to practice vocalizing! A church that is built to hold five hundred people allows a lot of sound-wave experimentation.

As a pastor, I have always wanted children, including the youngest ones, to be present in church, to experience the special actions of worship. It is hard to think of any other public space where we do what we do in church. We sit, then stand together. We listen, then we speak together. We sing. We hear loud music and quiet music. Imagine you are from Mars and you have no idea of what church means: you would notice these things people come together to do which they don’t do in their homes or in stores or restaurants, things done in church, more or less every week, which are unlike everything else in the week.

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I have imagined that children, even before they can understand words, are nonetheless able to have a pre-verbal understanding of the worship of God that happens when we gather in our worship assemblies. God can reach them, and therefore they ought to be there.

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Many years ago, before I went to seminary, my wife and I and our not-quite-toddler son were at a sparsely attended Easter vigil. I had gone to the back with our son, to hold him and whisper to him as the service went on. We were pacing back and forth. Way up front a baby was being baptized. In the midst of the questions and answers and prayers that precede a baptism, that baby cried out. Our son cried in response. The baby up front cried again. So did our son. It was as if they were having their own communication, carried through that space by the Holy Spirit, in a language that only they—and God—knew.

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Yes, despite difficulties in managing occasional disruptions, it is very good to have babies around.