Fourth Tuesday of Advent
Today's readings feature the words of Mary, a teenage girl experiencing an unexpected pregnancy, and Hannah, an older woman who has given birth after many years of infertility. These two vastly different narratives are united by the shared experience of pregnancy, labor, birth, and entrance into motherhood.
In May I will graduate as a reproductive health nurse practitioner— a career that allows me to care for people in all areas of their reproductive health from pap smears to birth control counseling to prenatal care. During my clinical rotations when I am caring for a prenatal patient, I will often open up the visit by checking in on their overall wellbeing. Patients are quick to share the various ailments they are experiencing: swollen ankles, lower back pain, Braxton hicks contractions, jabbing pain in their ribs, difficulty sleeping, leg cramps. Usually by 35 weeks, patients will say to me “I’m ready for this baby to be here already!” As they get closer to their due date, their body begins to prepare for labor— aptly named because it is hard, physically and emotionally laborious work. Postpartum encompasses a new set of joys and challenges— lack of sleep, cuddles, mood changes, watching a tiny human grow, and navigating a new identity.
While I am not a mother myself, which limits an embodied understanding of what birth entails, I have been privileged that many patients have opened themselves up and allowed me an intimate look into their birth experiences: the challenges, joys, pain, and messiness. Yet, when talking about the incarnate birth within the church, the multifaceted nature of pregnancy, labor, birth, and postpartum are absent from the narrative. Queer Latinx theologian, Marcella Althaus Reid, writes about how we need to talk more about the “indecency of the incarnation” and theologian Lisa Isherwood calls us to remember that “it was not a sanctuary that held Jesus, but a womb; [and] he too took the walk down the vaginal aisle [arriving] into a world of shit, blood, and weeping.”
2020 has been a heavy year for many of us: a global pandemic, wildfires rampant across the west coast, protests across the country, a presidential election. These events have highlighted the longstanding systemic inequalities, anti-blackness, white supremacy, police violence, and overall injustice embedded into the infrastructure of almost every institution in our country (including the church). Recently, my social media pages have become a forum around the topic of abolition— a conversation which has always existed but has become more mainstream over the past several months. To abolish the existing systems and ways of being requires us to birth something new— community care, centering Black joy, those with privilege giving up power, resting rather than grinding. But this birth will not occur without “shit, blood and weeping.” We cannot sanitize the process of abolishing these systems. We cannot shame or police the ways communities demand justice. Birth is messy. Birth is hard. We may experience swollen ankles and leg cramps from marching in the streets in protest, difficulty sleeping as our nervous systems learn that it is safe to rest in our own homes, and palpitations in our chest as we overcome anxiety and speak truth to power. We may proclaim “I’m ready for change to come!” as we find ourselves tiring due to the difficulty of this work. But during this time of Advent, as we prepare for the birth of Christ, let us trust the messiness and indecency of this process as we work to abolish these oppressive systems and birth new ways of being.
