October is Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness month, and it feels a bit extra for me to write something about it considering I have spent so many years talking about it already. I have written so many blog posts and communion meditations and sermons and seminary papers and Instagram captions on my experiences that I wonder if there is anything new to say.
In the world of reproductive loss, there are many ~journeys.~ I hate that word. No one sets out on one on their own. We are often thrust onto a road where we do not recognize the road signs or the landmarks, and it is so very lonely.
My ~journey~ was recurrent miscarriages, and it sucked. I talked a little bit about it in this recent post.
I think I continue to write about this because there is so much shitty theology out there surrounding miscarriages and fertility. My pursuit of better theology around this issue will fill a book one day, I’m sure of it. But for now, I write here, always looking for hope that is not delusional and theology that can withstand the end of the world–even the little worlds of pregnancies.
A caveat: pregnancy is not limited to cisgender women—non-binary folks and trans men can also carry a child. I will use both gender neutral and feminine pronouns when talking about all things pregnancy, but if I default to feminine pronouns, it is because I am often talking about my own experience and my pronouns are she/her.
So let’s consider some of the narratives that are out there for miscarriages:
Your baby is in heaven. You will have a child one day. God has a plan for your life.
Look at the success stories of Sarah, Hannah, and Elizabeth. They waited so long and were so faithful, and look! God gave them a baby. Hannah’s response even fits on a onesie: “For this child I prayed.”
Let’s talk about heaven first.
The prevailing response to death of any kind in Christian circles is heaven, which is offered as a disembodied reunion, separate from our experience now, where everything has been fixed, and where we all remain distinct.
This offering is unhelpful, to say the least.
First, it opens the door to some dangerous conclusions. If heaven is not accessible until we die, in the midst of grief and depression that is strong and test results that do not give definitive answers, death seems welcoming. But not in a healthy, sacramental way, but rather in a deceptive way, as a vehicle for a grieving person to reunite with their child.
Second, this view of heaven privileges life and whole bodies over death and broken bodies, which runs contrary to the truth at the altar (“This is my body, broken for you” and all that).
How we understand the role of the body in spirituality is crucial. Jesus, in both his life and his death, signified the importance of bodies. Broken bodies and spilled blood were hallowed in the story of Jesus, and what happens to a person in miscarriage happens to their body and within their body. To point to a nebulous afterlife as the place of hope denies key parts of the Christian story.
Miscarrying people exist within a liminal space of death and life.
Bodies are no longer just bodies—they are also tombs
While she lives, a part of her, and yet not part of her, dies.
She is fragmented and dead while remaining whole and alive.
It’s a real mind fuck.
So can we play with some theology together?
Let’s play with Christology first.
If we are being Trinitarian about it, Christ, through his death, brought death to God. Before the cross event, God was only life, but once Christ died, death became part of God.
An ancient theologian, Origen, talks about the defeat of death in a fascinating way:
“For the destruction of the last enemy [death] must be understood in this way, not that its substance which was made by God shall perish, but that the hostile purpose and will which proceeded not from God, but from itself will come to an end. It will be destroyed, therefore, not in the sense of ceasing to exist, but of being no longer an enemy and no longer death.”
In other words, Christ, in dying, made death not an enemy or a punishment, but rather, a part of God.
One of the values of imago Dei (that humans bear the image of God) is that we are able to recognize ourselves in God, an identity that does not depend on a heart beating.
Just as a person goes on living while death resides in her, God, too, knows what it is to live while part of God is dead.
Rev. Dr. Serene Jones, in her exploration of her own miscarriage wrote, “The whole of Trinity, we are told, takes death into itself. Jesus doesn’t die outside of God but in God, deep in the viscera of that holy tripartite union.”
God, like me, lives while death is part of God’s self in Jesus.
In this sense, in a month like October, God can be considered as the miscarrying God, and Jesus, the miscarried God.
What does this have to do with the narratives I mentioned earlier surrounding miscarriages?
I have found the work of Sallie McFague* to be immensely helpful when confronted with these narratives steeped in inadequate theology.
She writes,
“God is not a being, even the highest being; God is reality. This is another way of saying God is being itself, or the ground of all that is real, is actual, exists.”
We are in God and God is in us, no matter what happens. This understanding of God differs from the narrative that God is orchestrating events according to a master plan, or watching as events unfold, because God is not apart from the events—God is within and around and beyond events.
An important part of miscarriage and reproductive issues is the pointlessness of it. We do not experience these things in order to learn a lesson or become a better person or to share our story for the glory of God. There is no hidden purpose. There is no inherent meaning. It just is.
This experience is not happening to me or for me. It’s just happening.
By allowing suffering to be suffering, we actually validate it. We see it clearly.
And so seeing God as someone who knows what it is to live and die at the same time, to be alive yet a grave, grounds me in a reality, a story that is ancient and true.
In this way, I am no longer the Other among Mothers. I am in God, I am in the image of God, and the bleeding, grieving body that has been mine is hallowed. Because even in death–however fragmented–we are in God.
*My favorite books from Sallie McFague are Life Abundant and Models of God. 100% worth the read.
I post once a week about questions, stories, and faithiness. The weekly post goes out to everyone, for free, always.
By becoming a paid subscriber, you also receive a weekly links post filled with the best stuff I read/listened to/watched, as well as the occasional audio recording of posts. You also have the ability to leave comments.
And of course, by being a paid subscriber, your generosity allows me to continue to do this work, and to do it better each week.