There’s this beautiful entry in Julian of Norwich’s book of visions about the womb of Christ.
Julian of Norwich was a nun who lived in a room attached to a Catholic Church (the only kind there was at the time) during the scourge of the Black Death in the 1300s. In a feverish state and on the brink of death, she had multiple visions of Jesus. She survived her illness and lived to tell about these visions.
She was a devout Christian in the Catholic way, but her writings are refreshingly subversive, even for today’s standards.
Let’s get into some gender-bending, shall we?
In one of the recordings of her visions, she writes that we are always in the womb of Christ:
“…and our savior is our true Mother, in whom we are endlessly born and out of whom we shall never come.”
It’s as if we are always incubating in the very body of Christ—his body transcending sex and gender and time—transforming us, nourishing us, sustaining us, carrying us.
And not only that, but we are always being born--an endless birth, a moment of possibility and miracle suspended in time.
When I first enrolled in seminary, my deconstruction blown wide open and my vocational future unclear, I saw a picture of a woman on her ordination day. She was very pregnant and holding a toddler on her hip, with a red stole draped across both of their shoulders.
At the time, I was reeling from multiple miscarriages and not sure if I would ever become a mother. I hadn’t yet realized my own call to pastoral ministry but I looked at that picture and knew deep inside that was what I wanted.
And that has become true. My own daughter climbed all over me at my pandemic-era ordination service. I preached Christmas Day service three months pregnant and later to my denomination’s General Board seven months pregnant.
For me, motherhood and ordained ministry are all tied up in one another. I spent most of seminary wrestling with my miscarriages theologically, and that experience within my body profoundly shapes my approach to ministry and my understanding of God.
I have spent a lot of time thinking about what to do with pregnancy (the miscarrying of it, the lack of it, the miracle of it) theologically. I’ve wrestled with what to do with wombs outside of a heteronormative, patriarchal understanding of them.
And I’ve pondered this idea of Julian of Norwich in my heart (a la Mother Mary) about Christ, in whose womb we are eternally being carried.
What do the possibilities of this earthy experience tell us about the Holy One?
For one thing, I believe it tells us about the deep embodiment of God: that God cares about our bodies and that our bodies are messengers about the Divine. And not just when they are beautiful and new, or wise and old.
But also when they are disabled, when they are chronically ill, when they are broken and bruised, when they are leaking milk or blood, when they are emitting unseemly smells and sounds, when they are tired and healing, when they are declining, when they are dying.
Julian of Norwich wrote,
“the second person of the Trinity is our Mother in nature in our substantial creation, in whom we are founded and rooted, and he is our Mother of mercy in taking our sensuality*. And so our Mother is working on us in various ways, in whom our parts are kept undivided; for in our Mother Christ we profit and increase, and in mercy he reforms and restores us, and by the power of his Passion, his death and his Resurrection he is united to us in our substance.”
(*as in our senses)
Even in the very limits of our body we are learning about the Divine.
This is, perhaps, what it means to be always in the womb of Christ, in the body of Christ: eternally incubating in love unto death, a love that is so deep it is willing to die, and a love so profound that it somehow embodies and transcends death at the same time.
From before the beginning, from the womb itself, all the way until the end, indeed through the end, we are united with Christ.
She goes on to affirm this about Christ’s motherhood:
“I understand three ways of contemplating motherhood in God. The first is the foundation of our nature’s creation; the second is his taking of our nature, where the motherhood of grace begins; the third is the motherhood at work. And in that, by the same grace, everything is penetrated, in length and in breadth, in height and in depth without end; and it is all one love.”
There is no part of the human experience that is untouched by Christ. From amniotic fluid to funeral spices, we are carried, nourished, and sustained. His body, broken and expanded for us. His blood, transformed into food that feeds our little, dependent bodies.
Last Advent, I preached about the Magnificat—the liberation lullaby that Mother Mary sang when her womb encountered her cousin Elizabeth’s. And I talked about placenta, much to the discomfort of some of my parishioners.
But one of the benefits to the church for having birthing people in the pulpit is that we can give firsthand accounts of the most miraculous event on the planet. We can speak to the arrival of God in the world in a way that the other half of the world cannot.
So here’s some stuff you didn’t learn in health class:
When a person is pregnant, their uterus contains both the baby and the placenta. The placenta is an organ, and it becomes the life support system for the fetus, and it has a lot of important jobs, but nourishing the fetus is number one priority.
It is also responsible for swapping oxygen for carbon dioxide, eliminating waste, regulating the baby’s temperature, helping fight potential infections, and building immunity. However, given its vital role, shockingly little is known about the placenta.
It is only recently that scientists realized that this organ that is both part mother, part fetus, has a microbiome of its own that affects the health of the child the fetus will become for the rest of its life.
Did you get that? The placenta affects the health of a person for the rest of its life. We are all still living out the consequences of the time we spent with the placenta in our mother’s uterus.
The organ begins forming in the lining of the uterus as soon as a fertilized egg lands there, embedding itself deeply in the mother’s tissues and tapping into her arteries so aggressively that researchers liken it to cancer. Every minute, about 20 percent of the mother’s blood supply flows through the placenta. No wonder we’re so tired during pregnancy.
Trophoblasts are the generals of this placental invasion, and they are a force to be reckoned with. They shove other cells out of the way and destroy them with digestive enzymes so that they can take over and start building the placenta.
Not only are they brute warriors, but they’re also wicked smart. Trophoblasts do something that no other cell normally does: they start making molecules that identify themselves to the mother’s body as being a blood vessel cell rather than a placental cell. They do this so that the mother’s body does not reject the organ being formed.
The placenta does not technically belong to the mother. Our bodies create it, but it is part of the developing child, which means that 50 percent of the genetic material comes from the father—a foreign entity.
The organ, and the fetus, are both foreign to the mother’s body, yet her body tolerates them.
I mean, think about that.
For those of you who know about organ transplants, you’ll know that when an organ is transplanted into a human body, the patient must go through aggressive immune system suppression with drugs so that the new organ can be accepted, because our bodies’ natural response to a foreign organ is to reject it.
Yet the placenta tricks the mother’s cells into thinking it’s all her genetic material so that her body does not reject it. Scientists are now researching how the placenta works in order to better transplant other organs and prevent rejection.
This organ is the site of the first methods of communication between mother and baby. It’s the site of their first connection.
And because the health of the placenta directly affects the development of the baby, it is a liminal space of past (mother and father), the present (the developing baby), and the future (the baby’s health outcomes throughout its life).
It reaches back into the mother’s body while making future generations possible.
In the words of the writer of the Gospel of John:
“All things came into being through [Christ], and without him not one thing came into being….and the Word became flesh and lived among us.”
(many thanks to Like a Mother: A Feminist Journey through the Science and Culture of Pregnancy by Angela Garbes for turning me on to the miracle of placenta)
I post once a week about questions, texts (many things are sacred texts—my main, but not only, one is the Bible), and thematic discussions about all things faith.
The weekly post goes out to everyone, for free, always.
By subscribing to the paid portion, you receive a weekly post with links and recommendations (just trust me!), a subscriber-only audio recording of my post, and the ability to participate in discussions in the comment thread.
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.