From Your Minister
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Before rebirth, there has to be birth. I have never given birth, but I have been privileged to witness two human babies, six puppies, three kittens, and a few birds and turtles enter the world. And I suspect all of us have watched documentaries of the same kinds of thing.
Of course, it’s different to witness someone else giving birth than to be center stage, either as the one giving birth or the one being born. What’s that old joke about the difference between involvement and commitment? Take a plate of ham and eggs: The chicken was involved, the pig was committed.
I suspect that rebirth, like birth, demands that we be committed, not just involved. When I say rebirth, I mean real, deep rebirth, not the kind we experience every day, not the kind that is ours from a good night’s sleep or a great conversation. I mean turn-your-life-around, emerge anew, rebirth. Quitting drinking. Walking away from the corporate job to teach in an inner city school. Realizing you have been mean and committing yourself to kindness above all else. A brand new life, beginning here.
Though some of us, because of gender or age or choice or circumstance, have physically given birth, and some of us have not, I think we can all learn from the birth process. (And I’ll stick to the human birth process, because humans can talk about it.) Perhaps the birth process might be instructive to all of us about some of what goes into rebirth.
Before birth, there is conception. And that is no small thing. I know people who would have been the finest parents on earth who climbed every mountain medically possible to conceive a child, who dedicated great focus and wisdom and fortune to faithfully doing all of the things that make conception possible and likely, and yet were unable to conceive. And I know—don’t we all know—women for whom pregnancy is undesired, ill-timed, wrong, who find themselves pregnant, having done everything in their power not to be. Conception is a mystery, ultimately not in human control.
After conception, there is gestation. Gestation, for some women, means glowing with health and vitality. For others, it means wretched misery. And for most there are different times of health and misery woven together through the long gestation period. Let’s just say there is pretty universal queasiness. Women describe a feeling of the body being something alien, inhabited, different. A feeling of disequilibrium that goes on and on and on, until it feels almost unbearable and the thought of the pain of giving birth is less awful than the thought of going on another day in the current situation.
Or not. Many pregnancies end, not in birth, but in miscarriage. Apparently more women than we used to think miscarry in the first few weeks, so that many of the women who thought they were pregnant, but then think their cycle was just a little different, actually were pregnant very briefly. Some women, who desperately want to be pregnant and do everything possible not to miscarry, miscarry. Some who pray for, even try to induce miscarriage, can’t.
And of course there are the pregnancies that end by medical intervention, for a variety of reasons—health, personal, relational. Not all conception, not all gestation, results in birth. Sometimes there is a long, queasy gestation period before it is determined that a pregnancy is not viable, that carried to term, the resulting birth would not bring sustainable life. When this happens, there is heartbreak not only for the pain endured in the present for those who loved that growing being, but also pain for life that was imagined that will never be, cannot happen.
But, presuming that gestation results in a full term pregnancy, in a new being ready to emerge into the world, between gestation and birth there is some pretty hard work for the mother and the baby. The mother, surrounded by those others most deeply committed to this baby’s life and well being, feels a quickening, and contractions, and water breaking, and then begins to push. And this can be pretty painful.
At the first birth I attended, the nurse kept saying to my friend, “Push beyond the pain, Jane.” After the birth was over and life was calm again, I asked Jane, “What was beyond the pain when you pushed?” I expected her to say something cosmic like, ‘White light and beautiful music.” Jane looked at me as if I was simple and replied, “The baby, of course!” Much more cosmic than white light and beautiful music, now that I think about it.
So, that’s birth… Conception, which is out of our control. Gestation period, which brings queasiness and uncertainty. Pain and intense focus. Different for every pregnancy and person. But then, ultimately, something beyond the pain. Does that seem like it describes rebirth, too?
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