Birth (Pastoring for Life: Theological Wisdom for Ministering Well)

The Mystery of Being Born

Howell, James C., Byassee, Jason

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781493422265
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

This volume explores the connections between our own birth, the experience of having children, and the new birth of the Christian life. Seasoned pastor James Howell offers theological perspectives on a variety of themes associated with birth, such as who we are in light of having once lived in utero, why people might have children, infertility, adoption, baptism, and how to make sense of it all in light of God coming to us first in Mary's womb and then as an infant. The book includes paintings, photos, and drawings. About the Series
Pastors are called to help people navigate the profound mysteries of being human, from birth to death and everything in between. This series, edited by leading pastoral theologian Jason Byassee, provides pastors and pastors-in-training with rich theological reflection on the various seasons that make up a human life, helping them minister with greater wisdom and joy.

Part 1: Our Mysterious Beginning

ONE
In My Mother’s Womb

God’s knitting: Is that how I got into my mother’s womb in the winter of 1954? Is that how you got started? What made the psalmist ponder his own past, when he was a microscopic next-to-nothing, and chalk it up to God? “You knit me together in my mother’s womb” (Ps. 139:13). We can say he was inspired, of course. But it’s complicated, isn’t it? Read novels, watch movies, or listen to your friends or your own life: how you took up residence in utero is a mix of falling in love, testosterone, estrogen, the chance of timing, the proverbial backseat. When and how were you conceived?

My parents were “trying.” My own first daughter was a bit of an accident. Lisa and I had just gotten married and moved and taken new jobs—and somehow hadn’t gotten around to talking about having children yet. Not long after what must have been conception, we both got a series of immunizations in a clinic with sternly worded signs threatening pregnant women with dire consequences. When the gynecologist gave us the news, I didn’t feel joy so much as numbness. We weren’t “ready” (whatever that means). We’ve always called our daughter “the most loved unwanted child in history.”

The theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar speaks of “the terrible accidentalness of sexual causation,” which may elicit a “reserved awe on the incomprehensible linking of God’s creative act with the accidental generation of nature. God did not, so to speak, will him unconditionally; instead, God connected his own creative act in the light with quite dark and blind co-causes.”1 Your parents: co-causers! Maybe Forrest Gump’s words at Jenny’s grave fit: “I don’t know if Momma was right or if it’s Lieutenant Dan. I don’t know if we each have a destiny, or if we’re all just floating around accidental-like on a breeze, but I think maybe it’s both. Maybe both is happening at the same time.”2

God made me. God made my daughter. God made you. But then you have to say God made all the accidental ones, and you have to grapple (as we will later) with God apparently not planting a little one in the womb of the woman desperately eager to become a mom. God made me and you, and Jesus in Mary’s womb; and God made that scandalous child in Bathsheba’s womb; and God made those with health challenges we’ll ponder later on. When God made the universe, circumstances were put in place for mammals to come into being with this peculiar potential for male sperm to invade female space to create life. How odd of God to knit you and me together in this quirky mix of creation, good intentions, luck, surprise, and delight!

You Really Are Special

The biology of God’s knitting is dumbfounding. You and I began as a miracle, a microscopic merger, an outright freak of nature that happens more than four times every second worldwide. Twenty or more were conceived while you read that last sentence. You might blush if you ponder the sexual act that spawned you. But let’s zoom in on that moment and what happened: an ovary released an egg, which sailed through the fallopian tube like a wide receiver running downfield ready to catch a ball if thrown. Sperm, exiting your father’s testicles, swam upstream through the vagina into the uterus. One out of a spurt of millions of sperm met up with that waiting egg. As Adam Rutherford explains, “On contact, that winning sperm released a chemical that dissolved the egg’s reluctant membrane, left its whiplash tail behind, and burrowed in.”3 This penetration, unseen, initiated the transformation of the egg into an embryo, which found its way to the lining of the uterus, coalesced there, and cell division commenced at a rapid pace.

We know things the psalmist never imagined. The chromosomes in the sperm and egg are shuffled, producing a deck never seen before, never to be seen again. You think you are a complicated, complex person? You have no idea. Your genome, the totality of your DNA, has something like three billion coded letters. Each massive batch is utterly unique, even though over one hundred billion people have been conceived and born on earth. Even if you are an identical twin, you’re still peculiar. The instructions built into these genes are, at that moment of conception, already directing how you will be constructed, how tall you’ll be, the color of your eyes, your proclivity to disease.

Your DNA, by the way, was forged inside your grandmother—as the egg that you came from was made inside your mother’s ovaries while she was inside her mother.4 I never met my maternal grandmother, who died before I was born. We have a few grainy black-and-white photos of her; when I study them, it’s a bit mind-boggling to think I once resided inside this woman, Estelle Comer Marley.

Even more humbling, gratifying, and stupefying is the far larger genetic truth—that you descended (in the “great leap forward”) from a group of great apes that existed many thousands of years ago. And your ancestry extends even further back into the mysterious origins of life and the universe itself. The psalmist writes,

When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,

the moon and the stars that you have established;

what are human beings that you are mindful of them? (Ps. 8:3–4 NRSV)

Knowing that those stars were billions of years in the making, and that we are too, we have even greater cause than the psalmist to be dumbfounded.

Utterly Dependent

The fused zygote begins doubling in size every few hours as it settles into its new abode in the uterus. After a week, this complex marvel is one-tenth of one millimeter long. Barely there. But talk about a growth spurt: he’s twice as long in just one more week; she’s grown sixteenfold by week eight, when mom finally figures out she’s pregnant. From the fetus’s perspective, mom is a colossus, the child downright Lilliputian. Rapid development of the child’s fledgling organs and limbs continues for months until mom is showing. After a few more weeks, mom’s belly is quite obvious, continuing to expand until it sticks way out there, beautifully if laughably. After a big meal we say, “My stomach might pop.” A pregnant woman’s looks and feels like it just might, but it never does.

The very early division, compression, and metamorphosis of cells is amazing. Mom, as host, is keeping this new, microscopic life alive with zero effort or awareness. The child isn’t exerting effort either. A fragile ecosystem somehow develops, and it actually works. The placenta, really just a temporary organ, provides oxygen and blood to the fetus, sharing nutrients from mom’s system, and transferring fetal waste back through mom’s body for disposal. Mom breathes, involuntarily, and her oxygen makes its way into her bloodstream. In its aquatic, squishy world, the baby can’t breathe, so the placenta functions as its lung.

The umbilical cord shares in these labors. We speak of “navel gazing,” with derisive connotations; but where better to look to contemplate the befuddling fact of existence? Mark Sloan, pondering what that belly button once was, points out that “it’s just been there collecting lint ever since. But there was a time when it was the center of my world, the sole port through which every molecule of food and oxygen that went into making me arrived.”5

I love the moment in the film The World according to Garp when Garp, despairing that no one is buying his novel, learns that Helen is pregnant. Moved to tears, sighs, and laughter, he climbs onto the bed, uncovers her belly, draws a face with a marker, and says, “He’s in here, right? It’s nice in there, I know.”6 How good of God at the very outset, before anybody knows you exist, to engulf you in such a nice, nurturing, free-of-charge, secret, and warm world of what can only be called grace.

A Glimpse into the Womb

When I took up residence in my mother’s womb, no one knew who or what or how I was until I came out. When it came time for me to become a father, we were afforded a glimpse into the womb, but only by a kind of trickery: the ultrasound, developed to detect icebergs and submarines, provided not a straightforward snapshot but a grayish, grainy impression of a very real creature only a few inches tall. Parents see these images and become giddy, their wee one posing for the first of countless photos—though the child really has nowhere else to be.

I recall being amused and maybe a little grossed out when the excited technician smeared brownish jelly all over Lisa’s tummy. I wondered what we would see. I didn’t expect to hear anything—but then remembered it’s called an ultrasound. A swooshing sound began as the technician probed left and right—and then there she was, my daughter. “Do you see the head?” I said yes, but in all candor it was like deciphering a Rorschach inkblot—an apt image, as I would spend the next few decades wondering, “What is it?” The technician asked, “Do you see the heart?” I replied, “Not really.” This tiny creature, who would change our lives and the lives of so many, was hiding in there, alive and pulsating, not big enough yet for Lisa to be showing.

How sad, and yet understandable, that life in utero has gotten politicized and has become the fulcrum that determines elections and Supreme Court appointments. Both the wee one within and the mother housing the wee one are medical marvels. Surely both merit rights and protections and attention and immense love. So much heart stuff is at stake: the fetus’s minuscule heart beating just below and entirely because of the beating of the mother’s far larger heart above.

No wonder heart is the word we use when we speak of love. When no one had ever met you, when the most visible you’d been was through that grainy ultrasound, you were loved; you were the cause of dreams, worry, and sometimes heartbreak. We think of newborns as dependent—and so they are. But if you want to see dependency, if you want an unrivaled portrayal of what grace and mercy are like, peer into the womb. Ponder that ultrasound snapshot or marvel at those startlingly beautiful photos somebody figured out how to take of intrauterine life. You were there. So was the person you love or the one who gets on your nerves. Tenderness and mercy must be required among us wonders of nature.

As if to ensure we’d have the most vivid image possible of what mercy is, God worked it out that the Hebrew language’s word that we translate “mercy” comes from the same root as the word for “womb.” Mercy is womb-like. We forever carry some dim recollection of how warm and embracing that mercy was. You’ll always crave a return to that mercy.

You’ll need that mercy, if you’re a fetus or if you’re a grownup reading this book, for the journey ahead will be tougher than you realize. Gorillas, baboons, and chimpanzees have it easier. Not only do they not feel the anxieties that afflict us. Their birth is also more straightforward, a direct shot out of their mother’s womb. Human infants have those twists and turns, the possibility of going breech. Why are things so complicated for us? Is God still rankled about the apple? “I will greatly increase your pangs in childbearing” (Gen. 3:16 NRSV). No matter how well obstetricians and midwives improve their craft, childbirth is still extremely difficult and painful for the mom—and for the equally helpless child inside.

Modern people scoff at the medieval notion that original sin is transmitted to each person in the womb (with the possible exceptions of Jesus and his mother). Understandably, theologians tried to reckon with the reality that every person inevitably and unfailingly is a sinner—and right out of the womb. Whether or not you’re fond of the notion of original sin, you realize our immense need for God’s mercy—not merely once you’re old enough to be accountable but from birth, even from conception forward. And as we fully understand that all our human brokenness (whether it’s baldness, allergies, tendencies to depression or alcoholism, or mortality itself) is right there at conception and in us always, we need not shrink back from the idea that we most certainly are, as the hymn puts it, “weak and wounded, sick and sore . . . bruised and mangled by the fall.”7

Called from the Womb

If God is fully present in utero, if God somehow knit us together, if God understands the complex realities of life in the womb and the daunting challenges of the journey ahead better than we do, then can we make sense of God’s will, of God’s desire for this fragile, latent person in the making? Is God merely rooting for survival? If mom and dad are already harboring dreams for this child, then how much more will God already be envisioning a holy, faithful life for this disciple-to-be? We think of God’s calling as coming to attentive seekers, to young adults, or to those in midlife crisis. But in utero? Isaiah 49:5 teases out the idea that the prophet had been formed in the womb by God “to be his servant, to bring Jacob back to him” (NRSV). Jeremiah countered God’s call by saying “I am only a boy” (NRSV); but then on further reflection, he began to intuit that God had actually been calling him even in his mother’s womb (Jer. 1:4–10).

A fetus can detect sound at twenty-six weeks. Can it hear God? Does God call particular people, or all people, even in their mothers’ wombs? What is calling anyhow? Is the divine call a voice out of nowhere? Isn’t each person’s sense of divine vocation a symphony of voices that call? Messages overheard from mom and dad, attributes and skills fostered in the womb and in later chance encounters, some church chatter and personal musings mixed in there: we process it all and infer that God is asking something of us. Frederick Buechner famously wrote that “the place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”8

Fascinating: the world’s deep hunger is out there, waiting for you to be born and notice; and your deep hunger is already there, festooned in your DNA, destined by the parents you happen to have and the place you’ll happen to live. What if mom and dad begin, during pregnancy, to ponder that this unseen child is already being called by God? And what if you and I reminisce a bit and puzzle over what we probably missed back then—and since!—that God is calling us, even in utero?

To follow that calling, and frankly just to survive, mountains of help will be needed—from God and from others. God has wired us to need and to help one another, to be interd...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Series Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part 1: Our Mysterious Beginning
• Part 2: Jesus’s Birth and Early Life
• Part 3: The Complexities of Conception and Raising Children
• Part 4: Our New Birth
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Scripture Index
• Subject and Name Index
• Back Cover