In a recent blog post in The Times of Israel, published on 4 April 2019, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks reflects on the sacrifices required by Jewish law after a woman has given birth. Two sacrifices are expected after the period of purification following the event of the birth has elapsed. Both are described as ‘sin-offerings’ even though it is clear that the woman in question has not committed any personal sin in the birthing process. What, then, is the rationale behind this law? Besides some ancient interpretations for this apparent incongruity, Rabbi Sacks offers his own view. He reflects on the symbolic meaning of exclusion from the Temple (which is not what we now mean by being ‘impure’) and on the idea that human birth and human death are integrally linked. Thus, he clarifies, ‘The woman who had just given birth was … teme’a [unfit for entering the Temple] … because birth, like death, is a signal of mortality, which has no place in the Temple, the space set aside for consciousness of eternity and spirituality’. This article explores the idea that the limits of life – birth and death – are essentially contiguous events. Moreover, it underlines through some examples – because death is a topic upon which theory fits uneasily – that birth and death come together most poignantly from a woman’s perspective because women are at the forefront of the experience of childbirth.
Childbirth is discussed in today’s society primarily in terms of women’s rights. In such debates, the overwhelming refusal to see abortion as death in the womb is part of a larger uneasiness with respect to the process of giving life as it takes place in our world that posits itself outside religious (or other) frameworks. Behind the rational motivations supporting the abortion campaigners’ viewpoint, there lies a deeper refusal to accept that creating a life is to subject it to change and death. Treating fetuses as things we dispose of inures one to the task of childbirth. Women would rather give up their privileged insight into the work of creation along with the responsibility this insight implies than admit to the fragility of participating in the simultaneous mechanisms, and mysteries, of life and death. As it is, the experience of childbirth cannot merely be enjoyed; rather, we must to an extent also undergo it, allow it to transform us by taking us to the edge of that abyss. That is a terrifying thing. Its unpredictability is especially tough to acknowledge in the age of neatly-packaged Facebook storylines.
It was no less terrifying in the past. In the Middle Ages, women with fertility problems would pray at shrines and practice incubation over saints’ tombs. Such practices, not unlike those at Classical temples, are often understood as magical. But prayers over the bones of the saints could enact a fundamental reconciliation between that woman and her responsibility for giving birth to new life. The sanctity of relics promised not so much the attainment of future immortality, but rather offered the present reassurance of the goodness of life that stems from seeing even dry bones remembered and honored. Revered tombs reassure us that bodies can have a point even after death. Our own practice of reverence has the power to unleash creativity by releasing us from the fear of the unknown, from the threat of death hidden in the first step to life. It persuades us that it is worth using our own bodies to contribute to such ongoing goodness.
The contrary is also true, though, namely, that women who accept the experience of motherhood are led to a transformation of the self by this simultaneous consciousness of life in death, and of death in life. My friend Lisen died of cancer a few months short of her fiftieth birthday. At times I think I came to Sweden just to meet this woman. We spoke on the kids’ first day of school. She told me matter-of-factly she had been sick.
“Sick with what?”, I asked.
“Cancer”, she replied.
I was stupidly shocked, this seemed so incongruous. Here was this loving, active woman shepherding noisy first-graders in front of my eyes. She had cancer.
Lisen was not religious, and a bitter anticlerical streak surfaced occasionally in her, perhaps stemming from some past bad experience, though I do not know for sure. I often thought faith might help her in some way, if only by providing occasions for prayer and a sharing in Christ’s suffering. But then again she was one of those people so thoroughly good for whom religion would not add anything, ethically speaking. Her Calvary of suffering was surely purifying enough for anything she or indeed anyone else might have done wrong. She embraced that experience as wholeheartedly as she had embraced life. She rarely spoke about her illness, which steadily got worse. Yet, to the astonishment of her friends, she survived the catastrophic medical forecast by a number of years. She was a kind of living miracle.
Lisen’s strength was her family, her children. She was totally devoted to their growth and well-being. I remember her worrying about them much more than about herself. She had worked as a researcher in physics, and so was no typical stay-at-home mum. Her analytical and critical skills were transferred without attenuation to her daily life as a mother and to the added care of a cluster of friends around the school (mainly foreigners like me) whom she was always keen to help. In her journey towards death, one could see that it was not seeing the children through to adulthood that was her greatest pain, more painful than the body-deforming cancer with which she had to fight.
A mother’s hope that she engender a good human being, a positive addition to God’s creation, need not imply that she wishes that child to be just like her. Nor is it necessary that children carry us forward into their memories, because, from a mother’s perspective, it is they who count more than our own lives. Only this point of view can explain how some women can accept the toughest decision of all, to ‘abort’ themselves and let their child live. The pediatrician Gianna Beretta Molla (1922-1962) refused medical intervention to save her fourth child’s life at the expense of her own. She was canonized in 2004. Her daughter, for whom she died, now gathers people’s intentions for prayer to her saintly mother and continues the witness of her life: ‘how many babies I met called Gianna — because they were born thanks to the intercession of my mom!’, she declared in a recent interview. If asked directly, few would think they could muster Gianna’s courage. But while with hindsight this was certainly an act of heroism, its premise was simply the coherent acceptance of the life-and-death bundle that lands in our arms with life itself as an indissoluble package.
My aunt kept a straw bag ready for her weekly trips to the cemetery. It contained a pair of scissors to shorten the flowers to the size of the pot and some paper to wipe the dust off the stone slab, and some bus tickets. In her otherwise mostly solitary life, the trip to the cemetery was also a social occasion, a place to meet some distant relative and to catch up with the news – not only about who died when. It was also a place for alms to the beggars at the cemetery’s door. In her regular visits, death was interwoven with life, without any special pathos, without any ostentatious lament. And the people at the cemetery, those buried there, remained to some extent in the narrative of the living, part of their weekly conversation, and not some forgotten, remote and discarded body, wiped out from the here and now of our self-consciously positive and busy lives.
You can click to put a flower on the selected gravestone now through the website of the ‘Cimiteri Capitolini’ in Rome. That saves the journey. And the skype icon of my mother is still there among the other interlocutors I have accumulated through the years, reminding me every time I open that app that she is now permanently ‘offline’. Death has crept into our computerized existences as much as it has seeped out of our real ones. The wish that it could stay virtual might easily persuade us not to look around where death is experienced. Today my app store is offering me a game entitled ‘Explore. Die. Repeat.’ where I could, if I so wished, ‘Enjoy supreme action in the dazzling Dead Cells.’ Playing the last life of the virtual heroes enacts a kind of exorcism against the ultimate limit. It pushes away its finality. But even so, death’s fear relentlessly persecutes us unless we turn to tackle this issue. Even its distant hovering is a blocking presence, as fear to look at death eats away our capacities to name reality and live it. It chills the birthing process and transforms the motions of motherhood into an incoherent parody. Even Jesus on the cross must be alive nowadays to be acceptable. It is notable, however, that his promise of salvation had to go through the unavoidable experience of a horrible death, and that his mother was there with him.
In the traditional, ancient iconography of the Crucifixion, a man and a woman stand on either side of Jesus: they are the disciple John and his mother Mary. It is especially Mary’s lament that has been given voice in poetry throughout the Middle Ages, in many different, moving, and, for us, even slightly shocking ways. Often the verses connect Mary’s acceptance of the angel’s request with the fateful destiny of her son on the cross, as for example in the words of this Byzantine lament: “O sweetest Jesus, the Magi coming to Bethlehem did not only bring you gold for a king and incense for a divinity, but also myrrh as for a dead person. … What is more burning than fire for a loving mother than the death of an only son? That greeting of Gabriel, who said to me not long ago ‘The Lord is with you!’, sounds not without irony now that you lie among the dead, while I am still breathing the air of the living”. The transaction at the Annunciation was no mere womb-hiring. Mary at once accepted birth and death, allowing God’s plan to penetrate fully into the human dynamics of existence and experience, albeit without their usual fallacies and weaknesses.
In a thirteenth-century Passion play from the island of Cyprus, Mary’s grief is tied to her experience of maternity. In her lament, she addresses the cross with these passionate words: “Bend down, O cross, that I may embrace my son/ and kiss tenderly my beloved heart, the apple/ of my eye; Him whom I suckled at these breasts/ after a strange manner, as not having known man./ Bend down, O cross; I wish to throw my arms/ around my dearest son. Bend down, O cross,/ that I, as a mother, may/ bid farewell to my most beloved son, and/ kiss him tenderly”. As in Michelangelo’s Pietà, the mother holds the body across her lap first to suckle the baby and then to mourn the dead beloved son.
Although our modern taste for silent dirges and contained emotions has shut up Mary’s voice, it is Mary’s experience that all women share not just if they are unlucky enough to have to witness their children’s death, but every time they go through with accepting a birth. To accept their bodies as potential creators, women must find a way of coping with their awareness of the mortality of both creator and creature. Religious practices can offer a safety net where that anguish is reined in and at least partially sorted. Or they can offer models where experience is shared without loss of meaning.
The red square of blood on Kajsa Matta’s Crucifix in St Lars (Uppsala, Sweden) takes up women’s experience of bleeding bodies for Christ to redeem through his suffering (on one interpretation at least). It represents the ordinary violence borne with dignity and selflessness by those women who undergo offering themselves to life and embracing the inevitability of forthcoming death, who silently bear the anguish of the unknown turn of events. Lisen’s miracle were her children – three of them – because they were her reason to live. Her keenness to capture her family’s life in millions of photographs created memories with a poignancy that escapes most of us, distracted as we are by the illusion of ordinary infinity.
[This article originally appeared in Swedish translation in Signum 7 (October 2019), with the title: ‘Att ge liv – modern och döden’]
Photo: Nikodem Nijaki [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)]
