“I recall the nature of the physical pain I was experiencing. It was curious and incomparable. The morphine did not make a difference. The physical pain of labour was a kind of ‘total’ pain. It resounded through my whole body. It was a dense agony, not a sharp, local pain. Together with the all-encompassing, physical agony was the mental apprehension of something going wrong, and of this ‘natural’ event turning fatal. I was at the mercy of something else, and I felt alone and helpless” (Ruth Sheridan, 2016).

On this day that we celebrate the Mother of God as God-bearer, the theotokos, and as a mother scholar myself, I want to focus on the mother and how her experiences on the ground not only has relevance for other mothers but actually gives a number of insights for the entire Christian community. In this reflection I focus on discipleship and what it means to bear Jesus in our bodies and live with the memory of both loss, death and guilt (the realities of mortality) and overwhelming joy and unfailing hope (as God’s disciples).

My theological insights are drawn primarily from a dear friend and excellent biblical scholar, Ruth Sheridan, whose account of her first birthing experience is found above. She is an Australian woman, abuse survivor, single mother of two children, winner of the 2013 Manfred Lautenschlaeger award for theological promise for her first book, Retelling Scripture: The Jews and the Scriptural Citations in John 1:19-12:15. In this reflection, I use Ruth’s exegesis of John 16:20-22 (published in 2016) read in light of her horrific 72-hour birthing experience. 

In a 2016 essay, “Making sense of motherhood: Biblical and theological perspectives,” she explains that John 16:20-22 comes at the end and as a crucial part of Jesus’s farewell discourse to his disciples. He says:

“Truly, truly, I say to you, you will weep and lament, but the world will rejoice. You will be sorrowful, but your sorrow will turn into joy. When a woman is giving birth, she has sorrow because her hour has come, but when she has delivered the baby, she no longer remembers the anguish, for joy that a human being has been born into the world. So also you have sorrow now, but I will see you again, and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy from you” (John 16:20-22, ESV).

Ruth notes that “John’s parable of the labouring woman has not received widespread attention in the scholarship.” Further, “the standard commentaries can sometimes give scant attention to the parable, or more specifically, the function of the woman and her child within it; one tendency is for the commentator to sideline Jesus’ speech about the pregnant woman and to concentrate instead on a seemingly more pertinent issue in Jesus’ surrounding discourse.” Ruth then goes on to present the various ways the pregnant woman’s labour is either ignored or devalued, by various biblical scholars who do pay attention to the text; all male. She says, for example, Rudolf Schnackenburg shows that “the ‘everyday’ image of a labouring woman is simply too mundane a reality to be affiliated with Jesus.” Meanwhile, Barnabas Lindars “considers it a ‘mistake’ to allegorize the parable as pointing to the disciples.” Ruth says, for Lindars, it is unimaginable to equate the woman’s pain with the sorrow of the disciples. In other words, she says, “The implication is that what belongs naturally to a woman cannot be symbolically predicated of a man.” Over and again, the male biblical scholars examining the farewell text overlook the significant maternal experience of labour, and understandably so as how could they imagine its significance if they had never undergone it themselves? 

Ruth fills the gap in the literature by providing insight to the dialectic between the great sorrow experienced by the disciples (in their anticipation of the loss of their friend, brother, and master, Jesus) and the overwhelming joy that Jesus tells them they will experience when they see him again after his death. Reading the text through the lens of her experience of great anxiety and pain during her 72-hour labour with her first child, Ruth brings to life the text’s claim of memory and sorrow intertwined, just as “forgetting and joy are correlated.” As she says herself:

“I think that these nuances are present under the surface of John’s parable, but my perception of them does, admittedly, arise from my own experience of labour. Maternal identity emerges out of loss – out of the void of a ‘limit experience’ that threatens to annihilate the woman as a subject, and even very really, as a living being. The trauma of labour inflicts a kind of psychological loss on the new mother, the loss of a certain ‘innocence’ that led her to have faith in her control over her body. Childbirth is a θλίψις, a suffering that imposes itself from without. In the aftermath of labour, and out of the void of negativity, maternal identity is formed complexly: physical agony is temporarily forgotten, but long-term residual memories arising from trauma can persist, alongside feelings of guilt. There may be a need to remember the initial feelings of joy following the triumph over labour, as a form of consolation when a woman’s ‘hour’ returns.” 

Ruth ultimately argues that Jesus uses the labour metaphor “to elicit hope” from the disciples. To assuage not only the impending pain they will feel at the loss of him but also to attenuate in advance “their eventual guilt at abandoning Jesus.”

When have you had the responsibility for another, either as a parent, teacher, nurse, manager or other ways? What have been your learnings and what could the Church learn from your experiences about how to really care for another, respecting their dignity and agency? That is, what would being a disciple of Jesus, the Church today, a sacrament to others, look like if we took seriously the experiences of people who have been caring for others while respecting the agency and dignity of those they helped, at all different stages of their personal and spiritual lives? How might our Church better follow the key Vatican II theme from the Constitution on the Liturgy, Sacrosanctum concilium: the “fully conscious and active participation” of the whole community (14), encouraging the church to “grow up” rather than remain as infants?  Further, how might the local and universal Church better listen to those whom society often dismisses – real women and real mothers and their messy, complex realities included? Mary, our mother and sister, we hear you. Pray for us.

Image description: Against a dark background of the stable, Mary stands with her legs open, crying out, as Joseph kneels at her side, pulling a baby from inside her.

One of the pictures of Mary as a mother that I most resonate with is this image created by Natalie Lennard called “The Creation of Man” (2017) from the award-winning fine art series Birth Undisturbed. Apart from Joseph looking so calm (I’ve never heard of any spouse being calm inside or outside of the birthing room) and the animals seemingly unperturbed by Mary’s birthing screams, this is just how I imagined Mary birthing Jesus – just as I birthed my own children and screamed, and just as I heard the screams of other mothers birthing their children in the other rooms of my hospital corridor. 

I think one of the things I learnt in being a mother and learning to mother my children as they continue to grow is that often the very times I would desperately like to curl up in a ball and tend to my own wounds, my children have called out for help – forcing me to look beyond my own pain to tend to them. While helping them, I also had to respect them as someone with agency and their own personalities. I cannot expect them to understand me or be like me. I had to respect them as themselves. I think I can say that over the course of their lives I have tried to mother them as best as I could, so that they eventually learnt how to care for themselves, to accept the help of another when appropriate, and to attend to the wounds of those they are responsible for, even when it is personally inconvenient. As a Christian community, I think we have to constantly ask ourselves, who are our responsibility in light of our belief of preferential option for the poor? Who really are our poor in our community? And how do we help them, at the same time respecting their agency and dignity? How do we live out, for example, Matthew 25, “…when I was hungry, you gave me something to eat, when I was thirsty you gave me something to drink…” taking the cue from parents who have cared for a dependent other? Please know that in sharing my insights as a mother, I am not advocating for the neglect of mothers and the never-ending sacrifice expected of them, imposed by society. I’m simply saying that the more I have inconveniently been asked to parent, to consider the point of view of another under my care, the more I have been called to “grow up.” I have also learnt one of the complexities of being human – that we carry in our hearts and bodies woundedness that we can pass on to others, or we can facilitate the healing of another as wounded healers ourselves.