new heights. Our remarkable strength, determination, beauty, and self-sacrifice are all exemplified in the act of birth. For those of us called to physical motherhood, Christ certainly wants to be a part of the process. When women are treated with dignity and worth, especially in those profound moments that mark womanhood, they are “liberated” and “restored to themselves: they feel loved with ‘eternal love,’ with a love which finds direct expression in Christ himself.”22 It is a beautiful and transformative force for the woman’s understanding of herself and her role as mother when this type of care and reverence marks her birth, and it should be considered a tragedy when it doesn’t.
Every person is called to make a gift of himself or herself, and a woman partakes of that call in a unique way as she enters into the role of mother.23 In pregnancy and birth, we experience at a raw, intrinsic level the reality that we only find ourselves through the gift of ourselves.24 As she takes on the role of mother from the very moment of the conception of her baby, a woman becomes something new, and she experiences her womanhood in a deeper way. “Motherhood involves a special communion with the mystery of life, as it develops in the woman’s womb. The mother is filled with wonder at this mystery of life, and ‘understands’ with unique intuition what is happening inside her. In the light of the ‘beginning,’ the mother accepts and loves as a person the child she is carrying in her womb.”25 Becoming a mother can awaken within us a new strength, a deeper love and self-gift, and a greater awareness of the mystery of God’s plan.
We have a God who is deeply in love with each one of us, calling us to our own unique motherhood. He is a loving Father, and we can come to him in our pregnancies and births. After all, this is the vocation he has called us to. We don’t have to be ashamed of or feel silly for asking him to be a part of it, and we can freely ask that our births be beautiful and holy and happy for us as mothers, for our babies, and for our whole family. We can also feel confident demanding that our dignity as his daughters be respected by our providers and others with us during birth. Our God is not a stingy God. He can and does want to be involved. He can and does want us to come to him in our need, especially in this most poignant time of our womanhood.
Your birth can be a beautiful moment of honoring and experiencing the feminine genius God has given you. He loves each of his daughters deeply and intimately. Not only does he want to meet you in your birth; he wants to work in and through you to bring both physical and spiritual life into the world.
With all my births, I’ve experienced birth as a sort of “thin space,” a place where time seems to stand still … a moment in which I can feel that participation in creation. I get to bring into the world a bit of heaven, pure innocence, which can only come from God. With all my sinful nature and ugliness, I get to help do that. I feel him. I feel God working through me to create another person, another soul, a unique individual. And I know I couldn’t have done this on my own. When the head crowns and it hurts like nothing I’ve ever experienced and I push till the baby is out, and in the sensation of relief afterwards, I know, I just know, I was part of a miracle.
— Megan Lyons, mom to four
The Theology of the Body: A Theology of Birth
“This is my body, which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.”— Luke 22:19
Is it crazy to talk about a “theology” behind birth? Some might think so. But God is not a haphazard designer. His intentional design of all of creation, peaking in his design and creation of the human being — specifically woman — is meant to bring glory to him and lead us back to him.
Christian tradition has confirmed time and again the goodness of the body as a creation of God. We see in our body the absolutely amazing, intricate design of a heavenly Father, and we believe God when he says his creation is “very good.”26 The human person is uniquely composed of both body and soul, not just one or the other. We are not pure spirits like angels. Pope Benedict XVI reminds us: “Man is truly himself when his body and soul are intimately united.”27 In fact, this truth is the foundation of the sacraments of the Church. It is only through our bodies that we have access to the sanctifying grace of every sacrament.
This means as Christians we should view and treat our bodies with dignity as a good and beautiful gift designed by God to be used as a gift to the world. As the Catechism of the Catholic Church says: “For this reason man may not despise his bodily life. Rather he is obliged to regard his body as good and to hold it in honor since God has created it and will raise it up on the last day.”28 We need to honor our body and the way God designed it to function.29
This gets confusing in our culture, which urges us on the one hand to worship the body, yet simultaneously digs deep at the hearts of women, convincing them that their bodies are never actually good enough. How many of us have been scarred by this view of the woman’s body? From our earliest years, we hear that we must be sexy enough, pretty enough, thin enough, and readily available for sexual use. For many women, these wounds run deep. And these ideas seep into our images of and expectations of pregnancy and birth. How many of us can look in the mirror at nine months pregnant and feel truly good and beautiful? Precisely when we are at the epitome of our physical femininity, swollen with new life — our bodies doing exactly what they were designed by God to do — we battle feelings of being too fat, too ugly, too self-conscious, and too embarrassed to be seen in public. It can be a fierce battle to believe that our bodies are good and holy, designed by God for his glory.
Saint Gianna Beretta Molla, a brave Catholic mother and medical doctor who gave her life to save her baby, said, “Our body is a cenacle, a monstrance: through its crystal the world should see God.” This remains true even at the end of our pregnancies and at the time of birth. If anything, it becomes even more clear as we prepare to bring new life into the world. Our bodies are made by God, and they are good. You are good.
Yes, with your growing belly, your swollen feet, your widening hips, and your exhausted eyes, you are very good. You are a visible witness to the world of life and hope. God designed birth precisely and intentionally. Birth may be a private act, but just like the conjugal act that brought this baby into existence, that does not make it any less good. In fact, just like that marital act of making love, we can say that our instinct to keep it private actually highlights just how good and holy it truly is.
Through the Incarnation, God redeemed the whole physical world, making our bodies holy. “Through redemption, every man has received from God again, as it were, himself and his own body. Christ has imprinted new dignity on the human body — on the body of every man and every woman … the human body has been admitted, together with the soul, to union with the Person of the Son-Word.”30 What we do with our body can give glory to God. Saint Paul reminds us: “The body is not meant for immorality, but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body…. Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ?… Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God? You are not your own; you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body.”31
As a mother, you get to do exactly that in a very tangible way through your pregnancy and birth.
And the Two Shall Become (Really!) One
From 1979 through 1984, Pope John Paul II gave a series of talks during his weekly General Audiences. In the talks he formulated a brilliant worldview that tapped into the Catholic understanding of the human person being integrally united as body and soul. This series of talks over five years has come to be known as the Theology of the Body. The entire scope of the talks outlined the ways that our bodies can speak a theological language, especially through the Sacrament of Matrimony.
