shocked by the pope’s unembarrassed exegesis on the topic of sexuality and the ways in which it is designed to witness to God and even lead us to him.
Saint John Paul insisted that Christ gives us a model for understanding our bodies (and marriage and the family) when he speaks to the Pharisees about divorce.32 We must go “back to the beginning” to understand God’s original plan. The intentional design of our bodies as male and female speaks to us of who God is, and their very design proclaims the Gospel. Our femaleness and maleness, and the way they complement and quite literally fit together, tell us about God and his design for family, and they can be the instrument through which we become more like him. Sex is designed by God to be a way that married couples can experience and grow in holiness. In their very bodies, husband and wife replicate the relationship of Christ to his Church. Marriage is thus “a sacrament whereby sexuality is integrated into a path to holiness.”33
Man and woman, through their bodies, provide a glimpse of the mystery of the Trinity.34 They fit together, and neither the female nor the male body makes sense when seen in isolation. The husband gives of himself to his wife as the Father pours himself out to the Son, and the Son lovingly receives that outpouring. The love between Father and Son is so real that it begets the Person of the Holy Spirit. Mirroring this reality, the love between husband and wife is also designed to be so complete that it has the potential to create an entirely new person — a person who is then born.
Our bodies are good, holy, and beautiful, and sexual intimacy within marriage is also good, holy, and beautiful. “Since God created him man and woman, their mutual love becomes an image of the absolute and unfailing love with which God loves man. It is good, very good, in the Creator’s eyes.”35 The physical love between a husband and wife has the capacity to bring forth a completely new and eternal human being. A decision to love with all our body has the potential to change eternity. What an awesome — and sobering — concept!
“Amongst the blessings of marriage, the child holds the first place,” says the Church.36 In the marriage rite, man and woman are asked if they will “accept children lovingly from God.” It’s not because having children somehow makes them “better” than childless couples, but because the child is to be seen as the highest blessing and natural result of the union of man and woman, God’s plan for marriage and family made full. Their complete gift of self to the other in turn becomes a gift given right back to them. “In the newborn child is realized the common good of the family.… Its life becomes a gift for the very people who were givers of life.”37 Welcoming children should never be viewed as a threat to marriage. Children enrich, strengthen, and fulfill marriage. “The children born to them — and here is the challenge — should consolidate that covenant, enriching and deepening the conjugal communion of the father and mother.”38
Being open to children naturally opens the husband and wife to birth. “Both in the conception and in the birth of a new child, parents find themselves face to face with a ‘great mystery’.”39 Through the grace of their marriage, the couple has supernatural help as they walk through these “mysteries” of pregnancy and birth to enter into the new roles of mother and father.40
In some ways it would be easy to choose to stay a little bit selfish when it’s “just the two of us.” Yes, marriage is God’s way of helping us learn to give of ourselves and grow in holiness, but parenthood? Becoming a parent takes it to a whole new level, and that is exactly how God designed it. Our time is no longer our own, our sleep is no longer our own, our hearts are expanded and made more vulnerable. The weaknesses and wounds and self-absorption that we’ve been able to hide thus far often become glaringly obvious under the light of motherhood or fatherhood. But in the new reality of parenthood there is a new and radical freedom — freedom to become who we were truly meant to be. We become real love. We are stretched to grow in living charity, which “is never satisfied with not giving more.”41
You are a complex and intricate masterpiece beautifully designed to continue God’s work of creation for the world. As your womb grows and you take on the work of pregnancy, you are able to see the love between you and your husband. As women, when we open ourselves up to motherhood, beginning with our very bodies, we are changed. It all begins with pregnancy and birth. Every part of the woman’s body is at the service of creating and growing new life and then bringing that life into the world.42 The profound mystery of the creation of new souls happens quite literally inside our bodies. And then our bodies are designed to bring that life into the world — to give birth.
But isn’t this just over-spiritualizing it all? As Christians, we are an incarnational people. We believe that the material world is intimately united with the spiritual. Even more, we believe that God wants to work through the material world. He is revealed through his creation, through concrete, tangible things, from the beauty of nature to the soul-stirring power of music to the encounter with his very real flesh and blood in the Eucharist. Ours is a fleshy faith. God meets us and makes us holy through our bodies. If anything, it’s over-spiritualizing to deny that God can and does want to work through our physical bodies as he intentionally created them. We’d also have to write off the entire Theology of the Body as over-spiritualizing. The work of birth testifies to deeper mysteries, allowing us to participate in the work of God, and this is a profoundly Christian idea.
We shouldn’t be scandalized that our bodies and the powerful moments of birth reveal deep truths about God — the God of the universe, who became an unborn child, who gave water the ability to wash our souls, who designed sex to be a holy and spiritually profound act that reveals and leads us to the One who designed it all in the first place. We have a God who desires to be intimately involved in our lives and who reveals himself to us in and through our bodies — and that includes birth.
The births of my three children were all vastly different, but one thing was a constant — God was there, present with me, loving me. Always. Just because my first experience was traumatic doesn’t lessen the fact that he was present. One doesn’t negate the other; in fact, it can be the opposite. He stays with us in the hard places and can carry us through to the other side if we’ll let him. And just because my last birth was peaceful and I was well cared for, that doesn’t mean that his presence wasn’t just as strongly felt. Birth can be an occasion for both joy and suffering, pain and ecstasy, love and fear. Our God is big enough for all of those things and more. By allowing him into the life-changing experience of birth, we are opening ourselves up to the true miracle of bringing life into the world.
— Christina Kolb, mom to three
Birth Fallen, Birth Redeemed
“When a woman is in labor, she has pain because her hour has come; but when she is delivered of the child, she no longer remembers the anguish, for joy that a child is born into the world.”— John 16:21
Ah, the chapter where it gets a bit more real … or, more appropriately, where we feel it a bit more. All that nice theology talk sounds lovely and looks great on paper. But at some point we need to get to the reality of what that will actually mean for us in our bodies. Does God’s plan affect what we as women physically experience during our births?
In his Theology of the Body, Pope John Paul II based his reflections and work on Christ’s prompting to go “back to the beginning” to understand God’s design and will for us, which helps us better understand what he wants from us, and what birth can become in light of the redemption.
Was Birth Supposed to Be Painful?
In the story of creation taken from Scripture, we are led to understand that God designed and desired childbirth.
