Birth Pains

I’m pretty sure the term ‘birth pangs’ was invented by someone who hadn’t actually given birth. It is in the same category as ‘ouch’ or ‘ouchies’ as my 5-year-old would say. Or maybe ‘hunger pangs’ which is not so much a pain but an unpleasant sensation.

I didn’t say ‘ouchie’ when I gave birth to my son. I can think of some other words I said, but ‘ouchie’ wasn’t one of them.

No. Birth is out-and-out painful. Even if you give birth via caesarean with an anaesthetic, the aftermath hurts, and my friends who have had epidurals also rarely use the word ‘pang’. No – pain is part-and-parcel with giving birth.

In the Bible - Mark 13 to be precise - we get an intriguing passage that leaves the modern reader confounded: wars, earthquakes, famines and heavenly portents, all seeming to spell doom, but in fact making way for something new. ‘Birth pangs’ we are told. But make no mistake: though the new baby is beautiful, painful the process will be.

It is hard to imagine how wars and natural disasters might spell anything other than bad news. These are not distant, abstract notions from storybooks, but seem to be the bread-and-butter of our daily existence: flooding that lifts vehicles in Spanish streets and throws them down again like they are matchbox cars; cyclones and hurricanes that are ever more frequent and ferocious; exploding pagers and bombs in the Middle East. Pangs? No. Pain. This is pain.

And yet. In the Bible, the deadliest of disasters is often recast as the precursor for God’s entrance into a darkened world. Like the splitting apart of a woman’s body as it opens up and gives way to new life, the wars and disasters that wrack our earth are said to be signs of God’s coming.

I’m not entirely sure how this will work. Will humanity be finally brought down low from our greedy and arrogant ways, and find a gentler way to proceed? Maybe. But one thing I am confident of is that Life is always stronger than Death. That green growth always follows a bushfire. That cities, when emptied of their human denizens, become quickly reclaimed by forests, the force of Life wrapping itself around steel poles and cracking its way through concrete. That humans will always, always, keep on rebuilding, keep on rebuilding; keep on making love and making families and finding new ways to live.

How will it look, when the current order can no longer sustain itself, and God arrives in our midst: a brand new, screaming baby?

Words by Rev Andreana

Image by Frank Alarcon, Unsplash