What follows is the third and final part of Mother Animal, Chapter 6: On Marian Birthgiving— the grand finale where Mary, at long last, gives birth. It is on this ground that, to me, the material gets the most volatile— the most controversial, the most incendiary, and therefore the most challenging to write about.
After all, this is where we enter the more serious debates that raged in the first four centuries of Christianity about Jesus’s incarnation, about his status as both human and divine, and therefore what this meant about Mary—whether or not she kept her virginity in tact after giving birth, what the implications were of her so-called “painless” virgin labor, and of course the whole concept of the redemption of Eve’s “curse.”
Given that there are countless treatises on these topics, and excellent books to help walk you through them if you can manage it (I go into a semi-fury every few pages), I’m going to stick with the story here as much as I can, with the birth details of Mary’s pregnancy and labor, and what we might carry away with us from them.
Even so, I get what feels like an ancestral prickling under my skin while writing these words. A semi-terror of saying something wrong, even though it seems virtually impossible not to say something wrong. Still, my motherline women from 16th century Yorkshire hover around me— women who were caught in the midst of the violence of the Reformation, where worshipping at Marian chapels could get you killed—telling me I’d better just steer clear of this subject altogether, it’s not worth making a fuss about, nor is all this talk of birthing babies and obstetric herbs and the things midwives know. This is the kind of sh*t you get burnt at the stake for, I feel them saying through the quiver in my chest, through the desire I have to run from my desk.
I don’t want to say something wrong. It is imperative that I don’t. Those sentences repeat and repeat in my head. They nearly make me tongue-tied even here, in private, with my keyboard and my screen. I know what it is to be tongue-tied on this subject in front of men in person too. The way an automatic silencing system seems to partly take over my brain, a survival mechanism— play dumb about your female ideas of God. It’s not safe. You will be belittled. You will not be believed.
The truth is, it wasn’t safe at all, not for a very long time. And it still isn’t in so many ways, both here in the west and beyond. I only have to think of the latest decree passed roughly two weeks ago in Afghanistan by the Taliban, declaring women’s voices unlawful in public, to lose my breath again. This is beyond Christianity. This is beyond the Abrahamic religions. Beyond monotheism. This is ancient ground, but it is also present-tense, this moment, abortion-is-now-banned-in-14-states-across-the-US ground. And one of its most potent, blood-drenched crossroads is the body of the parturient woman. The act of childbirth. It’s power utterly beyond the bounds and bonds of dominant patriarchy, and that power’s silencing.
Just a month ago, a sculpture of the Virgin Mary in labor called “Crowning,” created by artist Esther Strauss for an exhibition about women in art at St. Mary’s Cathedral in Linz, Austria, was beheaded only three weeks after its installation. It seems that the frank facts of Jesus’s birth from the human body of a woman, her face vivid with the intensity of birthgiving, her legs spread, is still as confronting to some now as it was two thousand years ago. Jesus’s death on the cross was as human as any death, and has been graphically depicted for as long as his birth has been sanitized, contested and, apparently, worth beheading statues over.
Never it, seems to me, has the way a woman gave birth caused so much controversy, or so much pain. I wish for us to be free of that controversy and that pain. I wish for Mary to be, too.
So, let’s see her through her labor.