Pregnancy, birth, and a new kind of Christianity … part 3

Unsurprisingly, some women – reflecting on pregnancy, birth, advent, and/or the birth of new spiritual awareness in us – resorted to poetry …
My friend Cheryl Lawrie in Melbourne sent a link to this beautiful poem …
And another friend, Amy Daws, sent in another beautiful poem – included in its entirety after the jump.
Another reader sent in this short but worthwhile insight …

I have not yet been pregnant myself (although as I am getting married
next year I hope one day to be!) but something struck me about
pregnancy as a metaphor/experience of faith: what about the days
before you even know you’re pregnant? And what about when you
intellectually are, but don’t “feel” it yet? Those both seem to me
rather like the mysterious way God secretly begins to work in us.

The Task of Eve
1
At 23 weeks she’ll respond to noise – she’ll jerk
if a loud sound is played next to your bump. Two weeks
later, she’ll be able to recognise your voice
and feel emotions.
Never knew what it would be like to have a person
spring into being and take up residence inside me. I thought it would feel
physical (growth and change) not symbiotic. The symbiosis started last week,
the night you kicked and punched like you’d had enough
and were coming out now, and I rubbed you ‘til you calmed down
and I knew you were real. And I needed you to be real. And to stay.
At 34 weeks, she can differentiate between dark and light
and is bathed in a red glow when sunlight is on your tummy.
No sunlight on me – it’s the dead of winter and I am bathed
in the toil of carrying you. The task of Eve to bring forth children
painfully, but God never mentioned the before, the carrying.
Still at night I’m aglow with the peace
of there being one thing more important than anything else,
one new thing to guide all others, this strange fire in me.
2
At birth you’ll need me more, it seems, every minute, every drop
of nourishment. At two, you’ll be stubborn, headstrong. Some days
I might forget how I need you, but oh, if I lost you….
At 10, I will pour my best into you, invest in your curious mind.
At 16, you might hate me for a day, or a year, but I’ll love you.
At 20, you may come back, needing me less but wanting me more.
The task of Eve goes on unfinished, for now: to end the symbiosis,
prepare you to not need me, watch you choose your own path,
however far from me it leads. (God did mention this:
“And a sword will pierce your own soul too.”)
To prepare you years from now to still live on, able, strong, at peace
after seeing me placed quietly in the ground.
Tonight, I’ll feel the kicks, your dance in your liquid home.
I’ll touch you, let you feel the warm pressure of my hand.
Tonight the toil, the sword, the grave; forgotten. The task of Eve
to forget them, and when facing them, to remember these nights.
Amy (Stahler) Daws, copyright 2002