jesus placenta

Like so much of female experience, the Christmas story was sanitized for me growing up. There were no bloody rags in our nativity scene, no ancient near-east chucks pads, no entrails of Jesus’ placenta, no milky nursing shirts of Mary’s… just a shiny, clean and often strangely Nordic looking baby Jesus, Mary (fully clothed) and Joseph. Where were the midwives?

My parents did a beautiful job integrating the Jesus story into our family Christmases growing up. They’d make a birthday cake for baby Jesus and recreate the nativity story using our stuffed animals at the foot of our Christmas tree. I am sure that I participated in some Nativity plays growing up, though the memories have since faded. And looking back with what I know now, I am sure there are valid critiques to be made of our celebrations, but I know they were pieced together with earnest hearts.

As a pentecostal, low church lady I never heard of Advent until my college years. Through an Evangelical Covenant church in Rhode Island I attended that featured an excitable young pastor who wove midrash readings of familiar texts and Bono references together, the frenetic Christmas productions of my youth were replaced with votive candles, a darkened sanctuary and four weeks of meditations on waiting. Waiting for the birth of Jesus and preparing our hearts for the gift of God made flesh. I cozied up to ideas, this “new” old thing, Advent, like my hands wrapped around a mug of cocoa.

I now work at a Catholic College and imagine my colleagues groaning at this low church spin off of the Church calendar that mainline Protestants and Catholics have faithfully kept from generation to generation, practicing great self-control in a consumeristic American culture to not have any Christmas decor in the sanctuary until Christmas Day itself. It reminds me of my years growing up in Austria, where it was not Santa who delivered the gifts, but the Christ Child. And Christmas trees weren’t hastily sawed down mere hours after wiping Thanksgiving dinner crumbs from the corners of our mouths, but with great giddiness and secrecy put up on Christmas Eve Day while fathers would take the children ice skating and mothers, in the great patriarchal dance, bustled their asses off to create Christmas magic by the time they returned.

Advent was an idea.

But when I first became pregnant in December of 2015, Advent became embodied.

advent in my body

We had planned to become pregnant a month later than we did, but my fumbling new knowledge of the Fertility Awareness Method brought Parker Simon’s embryo on swiftly, right before we left for a trip to Europe we had been saving up for for years. This was the trip where I would bring my husband across three countries to visit each school I attended and house I grew up in.

The nausea struck four days in, while visiting our friends in Vienna. My dreams of bottomless glasses of cheap and brilliant Austrian wine vanished and my nostalgia for all my favorite foods met the pall of the beige feeling of overwhelming nausea. By the time our Christmas Eve in Paris rolled around, I had completely forgot that it is essential to check if Air BnBs in France are smoking free and, of course, ours decidedly wasn’t. Our nights were filled with panicked googling of the effects of second hand smoke on an early pregnancy and the compounding nausea that resulted from our failed attempts to cover up the stale, yellow, smoke stench. Not quite the romp in the Parisian bedsheets I had been envisioning.

Did Mary experience this kind of nausea? Or worse yet, was she one of those blessed women cursed with the never-ending barfs of hyperemesis gravidarum?

We’re told that she visited Elizabeth who was six months along. Did Mary throw up the moment she got there? It would shine a new lights on the famed greeting:

41 When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the baby leaped in her womb, and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit. 42 In a loud voice she exclaimed: “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the child you will bear!

Kind of makes you feel like Elizabeth is that one friend who feeds you a lot of toxic positivity when you’re pregnant. “All that matters is a healthy baby!” “Oh, enjoy every moment.” EVERY. MOMENT. DAMNIT.

The sanitized nativity that I grew up with made this Jesus story far more divine than it was human. And yet we’re told he really did embody both.

As my pregnancy continued and I grew rounder and the nights became more unbearable, the crushing realization that I had made a decision there was no turning back from greeted me every day as I struggled to tie my own shoes.

God’s entrance into the world through a whole uterus, a whole pregnancy, a whole postpartum, confronts us with the reality of being human.

becoming more human

There’s so much we don’t know about Mary’s perspective on this whole thing. But what we do know is that she was an unwed, Brown, young woman in the shadows of an empire that literally was coming for her (see Herod’s decree to murder young boys in attempt to take her own son; the political battles and census driving her and Joseph to flee as refugees). We know now that they were Palestinian Jews. All this conveniently overlooked and untold in my white churches growing up.

What I am learning about Advent is also what I am learning about whiteness: that in an attempt to dominate, control and sanitize human existence and human stories, we (the oppressor and descendants of oppressors) have lost touch of actual humanity. Human capacity. Limits. Rest. And in our frenzy, we see that play out year after year.

Capitalism drives an overwhelming narrative beginning in late October to amass more and quickly and cheaply, being woefully disconnected from the vulnerable labor force behind our glutting pocketbooks. In a hubristic attempt to become like God: all seeing, all knowing, all powerful (see: history of slavery in the US, indigenous genocide, our military presence around the world), white folks become less and less in touch with our bodies— the bodies that God wanted, through this Advent, to baptize as sacred, meaningful, beautifully human.

That’s why I’m so passionate about pregnancy and birth, because it forces us to be distinctly embodied. Pregnant people can experience briefly what the most marginalized among us experience daily: we are forced to reckon with our human-ness. My houseless neighbors feel the cold crack of the pavement underneath them, sleeping. My Black neighbors move with a target on their melanated backs. My trans* neighbors experience heartbreaking dysphoria and perhaps restorative euphoria when they are able to transition. My undocumented neighbors move between systems and institutions in constant fear of their bodies being removed from their homes.

Indigenous theologian, Randy Woodley, challenges the Western religious notions of perfectionism, born of a Greek obsession with being without flaw. Instead, he proposes that perfection is about our role, living fully into the role that Creator God gave us, which is to be human (see Erna Kim Hackett’s Advent series posts for more on this).

Here’s what I’m learning this Advent about becoming more human:

If my neighbors are not experiencing love from me, that reveals that I am not loving myself well. The two are intricately tied
My body was built with real limitations: a need to hydrate, sleep, move and be nourished. When I ignore these cues, I experience death in my body and my relationships
When I learn of the experience of those in marginalized bodies and we envision a world created with them in mind, it’s actually a world that is better for us all
The invitation of Sabbath rest seems to have a lot to do with reminding us of our human role and God’s cosmic role and to know the difference

However you find yourself this Advent as we turn the corner to Christmastide, may you find the gift in a God who takes on flesh, who lived as vulnerably as teeny fresh babes do, and that your God-given limits are there to preserve a neighbor-loving humility in you and right relationship with self, with other and with Creation.

I’ll leave you with a poem that deeply moved me and that I’ll be sitting with during the twelve days of Christmas:

Go slow
if you can.
Slower.
More slowly still.
Friendly dark
or fearsome,
this is no place
to break your neck
by rushing,
by running,
by crashing into
what you cannot see.

Then again,
it is true:
different darks
have different tasks,
and if you
have arrived here unawares,
if you have come
in peril
or in pain,
this might be no place
you should dawdle.

I do not know
what these shadows
ask of you,
what they might hold
that means you good
or ill.
It is not for me
to reckon
whether you should linger
or you should leave.

But this is what
I can ask for you:

That in the darkness
there be a blessing.
That in the shadows
there be a welcome.
That in the night
you be encompassed
by the Love that knows
your name.

+Jan Richardson