Week 2: Expectations

Then Jesus began to teach his disciples: “The Human One must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, chief priests, and the legal experts, and be killed, and then, after three days, rise from the dead.” He said this plainly. But Peter took hold of Jesus and, scolding him, began to correct him. Jesus turned and looked at his disciples, then sternly corrected Peter: “Get behind me, Satan. You are not thinking God’s thoughts but human thoughts.”

After calling the crowd together with his disciples, Jesus said to them, “All who want to come after me must say no to themselves, take up their cross, and follow me. All who want to save their lives will lose them. But all who lose their lives because of me and because of the good news will save them. Why would people gain the whole world but lose their lives? What will people give in exchange for their lives? Whoever is ashamed of me and my words in this unfaithful and sinful generation, the Human One will be ashamed of that person when he comes in the Father’s glory with the holy angels.” Jesus continued, “I assure you that some standing here won’t die before they see God’s kingdom arrive in power.”

Mark 8:31-38

The battle of love and fear

A part of the way I approach my doula work as a minister is always assuming God is already at work, and like a child lost in the woods, delighting in each breadcrumb I discover as they lead me home.

The more I have witnessed women birth, the more I am convinced we are only beginning to scratch the surface of what the female body in pregnancy and birth can teach us about Reality, about God and the mysterious ways God works in the world.

Consider this, in the birthing woman’s body lies a battle between love and fear.

The physiological reality unfolding in her body is a dramatic display of powerful hormones. Oxytocin, the love hormone (the hormone we all excrete when we orgasm, laugh, experience joy) is the force behind the powerful uterine contractions that force baby down into the pelvis and eventually out of her body. At any time in this process, the threat of adrenaline and cortisol, our flight/fight response hormones of stress and fear, can slow and even completely stall the process. When a birthing woman perceives a threat, these powerful hormones release and cause blood to move away from the uterus and into her hands and feet: to fight or to flee.

Love and fear.

Is this not our most primal battle as humans? It certainly is a spiritual battle God speaks of throughout the Scriptures. Why must God continually reassure Israel with the refrain Do not be afraid, Do not be afraid?

God made us. Our bodies, our sinews, our flesh, our muscle, our sophisticated hormonal responses.

God knows that our Reptilian brain will cause us to make decisions out of fear, but when we know that we are fully safe and secure, we can make meaningful choices out of love.

There is no room in love for fear. Well-formed love banishes fear. Since fear is crippling, a fearful life—fear of death, fear of judgment—is one not yet fully formed in love.

1 John 4:18, The Message

Expectations

There is another important truth we can glean from a birthing woman. Uterine contractions are a productive sensation that leads to new life. As I coach mothers time and time again, when we perceive that sensation as a threat and double down on our resistance, we will experience more trauma. Uterine contractions are other-worldly in their power. They overwhelm us, yes. They can scare us, for sure. They remind us instantly of our infinitude and lack of control. But if we can find a way to surrender, we can ride the waves of this productive pain to new birth, new life.

This is where our theme for this second week of Lent enters.

Acceptance vs. Resistance

We see in the text from Mark that Peter, the passionate disciple, is struggling immensely with his expectations of what Jesus, the Messiah, would accomplish and how, with the clashing reality of Jesus’ terrifying words that he must suffer and die for new life to burst forth.

Peter, so sure of himself and so committed to his internal narrative of how this all would go down is said to scold Jesus, to which Jesus replies, “Get behind me, Satan. You are not thinking God’s thoughts but human thoughts.”

Damn. That’s harsh, Jesus.

I identify with Peter real hard throughout the Gospel accounts. He continually struggles to hold his vision with open hands. Every time Jesus challenges him, Peter initially resists, ultimately causing more trauma and pain when confronted with information that contradicts his expectations. Cutting off the ear, the three-time denial, the moment of fear as he realizes Jesus has led him into open water where he can only fully trust the Lord and the subsequent sinking in response to that fear.

Expectations vs. Reality. That’s where God gets me every time.

Surrender

I am embarrassed to admit it, but I have not learned this lesson well at all in my adult life. In every major season of life transition, I have encountered a stretch of time in which I could only trust in God’s timing, will, and manner; where my options for what I could control and try to hustle into reality had run out. And every single time I have thrown a tantrum like my three year old.

Chris and I had decided we would marry, and now it was on him to propose. Those weeks of waiting exposed the nastiest side of me: passive aggressive comments about timelines and venue booking deadlines, frustrated date nights, anger.

Surrendering to reality would have saved me weeks of anxiety, tension and frustration.

Fast forward five years and 10 days past Parker’s due date, I had done all the things to naturally induce labor (sex, nipple stimulation, eating dates like my life depended on it, long walks, etc.) and every night that I would wake up to pee only to realize I had not gone into labor, I melted into a desperate tantrum in the bathroom with God.

Surrendering to reality would have saved me weeks of anxiety, tension and frustration.

Fast forward two years and 9 days past Cedar’s due date, and Good Lord I was at it again! Pity parties, anger, helplessness.

Surrendering to reality would have saved me weeks of anxiety, tension and frustration.

God comes to you disguised as your life

Those are the words of author, retreat leader, speaker, playwright and psychotherapist Paul D’Arcy. God comes to you disguised as your life. God is your life. God is not hiding in plain sight waiting for you to find her. God comes to us as the various tensions, releases, circumstances and relationships we encounter every day. My futile attempts to make my life happen on my terms have always landed me frustrated, breathless and tired. In recent years, I have found it helpful when confronted with Reality that confounds my expectations to take a deep breath and surrender to it.

As James Finley beautiful says “What’s in the way is the way.”

Peter was so deeply concerned at Jesus’ prescription for himself. But Jesus was God. He knew exactly how this profound act of love needed to go down. Peter saw Jesus’ approach as unnecessary, inconvenient, and frankly, wrong.

Again, we find that birth is our greatest teacher. The way we birth is often the way we make love. It is the most intimate, revealing act that helps us gain a glimpse of the Reality of how we truly see ourselves, how we love ourselves; how connected we are to our bodies, how willing we are to trust and surrender to the moment.

It is natural to try to fight labor the moment it becomes intense. I remember a particular active-labor-contraction with Parker that sent me groping the wall of my bedroom like a wounded animal. I needed to find a grounding position that would allow me to trust God with my body, and to take the waves as they came.

Peter mistook his expectation as reality. Jesus corrected his skewed view.

What is the productive tension you are tempted to resist in your life this week? In your resistance, are you finding that you are experiencing the greater trauma of trying to take control? What might it look like to practice surrender to your current circumstances, to the season that is taking longer than you thought it would, to the contractions of a Loving God who wants to birth something new in you?

Embrace God’s paradoxical invitation today:

All who want to save their lives will lose them. But all who lose their lives because of me and because of the good news will save them.

May we lose our lives in all the right ways.

Bertrand Bahuet, France

Week 1: Wilderness

“About that time, Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee, and John baptized him in the Jordan River. While he was coming up out of the water, Jesus saw heaven splitting open and the Spirit, like a dove, coming down on him. And there was a voice from heaven: “You are my Son, whom I dearly love; in you I find happiness.”

At once the Spirit forced Jesus out into the wilderness. He was in the wilderness for forty days, tempted by Satan. He was among the wild animals, and the angels took care of him.”

+Mark 1: 9-13, CEB

As my son, Cedar, was crowning I felt like I was being split in two. God’s spirit descended on me, pronounced Cedar born and me alive, and then I was thrust into the wilderness. The postpartum wilderness. Slapped once more with the shocking limits of my capacity, the long days followed by long nights, the oozing fluids and bloody tissues, the forty days of steady hormone drops. Satan tempted me hard. Violent, invasive images of harm befalling Cedar climaxed one day at home alone with the boys. Both my then-two-and-a-half-year-old and four-month-old were screaming their faces off at the same time. I remember standing in my kitchen, unshowered, hair a mess, spirit crumpling, holding my fussy baby while my toddler angrily begged for more of me and I thought I could just throw Cedar down the stairs. Then there would be one less demand on me.

“…as it stands, motherhood is a sort of wilderness through which each woman hacks her way, part martyr, part pioneer; a turn of events from which some women derive feelings of heroism while others experience a sense of exile from the world they knew.”

+Rachel Cusk

That was one year ago this month. February 2019. I swiftly found a psychiatrist who put me on Zoloft for anxiety and began weekly visits with a wonderful therapist who specialized in postpartum mental health. I almost entered a day program for women and their babies suffering in this way.

Wilderness: the place where your identity is tested, where the evil one taunts you, where the angels take care of you.

For many of us, the fourth trimester and all the months that follow in the postpartum period can be described as a wilderness.

Both times, I experienced a glorious first week postpartum, filled to the brim with oxytocin at its finest: obsessed with my new baby, stroking his hair, sniffing his intoxicating head, kissing his fleshy, lanugo-covered body.

And both times I began to slip into depression and anxiety around four months postpartum, after the immediate support died down.

This wilderness exposed the worst of me. I felt purpose-less, benched from my other “more important” duties in society, so angry that often the most I could show for my days was a once empty dishwasher now filled with myriad cheerio-caked bowls.

Was this really my life?

In the lowest of lows, a poem spilled out of me:

my life is littered with

trains and toy cars

and various

shopping

bags

filled with books and old

receipts

with creeping despair

and dust bunnies

with calendar reminders

milk-filmed pump parts

laundry

re-washed thrice

neglected and forgotten,

victim to the Groundhog days

I am living.

My laptop screen is cracked

and mirrors

my

sanity.

Overwhelmed.

Jesus, can you be even here?

I need help.

My weeks feel like

homes

of cards

and one

small

detour or

departure

sends them all

down

down

down

like my head into my hands.

I know the work I must do

to climb out of this pit

But the mere thought of sinking fingers into

clod

and mustering my unused muscles

to climb

or crawl

upward

leaves me defeated

Can someone get down here and help me out?

Can someone get down here and help me out?

That’s how it feels, sometimes, in the wilderness.

Here are some notes from this week’s text that bring me deep comfort:

1. God was the force behind this entrance into desert. If God’s behind it, God is in it. God has made it. It cannot exist outside of God’s presence.

2. Wilderness almost always follows a declaration of identity, a new birth. In every season of my life when God births clarity in me about who and whose I am, a season of testing follows. This could be seen as cruel, sure, but this is also science. We are in late February. Farmers have been growing seedlings indoors in warm and loving environments to become sturdy plants that can be planted outdoors after the first frost. There is a gardening term called hardening when you take that little 1-2 inch seedling that has just shot up out of the earth and you carefully, deliberately expose it to the harsh elements. Why? The resistance forces the roots of that little seedling to grow thicker, deeper and more resilient so that it can truly flourish and multiply 30, 60 and 100 fold. The postpartum period tests our new motherhood, it reveals all the things our identity rooted itself in before it was completely disrupted by this new life, and it will force you to put your roots deep into good soil to come out on the other side alive, strong, persevering and resilient.

3. The angels tended to Jesus. While it doesn’t say that God-God-self walked with Jesus into the wilderness, God did not send Jesus alone. When I am in wilderness seasons, God’s familiar location in my life feels hauntingly empty. I feel exposed and naked, and very vulnerable. But God sends angels to tend to me. Something of the divine, yet qualitatively different; Supernatural strength and help to remind me to be rooted in God (as the story goes in other Gospel accounts, Jesus stays rooted in the Word, which is of course the Christ, and stands firm in his identity).

   Your angels might looks like 200mg of Lexapro or Zoloft daily, paired with angels of psychotherapists, angels of midwives who call you regularly to check in, angels of praying mothers who text you Scripture verses, and angels of praying best friends who take you out for a beer and remind you that this too shall pass, angels of partners or husbands who practice presence and take the screaming baby while you catch your breath, angels of liturgies written thousands of years ago so that you don’t have to scrape for spiritual and emotional energy that simply is not there. The angels will care for you in this crucible of the desert.

Here we are, approaching the first Sunday of Lent 2020.

Tell me, friend, are you in a wilderness? What are you observing? How are you feeling? How is God sending angels to tend to you?

Resources:

This song literally carried me in my postpartum period with Cedar.

If you live in Rhode Island, Connecticut or the Boston area, this was how I found my therapist and I think the platform is my favorite yet for finding good mental health care. It’s a beautiful user experience, the therapists post introductory videos of themselves and pictures of their office so you really know what to expect ahead of time and of course you can filter for your type of health insurance, various specializations you’re looking for (PTSD, grief, postpartum etc.)

ZENCARE

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Ash Wednesday: Great Suffering

“Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

Embodied

In a true display of privilege, I didn’t need to think of my body until I became pregnant. I had never been hospitalized, never broken a bone, never encountered any limits on the capacity my body had to bring me to and fro, to breathe in and out without assistance; my body was a convenient vessel for the rest of my life.

That is until the beige, sticky pall of nausea began somewhere around 8 weeks.

And then the hemorrhoids that plagued my sedentary life.

The electric round ligament pain as my belly grew.

Pregnancy forced me to face my bodily existence every day. It forced me to confront my limitations, which is really my humanity.

Lent does the same.

It’s a six week stretch, beginning with Ash Wednesday that sets the tone of the ultimate humility: we are not God. We will die. We are dying. We choose death (that religious word sin). We are so deeply dependent and it kills us. The rest of the year we might entertain the illusions of our control and self-sufficiency, but Lent is one giant social experience in radical honesty.

“I am not okay.”

“I chose that vice again, and I am sick to my stomach.”

“I need help.”

We always carry around in our bodies the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body.

2 Corinthians 4:10

I know that Paul was speaking in metaphor. But I’ve always sensed that women can put flesh on those words better than anyone.

There are leaders among us every day, women who have carried death in their bodies.

Those who have miscarried, birthed deceased babies, lost their children within those fragile first weeks.

They are the ones who live with no illusions of control. They have tasted the bitter cup first hand that life is and then isn’t. That’s the truth of being human.

Just this week Vanessa Bryant eulogized her thirteen year old baby girl and her lover, Kobe.

They were and then they weren’t.

Fragile

“Human existence is so fragile a thing and exposed to such dangers that I cannot love without trembling.”

+ Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace

So fragile a thing.

I think for some of us, the boundary lines have fallen in such pleasant places that we truly forget that life is neither guaranteed nor owed. It is truly a gift.

The numbers do not deceive us:

1 in 3 women will have at least one miscarriage in her lifetime.

1 in 36 women will experience 2-3 miscarriages.

At age 20, 20% of pregnancies will end in death.

By age 40, 40% will.

We don’t have consistent parameters for early loss, those pregnancies that end before life could be detected with a Doppler. Estimates are between 50-70% of positive pregnancy tests end in death.

There is no standard of care for how to talk about loss.

Some providers refer to a fetus, a missed pregnancy or the dreaded clinical term, “spontaneous abortion.”

Every year in the US, 26,000 babies are stillborn, dying post 20 weeks gestation.

That’s 1 in every 160 deliveries.

71 families will be told today that their baby has died, and the stillborn rate is more than premature infant death and SIDS combined.

We don’t talk about it. Therefore, we don’t expect it. Therefore, when it happens to us the weight of silence is unbearable.

Pain Demands to Be Felt

There’s a line from John Green’s young adult novel The Fault in our Stars:

That’s the things about Pain, it demands to be felt.

Do we believe that? Do we live that?

As I am more and more exposed to a woman’s body in birth, I find this physiological truth fascinating:

If a woman fights the sensation of pain that comes with contractions, she will experience the process as unbearably painful and even traumatic.

If she has tools, support, and presence to surrender to the pain, she will progress.

Pain demands to be felt.

And that’s where Ash Wednesday enters. A day of communal permission to feel the pain: the pain of our suffering, the pain of our sin, the pain of our mortality.

Please, instead of shrouding the mothers in our midst who have experienced loss with that deafening silence, can we approach them this time? Can we ask them about their story? Say their baby’s name?

We might find that they are our leaders into lament, into feeling the pain that demands to be felt, into remembering our true humanity. And, as Audrey Assad sings,

See what you've lived through
So you can grieve it
And draw it towards you
Catch and release it

---

The following is a letter my dear friend Beth wrote to her stillborn daughter, whom she and her husband Brandon lost at 19 weeks. Her name is Annie Hesed (which means “an enduring love”), and Beth and Brandon have developed the most beautiful rituals to integrate the suffering of Annie’s death into their family life. Follow her @bethbgoad to read more about Annie’s death and how Beth is living with this grief.

Dear Annie,

A year has passed since the first and last time I held you in my arms. I remember so much of the day we met you face to face and feel robbed of a lifetime of memories. Your delicate body, fearfully and wonderfully made, was so strong. I measured your foot against my thumbnail so I’d always remember how small it was.

This year was not what I had imagined. There were no matching dresses with Maggie. I slept through many nights and woke up feeling disappointed I wasn’t a sleep deprived mother of an infant.

It is a privilege to be your mama, Annie, even though I have so many unanswered questions. When I am sad about your absence in our family, I try to remember all the pain you get to avoid on earth. I remember you’re with my own mama and smile thinking about you helping her with her heavenly garden.

You are loved, sweet girl, by so many, and perfectly, by our Heavenly Father.

Love,

Mom

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In remembrance of Annie Hesed Goad, born May 22, 2018 at 10:54PM, 66g and 5.5 inches

Resources

Adriel Booker’s Grace Like Scarlett

here’s an excerpt:

Grief expands the soul and exposes our need, but it also expands our heart to receive love and be changed by it. This becoming can make us more whole if we are open to receive (and be changed by) God’s astonishing love. “Blessed are those who mourn,” Jesus said, “for they shall be comforted” (Matthew 5:4). We are not blessed because we are mourning what we lost; we are blessed because we’ve experienced his comfort in the midst of it — that’s the blessing. Suddenly the brokenness has been transformed into the blessing. He doesn’t simply want to rescue us; he want to remake us. How stunning!

Podcast “Still A Part of Us” featuring the stories of parents of stillborn babies

Audrey Assad’s song on grief Shiloh