The Virgin nursing Infant Jesus, Defendente Ferrari. Creative Commons license.
It’s not disrespectful to imagine this if we acknowledge that all births are sacred, yet this thought is hard to contain in the manger scene: Mary howling, the blood, the absence of a woman attendant or midwife, emphasizing the aloneness of the experience for most of us women giving birth. The sacred, after all, is nearly always experienced alone, on a mountaintop or in a desert for the male prophets and saints, but in the cold and desolate cave (there were no stables at this time in Bethlehem) for Mary and for her descendants… giving birth in the antiseptic atmosphere of hospitals now that the natural birth movement seems to have passed, along with an understanding of the crucial importance of breast feeding.
For Mary, of course, there was no question of how she was going to feed her baby. And she was spared the modern intrusions of cell phone cameras and even videos, manned by a crowd around her bed. Ancient wisdom has always warned against the presence of the father at a birth and most men if they were honest would admit they would like to be spared the blood and the screams. Joseph’s ambiguous position, the father and yet not the father, would have made his presence even more dubious and he could hardly explain to friends and neighbors that the Holy Spirit was in fact the father.
We’ve sanitized all this, of course, turning a primal scene into a pastoral for children and yet it seems to me that Mary’s agony as a human mother giving birth unattended and unanesthetized is a worthy parable for and warning of her son’s later agony on the cross.
My mother Mary’s birthday was on Christmas Eve, and since birthdays shortly before or after Christmas are not much noticed in the excitement, my father initiated Christmas Eve plays in which all five of their children participated, more and more reluctantly as we grew into adulthood. Mother, the only audience, sitting in a throne-like chair, wearing one of her jewel-colored velvet at-home dresses, perhaps enjoyed our presentation or perhaps was embarrassed by it; she did not claim much enthusiasm for amateur efforts. And I remember mainly the stress of devising some kind of script (my younger brother Jonathan took over this task when I was grown and gone), usually some version of A Christmas Carol with Father delighting in playing the Ghost of Christmas Past, dragging tire chains up the stairs from the basement.
Oh the ghosts of Christmas past! We all have them. May yours wear holly wreaths and drag chains of tinkling bells if they have to drag chains at all.
Blessings on you, every one.
Very well written! Brilliant piece. Thank you for this perspective
I have from childhood wondered at the things adults will believe and foist onto children, the Xmas story being just one. I’ll offer some ideas that are outside the patriarchal religions’ tales. Were there really “virgin” mothers? Some of us think that in the pre-patriarchal era, when people lived peaceful lives of pleasure without weapons or warfare, guided by their intuition and through cooperative living and consensus decision making, not perfect but a far cry from the patriarchal nightmare, most women had keenly developed their psychic powers and would retreat to a ritual place to meditate concentratedly when they wanted to start their organs on the process of creating a new life within their own body. The invaders’ story of “virgin birth” came after their takeover, when life was no longer peaceable enough for women to go deep enough meditatively to generate life themselves, and after women had been made slaves. (The non-ruling men made slaves as well.)
Another thing that some of us think was the case in peaceful, pre-patriarchal areas: There was only one life form — what the patriarchal males later dubbed female. But at some point in time, when the population would now and then diminish, Nature began using the time in the womb to alter a baby so that its genitals migrated outside the body and so that a member fitting the shape of the vagina would fit inside it and send altered eggs — later called sperm — in to meet with the egg in the womb. This is still routine with every pregnancy still. We all start out in the one life form. some continue developing in that way. Others are altered — later called males. Even med schools have to recognize this, and teach it, but as hurriedly as possible, not to be mentioned again or thought of, with the ramifications of it for life in a world structured on a glaring inaccuracy. Among other species, the altering also goes on — the speculative explanation being that it happens when the population declines.
If this is news to you, it should be no surprise. Conquerors must destroy all signs of the culture they destroyed, in order to own and dominate it. And they must replace what they eliminated with stories and practices of their own. Yet somehow this goes unnoticed, in relation to everything that non-feminists don’t want to see. So there it is. There probably was a self-generated manner of creating new life before Nature began the adapting gig. Unfortunately Nature didn’t also provide the altered ones with some way to wisely handle the excess of testosterone which would cause the member to stiffen and out-of-body eggs to be produced. And so then, along with intercourse, we had rape and “females” being labelled all the ugly names the ruling marauding males could think up to call “females” who’d been raped or who’d dared have sex outside the males’ rules for their sex slaves. Such a hornets’ nest Nature created when it started adapting the one life form. This cruel and tragic hidden history is what comes to my mind every time I can’t avoid seeing some depiction of that ridiculous story of Mary’s “virgin birth”. And yes, birthing became a horror, once taken over by the marauding males. And still is, today, unless one somehow happens to know to call on a wise and loving midwife.