Growing Up to Be a Child

I Source

You knit me together in my mother’s womb

Being born must be an incredibly traumatic experience. The poor baby girl, after nine months cocooned in a warm, moist, quiet and dark nest, is suddenly squeezed and pushed through a narrow hole. Her head is compressed much as a towel when put through a mangle, only to emerge into a cold, noisy, frightening new environment. It is hardly any wonder the first thing most babies do is to cry.

It is traumatic for the father, too. We are, of course, much maligned by mothers, who think they have the worst of the deal. I don’t want to minimise the pain mothers go through, but it’s not easy for the fathers either. Often we have been dragged out of bed at an un-earthly hour, only to have to wait around before anything happens. We have to remain strong and cheerful, while being shouted at, having our knuckles broken. All the while we have no control over events. After the baby is born, everyone asks how the baby and the mother are; no-one seems interested in how the father is.

Why childbirth is so painful is a mystery. From a purely anatomical point of view, there seem to be two key issues. First, the baby’s head is big. Now that is important because of the size and sensitivity of our brains. In comparison to other animals, the human brain is inordinately large, yet it seems we hardly use any of its capacity and we certainly have a very limited understanding of how it works. Our brains are amazing, though, and an integral part of what it means to be human.

The second point is that the mother’s pelvis is relatively small. This, also, is important, as it is the narrowness of the pelvis that allows the mother (and fathers too for that matter) to stand upright and move on two feet. This is another integral part of being human. So we have the problem of a bipedal, thinking organism producing another bipedal, thinking organism, and the two don’t really match. However, all is not lost. Our skulls have been made with a number of interlocking bones, which in the adult are fused together and hard but in a newborn infant are still separate, soft, and pliable. During the delivery, the baby’s head can mould, allowing it to squeeze through the birth canal, while still providing protection to the sensitive brain within. It is quite amazing that babies almost universally survive this process without damage to the brain.

However, I wonder whether there is something more than just an anatomical reason for the trauma of childbirth. The Bible seems to suggest there is, locating it right at the heart of the consequences of the fall, when the Lord God says to the woman, ‘I will greatly increase your pains in childbearing; with pain you will give birth to children.’ That was the consequence of eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. It is interesting how that ties in with the anatomical issues above, with the development of the human brain being one of the prime reasons why there is the mismatch.

But why should that be the curse on the woman? True, the man gets his curse as well, having to work in painful toil to eat. But why painful childbirth for the woman? Perhaps it is somehow related to the deeper mystery of the pain of relationship, or of the bonding between a mother and her child. I don’t know, and I think this may remain a mystery. You, me, and each person living on this earth was born through their mother’s pain. Life is not cheap – not anyone’s life. Perhaps that is part of the mystery. If a mother can go through that pain to deliver her baby, that baby must be worth the pain – and so much more.

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I guess it is the same with being ‘born again’ into God’s kingdom. I suspect it is rarely, if ever, an isolated event that just happens easily. I suspect it usually involves a certain amount of pain. Perhaps God does sometimes miraculously change people all of a sudden. In my experience, though, being ‘born again’ is usually a long process of nurture and development, maybe with a crisis point in the middle, but never the end of the story. I think for most people to find a meaningful relationship with God, someone has invested in them, praying for them, relating to them, helping them to understand. And somehow, unseen, God is at work allowing their development in ways we can’t understand. Then there is the pain. For the person involved, choosing to follow Jesus is a step into the unknown. It will involve leaving the security of the world as they know it, questioning their own values, and changing the way they function.

Just as a baby’s heart and circulation change dramatically following the birth, Jesus seems to call us to a totally radical new way of living if we are to be in his kingdom. Reading the Sermon on the Mount and his other teaching in the gospels shows just how radical this is – loving your enemies, putting others first, trusting God and not ourselves, rejecting violence, acknowledging our own vulnerability. I think when Jesus told Nicodemus that no-one can see the kingdom of God without being born again, he was making one of the most radical statements of all time. ‘Unless you are prepared to totally change the way you live in this world, you will not be part of my kingdom’ was the kind of message he was trying to convey. This isn’t some easy four-point prayer. It is a change as dramatic and painful as being born. I wonder how much we truly grasp this?