Wearing God by Lauren F. Winner

Author:Lauren F. Winner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2015-02-17T16:00:00+00:00

But let us imagine an alternative: let us imagine that Joseph and the midwives’ absence from the birth imply not that Mary had an effortless labor but rather that God—who is described in Isaiah as the one who opens the womb and delivers, and in Psalm 71 as the one who freed the psalmist from his mother’s womb—midwifed the birth.

One Old Testament text that casts God as a midwife is Psalm 22. In that psalm, we petition the God who is holy, who is liberator, who is king, who is God of our ancestors, and who is midwife. The psalmist, writing in a place of deep despair, pleads for God to draw near:

Yet it was you who took me from the womb;

you kept me safe on my mother’s breast.

On you I was cast from my birth,

and since my mother bore me you have been

my God.

Do not be far from me,

for trouble is near

and there is no one to help.

Whenever we pray this psalm, we are calling the God who attended our birth to once again attend to us.

Biblical discussions of midwifery, coupled with other historical sources, shed light on the metaphor of God as midwife. Foremost, the midwifing God is a God who helps bring about and sustain life—a midwife’s skill could be the difference between a mother or a baby living or dying. The God who midwifes us is the God who delivers us—in the sense of a labor and delivery, but also a great political deliverance: before Moses could act on God’s behalf to deliver the children of Israel, the Hebrew midwives Shifra and Puah did, delivering Hebrew babies and defying Pharoah’s orders to kill them. To think of God as a midwife is to identify God as someone who comforts and encourages—in Genesis, when Rachel laboring with Benjamin is in distress, it is her midwife who speaks words of reassurance to her. It also strikes me, a woman who does not have children, that in the biblical basket of maternal imagery for the divine, the image of midwife reaches out to draw into God’s action childless women—in ancient Israel, midwives were often either old women, or women who were themselves barren; it was those old or childless women who were free to get up in the middle of the night and attend a laboring woman for hours or days.

Midwifery is foremost about life—about helping women move from one life stage to another, and about helping to bring new life into the world. But midwifery can involve death: right after Rachel’s midwife comforts her, Rachel names her newborn son, and then she dies. There is a book I have read annually since college. Written by historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife’s Tale is a remarkable re-creation of the life of Martha Ballard, who delivered almost one thousand babies on the Maine frontier in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Most of the mothers and children she delivered lived, but a few did not, and Ballard typically recorded those deaths in her diary.

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