Question of the Day:
How have you experienced “birthpangs”?

All this is only the beginning of the birthpangs.

~ Matthew 24:8, JB

“Birthpangs” is an apt metaphor used by the prophets referring to something painful that is bringing about something better (see, for example, Isaiah 13:8 or Jeremiah 21:9).  The price for bringing about something better is invariably to go through the pain of birth.  In most mythology, male gods create by a flick of their creative finger.  Female gods often create by labor pains of some sort. 

Much of patriarchal Christianity has been trying to avoid pain, as we already see in the twelve apostles (e.g., Mark 8:31-33).  Males hope they can avoid birthpangs by making an “end run” around them.  Maybe that is why we could not hear a lot of the transformational teaching of Jesus.  It also shows us that Jesus was a very untypical male, surely not a patriarch.

If we had an image of God as a great Mother who is always giving birth, I think birth pangs would have been preached about and understood a lot more.  Maybe that was the image of Mary as the “Sorrowful Mother” at the foot of the cross or with the pierced heart, for many Catholics and Orthodox Christians.  Any woman, who has had a child, consciously understands something I will never understand: she knows the necessary connection between pain and new life.  Jesus says it clearly, “a woman in childbirth suffers,” but afterwards she has joy (John 16:20-21)!  We must allow Mary, mothers, and all women to more inform our reading of the Gospels or we might end up missing the core message.

~ Richard Rohr
February 2010