Continuing my booknotes, I'm going to try to alternate After Miscarriage and Reflections on the Psalms. I have things to say about both, and I'm reluctant to write/post day after day on the topic of miscarriage, even though (or perhaps because) I think I am writing from an intellectual distance these days, looking back on what has been both an emotional and an intellectual journey. I hesitate to say a spiritual journey, though I have thoughts about the nature of God interwoven. Because I'm not sure, if the experience has carried me anywhere spiritually, that I understand the nature of the direction I'm heading. Which means, of course, that the next quote will be about spirituality, since I have just admitted that I'm feeling adrift. Perhaps this is part of the explanation of why.
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The author explains that while it seems counterintuitive, asking others to pray for a baby is enriching for the other person, even if the baby is ultimately lost. One male friend of the author, reflecting on praying with his wife for the author's baby, who would be lost, writes,
"Baby E. became a true epicenter of prayer. To live such a short time without sinning while fueling so much prayer is the stuff of saints." p. 14
Prayer is hard.
Prayer comes easiest to me, I think, when I have a routine with other people involved. Mass, obviously, but also praying with my children at night. Because I am trying to instill this in them, and now, having established it as a routine, I am able to remember, to do. There have been times in my life when, mostly fueled by fear of nightmares and poor sleep, I also repeated, verbatim, a personal prayer that was more or less for peace through the night. On the other hand, an ideal of mine is the kind of dialogue that Tevya has with God in Fiddler on the Roof, which seems to proceed from a certain kind of faith and a mental leap that I find admirable because it addresses God as real. Perhaps what is hard about prayer is that it sometimes feels like abstraction, which is a difficult feeling to fight through.
None of this has anything to do with the quote, except that the baby that I had and lost was--in a desperate, please-keep-these-nightmares-from-me kind of way, an epicenter of prayer. Fear is a powerful motivation, and while I didn't always think I was going to miscarry--I really thought I was going to still be pregnant now, or next month, or in August--I feared and expected it. And I did--I prayed for intercession. Mostly just a casual, "Please give me a healthy baby and a healthy pregnancy"--but also a novena to St. Gerard--and even a special Mass with a blessing for the unborn and their families. This last was on the day that, I truly believe, the pregnancy ended. After leaving the ER at 3 a.m. a few days later to wait and see, having a pretty strong feeling that I was miscarrying, even if it couldn't be confirmed (there was only an empty gestational sac on the ultrasound, which might have meant there was a viable fetus that they couldn't see...), I stopped at the chapel--the same chapel where we had the blessing,and where I stood up for the first time and said publicly that I was pregnant--and prayed for peace.
I have never prayed so much in such a short period of time for one focused thing. I may never again. I don't usually fight in my mind against the things I see as inevitable, including death. In fact, most of the time I mourn for the person who is dying, or likely to die, in advance, and there is no mourning left in me by the time they die. I wonder if that means that I don't truly believe in miracles?
I attribute it, instead, to a kind of realism. Not wanting to fool myself. Which means pride, I guess.
I always understood that, being 43, I was more likely to miscarry than ever before in my life, but I held onto the most hopeful statistics and to the knowledge of every woman I have known (including my mother) to carry a healthy baby to term after 40. When I began to miscarry, I did feel like it was inevitable--after all, they say that in most cases, it does have to do with the viability of the fetus. So what was all of that prayer? What did I expect? A change of outcome?
Well, had an outcome changed, I wouldn't have known anyway. I guess the real benefit to my realism here is that I can't "blame God" for something that I wanted that simply wasn't going to be. I am not bitter--only observant--that I think the pregnancy ended on the day of the blessing. Perhaps that means that my baby was alive when she** received it. I can hope so.
This idea of the unborn baby--who lived a short while--as an epicenter of prayer resonates. If nothing else, she made me reach out to God in a focused way. If that has dropped away a bit for now, it was still a part of my life that I can remember, and build on. That would be appropriate for Lent. But I'm not sure I have it in me just yet. Still healing. Still wondering where I'm headed spiritually.
**There is no way to know if the baby was a girl, but I always expected her to be.
3 comments:
Part of what resonates with me in that quote too, both from my own experience of miscarriage and as a friend who has accompanied many other friends through their miscarriages. Is that baby as an epicenter of prayer, is also a center of a community or people praying. All the people you asked to pray for you, those who were at the special Mass, those who your friends asked to pray for you too. And the saints who were invoked to pray for the baby too. A cloud of witnesses, joining in a common prayer around the person of the baby. The time of my miscarriage and then the subsequent cancer scare was the first time in my life where I had a sense of many people all praying in a concerted way *for me* at the same time. I have often paused to say a prayer when someone on the internet asked for prayers for a special intention. This was the first time *I* was the subject of the intention. And it felt... different. Like a new awareness of God being present to me in the prayers of other people. I"m not sure I can explain it really, just that it was an experience I go back to and think about, and maybe it makes me more likely to pray for other people and to think my prayers have a value. Because I did and do value the prayers of those who took the time to pray.
That's a profound way to think about it. I felt so alone at the time. There was still the hidden element to the pregnancy. Ironically, it only became public as it ended. And was even the subject of something like ridicule or scorn from a family member, which is kind of hard. But I felt so isolated in that mass because I was older. Heading back to work (others weren't). With my husband (not a mother-figure taking care of me). Not obviously pregnant (again--unable to *prove* that I was pregnant). The mass was a great thing, and meaningful, but I felt very *outside* of that community. Which is the reality of parishes here. I don't fit in to the family parish, and the university parish doesn't know what to do with us.
My internet community was there for me, and praying. And thinking about it in your way, it doesn't matter much how I felt about the parish community. The truth of the prayers was there.
It is hard to feel isolated from the parish community, though. We need those face to face in person contacts and as awesome as the online community is, sometimes it doesn't have the same emotional closeness as being in a crowd of people you know and who know you.
But the reality of prayer and the communion of saints is real and it is comforting to think on it.
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