Through the Breaking Waves a Child is Born

Through the Breaking Waves a Child is Born:

A Surrendered Suffering

I am in distress, as a woman about to give birth to her first born.

For her pangs come over her and she has excruciating pain at the mouth of her womb,

writhing in the womb of the pregnant one.

 For children come into life through the breaking waves of death,

and she who is pregnant with a male child is afflicted by her birth pains.

For through the breaking waves of death she delivers a male child, through the cords of Sheol.

… those who go down to the seas are terrified by the roar of the water,

and their wise men are for them as sailors on the deeps …

they are tossed up to the towering waves and breaking waves by their roar …

(1QHodayot 11:8-10; 15-17)

The breaking waves of death swirled about me;

the torrents of destruction terrified me.

The cords of Sheol coiled around me;

the snares of death confronted me.

(2 Sam 22:5-6)

How much personal experience is good to share in a book that may be read by many? Here is my struggle! Small exegetical puzzles  - the exercise of the "mind" - are a safe retreat for me! Yet, as I work with the scrolls, my thoughts keep turning to how the Dead Sea Scrolls songs on suffering have affected my heart and my life.  Does the combination of "mind/academic" and "spirituality/life experience" work? One publisher told me that the Dead Sea Scrolls are "academic" and not devotional and wondered how the two could come together. Here is another draft chapter for the meditational book. You are welcome to respond to me at dorothy.peters@twu.ca with your thoughts! 

A mother or midwife will tell you that the labouring mother’s body instinctively tries to protect her by rising up and fighting against the pain. Normally, the presence of pain in the body signals harm and the human body interprets overwhelming pain as a sign of trauma or disease. Fear follows hard after pain, urging one to seek attention for the break, the bleed, or the cancer. Fear, in this case, leads directly to healing. Not surprisingly, the body interprets the pain also of labour, the “breaking waves of death,” as a signifier of harm and danger to itself, responding automatically with fear and even terror as the pain intensifies.

However, fear and struggle during childbirth may actually prolong or stop the labour, increasing the chances of life-threatening complications. Therefore, a midwife encourages the mother to embrace the pain, breathing with it instead of fighting against it. Counter-intuitively, against everything that her body is telling her, the mother pronounces this particular pain “good.” When she surrenders to it for the sake of her baby, her womb opens to give life and the baby frequently is born shortly afterwards.

It seems deeply ironic that the protection of the unborn life requires a mighty resistance against the urge for defensive self-protection. Even more ironically, this urgent fear that drives the mother to “fight” or “flee” the source of the pain actually jeopardizes not only the safety of the child but also of the mother.

Childbirth in the ancient world was accompanied by the real threat of death both to the mother and to the child and it is not surprising that the ancient Dead Sea Scrolls hymnist chose this familiar image to describe his own metaphorical near death experience. He writes a new song that weaves what he knows (or has heard of!) the travail of childbirth together with language from a biblical song of David. About eight hundred years earlier, God had delivered David from the death threats of Saul and of his enemies, and David responded by singing a song of his deliverance from the “breaking waves of death” and the watery “cords of Sheol,” the place of the dead.

In this second century B.C. prayer, the Teacher uses the powerful picture of childbirth to highlight the deepest of paradoxes: Out of life-threatening suffering, new life is born.

There could hardly have been a more dreadful sound to a sailor than the terror-inducing roar of heavy seas and breaking waves that threatened imminent destruction of ship and all life aboard. “Breaking waves” was thus a logical choice for a man struggling to imagine the sensation of waves of labour from the woman’s point of view. In Hebrew, this choice becomes even more intriguing in a play on words that located the pain of the “breaking waves” (mishbar) right at the “mouth of the womb” (mashber). Did this male writer have help in knowing how to locate the place of pain so precisely? ;-).

The basement morgue is very different from the birthing room. However, the lessons one learns about suffering in the birthing room create even the smallest space for hope for encounters with the face of death in the place of the dead.

It was in the birthing room of our community hospital that I first met my youngest son. Fifteen years later, I saw him for the last time in the morgue. But as profoundly different as the morgue is from the birthing room, the overwhelming waves of pain in both settings were profoundly similar.  In the days following my son’s death, I often pondered the day of his birth. Matthew was born one breath at a time, through one wave of pain at a time. And I wondered whether, just as I had surrendered to the pain in order to give him life, if the pain of losing him might also be surrendered, becoming, in some yet unimagined way, life-giving, too?

When I try to escape the pain, even now, it pursues me and terrifies me and crushes me with the full weight of it. However, when I turn into the pain with arms wide open, embracing it and surrendering myself to the full strength of it, the force of it is blunted and the terror loses its deadly power. Surrender does not erase the suffering. Far from it. But what it does is create some room for hope to enter in, a hope that dares believe that this suffering, too, might be pronounced “good,” and that it might, one day, accomplish a life-giving work within me.

In the Garden of Gethsemane right before his imminent death, Jesus himself said that he was overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death and prayed “Abba, Father … everything is possible for you. Take this cup from me. Yet not what I will, but what you will” (Mark 14:34-36). As Jesus himself expressed, God does not necessarily erase or even alleviate the deepest suffering of the ones he loves. In fact, through surrendered distress, excruciating pain, and the breaking waves of death, a saving life may come. Therefore, might we also be encouraged that our own suffering is labouring within us in ways that are hidden for the moment, but that will result in unexpected life for others and, in the end, even a surprising joy for ourselves.

Deep calls to deep

in the roar of your waterfalls;

all your waves and breakers

have overwhelmed me.

By day, the LORD directs his steadfast love

By night his song is with me—

a prayer to the God of my life (Psa 42:7-8)