suffering & the melody of thin places
singing the Psalms is good
Birthing is quite obviously physical. Physical work, physical pain. The workings of any woman’s body is a work of genius and intricacy. We experience all this viscerally. I, for one, love learning about it.
Birth might also have elements of sentimentality in hindsight. Yet I’m coming to see how stripped and flattened the experience appears, when seen through the eyes of someone who didn’t experience it.
In hospital rooms—where my physical body was recently being cared for, and memories of all kinds were being made—the actual experience contained infinitely more. These liminal places are quietly subtle. They also thunderous with the Spirit’s presence.
“Timothy George writes that these places are special “not because the air is rarefied or the land is narrow but because the distance between heaven and earth shrinks, and time and eternity embrace.” The Celtic believers thought of thin places as physical, geographic locations where the barrier between heaven and earth is porous because the Lord, in his kindness, met a person there.”1
George continues explaining how “A thin place is where the veil between this world and the next is lifted for a moment, and it may be possible to get a glimpse of what one’s life is all about—perhaps of what life itself is all about.”2
There are times when my heart is unusually tender, accepting of kindness in a way it isn’t always. My heart more readily accepts the reality of vulnerability and dependency. My mind settles. There is space to ponder. It is a gift, the sudden halting of regular life, and the incapacity to read or listen to long-form prose. That craving of the poetic. The mind, the heart are forced to rest—in honest emotion, in beauty and the mysteries around.
More often than not for me, this has been in times of suffering. And suffering has sporadically colored my experiences of of pregnancy and postpartum. The juxtaposition of life with death—or the threat of it—intensify the veil, heighten the soul’s sensitivity. What is unimportant is stripped away. Helplessly cracked open, I reemerge with vision clarified just a bit more.
My maternal grandfather passed away before our first child was born. We watched his body be lowered in the ground and covered with dirt, my own belly large with life.
An unfamiliar pandemic swept through the world. Being brand new parents and Long Island newcomers, we were now pregnant with our second child. His diagnosis at a few weeks old, requiring immediate surgery, had me pacing our chilly beach along the Long Island Sound. I put Steffany Gretzinger in my earbuds. Songs became prayers, as though the reflex of the suffering.
Carrying our third child, I watched Ukraine explode in violence and my father experience a health scare. A kind soul at the church we were visiting let me weep after the pleasantries of meeting each other. Then there was the Supreme Court decision fraught with a million successive takes, my soul so heavy however you cut it. My husband’s college friend’s cancer took a turn for the worse a month before I delivered. This remains one of the thinnest veils of time and space I’ve experienced, thick with the Spirit’s presence. My husband flew to the Austin funeral and reunited with old buddies under this jarring circumstance. He was in their wedding years ago in the same city—and had us lovebirds kissing in the rain after the reception party. I had looked up to this couple from afar, with their gift of teaching and boldness of love in ministry. His widow shared this song among others, which continued to wash over me in the postpartum hospital room and beyond. Was there something there for the next two-plus years? Some of the most discouraging periods, overwhelmed anger, and unmoored wrestlings arrived in various waves after that, including this pregnancy.
The week that started with a routine prenatal appointment ended up with an ultrasound and somewhat fearful tears most of the next morning, gathering things returning to the hospital, and a baby born into the world the next.
In those quiet, dark hours of the middle of intensifying labor—past the carefree beginning of it—it was EveryPsalm in the airwaves until we met our baby. When the mind cannot do anything except focus on the inevitable task at hand, something devastatingly honest is able to break though. In this way, I find labor and birth—while retaining much in the way of being uniquely special—to share much with other forms of suffering. Pain and vulnerability can bring out groanings for mercy like nothing else can. So in those hours of welcoming and enduring the waves, I let those lyrical Psalms wash over me. Scripture wrapped in melody is what I needed. The Spirit heard my groanings too deep for words—including but not limited to the duration of labor. Since then, I can hardly listen to certain of these renditions without some tears.
Too Cerebral or Too Emotional. Perhaps these categories are relative, and we can only see these parts of ourselves rightly alongside each other. I’ve used the intellect in overdrive as a crutch for a weary, battered, hardened or hobbled spirit that needs to rest itself in Goodness, in Beauty. To be enveloped and swallowed whole by it. To let the mind be properly formed in truth by the subtle ache of it all. There is no competition among the transcendentals. Truth Himself deserves a beautiful adornment. That’s often the only lasting way to get through to our battered or hardened souls.
The command3 to make heavy use of psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs shouldn’t seem like such a dry and heavy yoke to wear. Scripture set to music is a treasure. Able to be sung with any condition of the soul, this method of hearing God’s word is a balm.
Our five year-old sets to work at the sunny kitchen table. He’s taping and cutting, adding a door and a ribbon for a windowpane. The box he’s using recently arrived at our doorstep, a meal kit gift. Their own child would have been two months old. Instead he was born into the world too early, cold and lifeless. I weep at the happy scene unfolding before me. “Will they get another baby?” our boys have asked. Babies, even unexpected or overwhelming amounts of them, seem more and more like miracles given in due time.
Is this not how the violent tenderness of grace feels, too? Ever uncontrollable, jarringly overwhelming. Better to wrestle with it than reject it. And I seem to be wrestling with a lot these days.
Yet, our tiny child’s name means good news. I look at her delicate form, an Ebenezer for this moment in time, for eternity. We will keep filling the air with the accompanying songs.
https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/gifts-thin-place/
https://firstthings.com/thin-places/
Ephesians 5:18-19
I cannot tell you how beautiful this is, and how deeply I relate, even though each has her unique thin spaces. You have put into words what so many of us know and struggle to articulate.
God bless you.
(We have a good news girl too)
At one point during my last labor I just sobbed and sobbed, leaning my head over the edge of the tub. I was near or in transition and it all just broke open. No one could do anything for me except for “hold space” as they say. My husband just sat with my hands in his, and our midwife sat quietly in the corner watching.
At my one day visit our midwife commented that while she didn’t know what I was thinking while I was crying, it reminded her of this universal pain that is being a woman in labor. She’s not a Christian, but she’s right that this suffering is a sort of portal. As soon as I see two lines on a test I begin to worry, because I begin to love.
You wrote this so beautifully, and I feel like I’ve bumbled through a comment, without really saying what I’m trying to express, because there just aren’t really words.
Congratulations! And have so much fun with the girlie things! I didn’t think I would care — I was happy to be a mother to boys (and it turns out I’m still not a headband/bow mom) but that little darling is just such a girl while still holding every inch of her own, and the boys love her and it’s one of the best things in the world.