The Dark Womb: Re-Conceiving Theology through Reproductive Loss

By Karen O'Donnell

The experience of reproductive loss raises a series of profoundly theological questions: how can God have a plan for my life? Why didn’t God answer my prayers? How can I have hope after such an experience? Who am I after such a loss? Sadly, these are questions that, along with reproductive loss, have largely been ignored in theology. Karen O’Donnell tackles these questions head on, drawing on her own experiences of repeated reproductive loss as she re-conceives theology from the perspective of the miscarrying person.

Offering a fresh, original, and creative approach to theology, O’Donnell explores the complexity of the miscarrying body and its potential for theological revelation. She offers a re-conception of theologies of providence, prayer, hope, and the body as she reimagines theology out of these messy origins.

This book is for those who have experiences such losses and those who minister to them. But it is also for all those who want to encounter a creative and imaginative approach to theology and the life of faith in our messy, complex world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: SCM Press
• Release date: Feb 28, 2022
• ISBN: 9780334060956

Karen O'Donnell

Karen O’Donnell is the Coordinator for the Centre for Contemporary Spirituality at Sarum College. A feminist, ecumenical, practical theologian, her interdisciplinary research interests span theology, spirituality, and pedagogy. She is the author of Broken Bodies, which is focused on the intersection of body and memory in Christian tradition, drawing on sacramental and practical theologies.

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The Dark Womb

Re-Conceiving Theology through Reproductive Loss

Karen O’Donnell

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© Karen O’Donnell 2022

Published in 2022 by SCM Press

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Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

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For all who have experienced pregnancy loss and for those who grieve with them.

Contents

Acknowledgements

Foreword by Heather Walton

Introduction: Re-Conceiving Theology Through Reproductive Loss

1. The (Theological) Silence Surrounding Reproductive Loss

2. Reproductive Loss as a Trauma

3. Reimagining Miscarriage: Embodied Agents and Moral Failures

4. Providence, Petitionary Prayer and Pregnancy Loss

5. Miss-Carried Hopes

6. What About Hannah?

7. Body Theologies

8. Teach Us How To Pray

Aftermath: The Post-Traumatic Remaking of My Self

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

There are so many people whose contribution to this work must be acknowledged and without whom I would not have been able to produce this work. These acknowledgements are more poignant than usual for two reasons. First, much of the work on this manuscript was completed during the COVID-19 outbreak where so much of life and work was interrupted by the pandemic. Second, this book has been in my head for the last five years and on my heart for much longer. It, therefore, feels even more necessary to thank those who have facilitated, encouraged, supported and nurtured the production of this work.

My first thanks must go to my wonderful colleagues at Sarum College who have been consistently encouraging and supportive as I have journeyed through this work. I am particularly grateful to the principal James Woodward who graciously made space for me to get this work completed. I am also hugely indebted to my wonderful students who are so encouraging, so invested in exploring new ideas and who challenge me to think through the difficult things all the time.

Various people have read and responded to portions (and sometimes the whole) of this work. I am so grateful to all of you who took the time to read or listen to the ideas in this work and give me such helpful feedback. I am particularly grateful to Maggie Kamitsuka, Flo O’Taylor, Ash Cocksworth, Jo Winn-Smith, Liane Chalmers, Helen Hooley, David Green, Helen Caine, Rosemary Shorter and Anna Fisk. I am also grateful to colleagues in the Theology departments at both Roehampton and Leeds Universities for fantastic conversations on these themes.

A further particular thanks go to Katie Cross, Wren Radford and Scott Midson for their support and encouragement, for never minding a stupid question, and for their care and compassion when parts of this book were hard to write.

I am, as always, so grateful to my family for their unfailing ability to look interested as I make them listen to ideas again and again! They have given me both the space to do this work and the encouragement that it is worth doing.

My last acknowledgement goes to my partner James. I cannot put into words how grateful I am for you and for your support and love each day. Thank you.

Foreword

by Heather Walton

This book compels its Christian readers to engage in a profound revisioning of both thought and practice. This is necessary because the categories, boundaries and definitions employed to secure a sense of safety, order and a ‘proper’ discreteness in personal, communal and religious identity are all placed under judgement when brought into relation with the person experiencing pregnancy loss.

The spiritual challenges we encounter here are bodily and visceral. The blood and tissue that flows from the miscarrying person are inseparable from those of the baby they have carried but may no longer hold. Now, and for always, living cells from a little life that died will be cradled and renewed within them. As Karen O’Donnell maintains, the miscarrying bodymind ‘is the place where death and life are tangled up and indistinguishable from one another … comingled in the womb’. The words that issue from this liminal space carry immense authority. They are spoken by persons who have tasted death and who witness to its abiding presence in the midst of life. It requires intense faith to generate theology from here and the reciting of prayer from this place is a witness of great courage.

But this work is vital. Attention to the bodymind that is bent over and bleeds its loss produces compelling insights into the divine economy. At its farthest reaches, as O’Donnell invites us to consider, the miscarrying person embodies the mystery through which the living God forever suffers to bear death within themselves. At its nearest shore it also stands as testimony to what it means to be human. We are neither natals nor mortals but constituted on that plane where life and death meet for a brief moment – as a pause in the regular breath between desire and dissolution. In both these aspects the miscarrying bodymind becomes revelatory. By responding to its disturbing presence, so frequently occluded or ignored, the passage to a remarkable kind of theological vision opens up – and with it insights into a deeper, darker form of faith. As O’Donnell argues, the ‘opacity, mystery and ambiguity tied up in the experience of pregnancy losses’ weighs traditional theological concepts and faith practices in the balance. They are found wanting.

After suffering pregnancy loss myself, and while enduring the long ache of infertility, I was overwhelmed by the sense that I was walking through the ruins of the world I had once known. My emerging theological voice, formed through the discourses of liberation and feminist theologies, could find no terms to express what I encountered there. Neither the language of hopeful futures of justice and plenty, nor the claims made concerning an imminent divine encountered in the goodness of embodied life, were adequate to convey what I had discerned. The Bible with its images of desolated cities and its long-sounding laments spoke to me in new ways. But the customary patterns of church life felt like charades staged to conceal the wreckage all around us. It was not that my experiences had so myopically obsessed me that I had entirely turned in upon myself. Rather they had opened windows on to a world of loss. A world that was my world now. As I learned how to dwell there its contours became compelling. I began to seek ways to comprehend how God might be discerned in this place. As the great cultural theorist Henri Lefebvre states, the ‘commonplace’ tragedies of everyday life transport us to territories where everything is transformed. He audaciously affirms and celebrates the significance of understandings formed by looking upon darkness:

[T]he thinking that does not shy away from … the darkness, but looks it straight in the face … passes over into a different kingdom which is the kingdom of darkness … Daily life has served as a refuge from the tragic … people seek and find security there. [But to] traverse daily life under the flash of the tragic is already to transform … So that the irruption of the tragic in everyday life turns it upside down.¹

Very few theologians have produced work that owns its origins in this kingdom. In particular, as O’Donnell shows, there has been a profound silence in relation to the singular experience of pregnancy loss. In her daring reflections, which do not shy away from darkness, we discover not only sorrow but a stark beauty. Much has been cleared away. The ‘comforts’ of a providential faith and the belief that God sends pregnancies in response to particular forms of prayer are straightforwardly dismissed as ‘toxic’ theological fallacies causing much damage to those whose lives are blighted in waiting for a blessing that never comes – or worse still, blame themselves for the losses they endure. O’Donnell resists the temptation to erect new, quake-proof, theological shelters where these edifices once stood. Instead she turns to the resources of negative theology and apophatic mystical traditions that might enable believers to raise empty arms in worship from a barren place. In a gesture of extreme faith, she claims corporeal co-mingling between the miscarrying person and God; sacramentally, eucharistically and iconically. A dark theosis is celebrated here that requires all the resources of theological imagination to express. This emerges into language only to dissolve again into the silence of absence where words fail but the Spirit, ‘who witnesses what cannot be spoken’, remains.

‘God remains. That thin weary thread of love is constant.’ However, just as theology is transfigured in the face of pregnancy loss so too must prayer be reconceived. Perhaps the most important gifts offered in this work are the prayers and rituals that teach us how faith may be practised by those who lie curled up ‘in the darkness and feel life slip away’; those who forever ‘carry these little lives and deaths within’. It is these simple and moving prayers, formed for praying as painful breaths are being drawn in and out, that mean this book will stand not only as a bold and original work of constructive feminist theology but as a spiritual jewel.

We need such resources. We need them to attend to and make our long belated responses to pregnancy loss. They are also essential because in this time of many troubles we must discover how to pray again. In a world of many irrecoverable losses. In a place where we must dwell among the ruins.

Note

1 Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life: From Modernity to Modernism (Towards a Metaphilosophy of Daily Life), trans. Gregory Elliott, vol. 3 (London: Verso, 2005), p. 171.

Introduction: Re-Conceiving Theology Through Reproductive Loss

My own pregnancy losses – miscarriages and ectopic pregnancies – have haunted my theological thinking for the best part of 15 years now, although I have not been pregnant in over a decade. For a period in my twenties while trying to conceive, I experienced a number of pregnancy losses. At that time, I was an active member of a charismatic evangelical church that I had been part of since I became a Christian aged 14. Sadly, it was my experience of these pregnancy losses that was the catalyst for me leaving this church. As I will go on to describe in later chapters of this book, my repeated pregnancy loss and eventual infertility defied the theo-logic¹ of this church who believed that God had a plan for my life, who believed in the power of intercessory prayer, and who believed, ultimately, that I just needed to ‘have more faith’ and I would be a mother. That was not the case and I found myself at a theological loss for words. This experience led me into a profound period of questioning and exploring my faith. It led me back into academic study and much of my research over the last few years has been focused on experiences of trauma, reproductive loss and post-traumatic remaking. I draw that thinking together here in this volume which is the one I wish I could have read when I was experiencing those losses.

Reproductive loss is very common. If you get chatting to a group of adults, you will invariably find that someone – if not a few people – in that group will have experienced a reproductive loss of some kind. The true rate of pregnancy loss is very difficult to quantify as statistics are drawn only from those who seek medical attention for their miscarriage. For many people, after they have experienced one or two miscarriages, they may prefer to deal with the experience at home, recognizing the signs and only going to seek medical attention if something is abnormal. For some people, what is lost during a miscarriage might be relatively ambiguous, as we note the fine line between a late menstruation and an early miscarriage.² For many people, access to medical care is so difficult they would, again, be very unlikely to see a doctor for a pregnancy loss unless something was abnormal. Official statistics put the rate of pregnancy loss around 20%. That is to say that one in five pregnancies will result in a pregnancy loss. The actual rate is likely much higher. Suffice to say this happens a lot, to a lot of different people, and it raises a whole range of theological, philosophical and spiritual questions, even among those who are not practising members of a faith.

In this theological exploration of reproductive loss, I am concerned with how we speak of God and discourse related to God from the context of the embodied experience of miscarriage. All theological discourse arises out of an embodied, enfleshed context so I do not doubt that there is theology already out that is written by people who have experienced miscarriage³ but there has been little in the way of sustained exploration of theology in the light of the experience of reproductive loss. I am clear that there is no value in pregnancy loss. There is no meaning that can be made from such loss that would justify the experience. The theological exploration I undertake in this volume does not justify miscarriage. However, the experience of pregnancy loss is a rich site of theological discourse. This experience challenges us to rethink entrenched forms of theo-logic that we have inherited often from more so-called ‘abstract’ and ‘objective’ forms of theological thinking. The experience of reproductive loss requires a reimagining of who God is, what prayer does, who we are and what it is that we hope for. What we find in this experience is that many of the things that have been taken for granted in previous theological discourse no longer hold weight. Our theology needs reconceiving and reimagining from within the experience of reproductive loss, in order that our faith (based on that theology) might sustain us through these experiences. That is what this work seeks to do.

What this book is not

There are a few things that this book is not attempting to do. First, it should be clear that I am a pro-choice Christian. Nothing that is written in this book should be used to support anti-abortion arguments. I am aware that there is considerable tension and discomfort – particularly among Christian feminists – around the interplay between pregnancy loss and abortion. Often these two themes are circling around each other such that to take on one has theological implications for another.⁴ While I will posit an approach to pregnancy that leaves room for life to begin at conception, I am certainly not arguing that any of the theology developed in this text functions in support of pro-life arguments against abortion.

Second, it should be clear that this is not a book in which I am going to argue that infertility is a gift, that reproductive loss is a sign that God has a special plan for your life, or that infertility is a reminder from God that we are not in control.⁵ This is not a book where you are going to find a theological explanation for why miscarriage and reproductive loss happens. This is not a theodicy in which I attempt to explain how God can be all-loving and all-powerful and yet awful things like miscarriage still happen to people. In fact, this is a book in which I am going to dismantle some of these theological ideas and clear out a space in which some new, more tenuous, more fragile, but hopefully more sustainable theological discourses and practices can be cultivated.

Finally, this is not just a book about miscarriage. Although, of course, miscarriage and other forms of reproductive loss feature strongly throughout the book, this book is also an adventure in constructive theology. Even if you have never experienced reproductive loss, I hope the ways in which I am reframing theological doctrines such as providence, prayer, hope and the body might be generative and stimulating. I hope the connections I am drawing between theology and spirituality, particularly how we pray, will be challenging in your own life. Ultimately, this is a theology endeavouring to highlight the theological space available to reimagine doctrine when we take our bodies – the starting point of all theological discourse – seriously.

What kind of theology is this?

I am not, as will become immediately clear, a systematic theologian. I situate my own work, which very often focuses on trauma, in a feminist and constructive mode of theology that is very open to interdisciplinary approaches to theological questions. As such, the theological and methodological approaches I have taken in this volume are varied and inter-related. In the first instance, this work is unashamedly feminist in its approach to theology. This means I have grounded the work in my own experiences of reproductive loss, drawing on an autoethnographic approach throughout the volume as I use my experiences to open up the range of experiences of pregnancy loss to theological investigation. The masculine domination of theological discourse, and the sense in which bodies in general – and women’s bodies in particular – are not appropriate sites of theological discourse, is strongly rejected throughout this work. I argue that the male domination of the theological world has resulted in an overwhelming presence of theological discourse that is abstracted from the real lives and real bodies of real people. But more, that rich sites of theological thinking have been neglected simply because they have never been noticed and considered. I think this is distinctly true of the experiences of reproductive loss but there are a whole range of other sites in women’s bodies that might have similar theological riches to offer, for example, menstruation, menarche, menopause, childbirth and sexual intercourse. So, this work is feminist as it begins with the real experience of reproductive loss and seeks to reclaim bodily experience as a site of theological discourse; in so doing, I hope that I do theological justice to these experiences.

In addition to this feminist perspective, this work is also in the form of constructive theology. In this sense, I am engaging in a theological reimagining of Christian doctrine out of the perspective of pregnancy loss. I demonstrate the ways in which current accounts of Christian doctrine are insufficient to account for the experience of pregnancy loss and the ways in which such doctrines do not do justice to the experience of such loss. In doing so, I am clearing the space for theological construction work, in which new theological spaces are constructed that provide