The Beginning of Life: Nothing Dignified About It.
- Sat 25th April 2009, 12:34 pm
The events commemorated on Holy week took on a special meaning for me this year due to the birth of my son. The events of Holy Week are key to Christianity as they are the means that Christ gave us eternal life. That being said, they were horrifically undignified – which is what the Romans intended when they crucified somebody. Similarly, what a woman goes through to give birth to a baby is also undignified as well as painful. It’s not just the event of birth that is undignified, but the entire pregnancy leading up to birth also can be quite undignified.
We all know what Yeshuah Ben Yosef (Jesus) endured in his passion. The scourging, the crown of thorns, carrying a large heavy duty load bearing crossbeam or two for a few miles to the place of execution, being nailed to it, hung up and left to die of exposure naked. We believe that by these events and the fact that he was the son of the god of Israel – proven by his standing up and walking away from it after three days in the tomb, Jesus redeemed humanity in perpetuity and gave birth to eternal life for us all.
What a woman goes through to bring new life about in this world is in a lot of ways very similar. It starts about 9 months prior with conception and implantation. In my wife’s case, she noticed when it implanted and could very intimately feel it growing. She was in constant pain and constantly felt like she had been run over by a truck. As she started to show, simple tasks became much more awkward. She would have a hard time getting up if she sat down, she couldn’t bend at the waist anymore and she couldn’t get comfortable enough to sleep. On top of that, the anxiety we both had for the future affected her especially – further enhancing her suffering and indignity.
Even further, close to term, the baby didn’t want to come and they ended up inducing her labor after a non-stress test indicated that his heart rate was all over the place. We had only eaten one meal that day and she had to further endure the dignity of a very light clear liquid only meal before they induced her labor in case they had to do a C section on her – which they ended up doing because the doctor decided that she didn’t like what the baby was doing. Before they did that though, she labored for close to 8 hours with very little energy to cope with the intense and severe pain of labor. After surgery, they had her catheterized and she had to wear a kind of diaper on top of that which had to be changed periodically to remove the discharge and put a new absorbent material down to catch the new stuff. Additionally, she had this new baby that was totally dependant on her for nutrition, yet because of how many wires and tubes she had on her, she could not really care for him, making it a very unpleasant and undignified experience.
While it was in the end a very happy day for both of us, the birth of our son was anything but dignified. There was blood everywhere before the birth, when the doctor broke her water to the discharge afterwards as her uterus shed its lining and healed after having my son ripped out of it. While crucifixion and giving birth are two very different experiences to be certain, one being the end of a life and the other a beginning, Yeshuah Ben Yosef’s execution had more in common with a birth than a death, as he stood up afterward and 40 days later ascended to his father, making it in reality a birth more than a death. Life and life’s issues by definition are very touchy, complex and can become quite undignified very quickly. The paradox of a crucifixion being a life giving process is a vivid example of this.
