How pregnancy loss led me to faith — but not in the way you might think.
I’ve learned that the experience of pregnancy loss in America is one of faith — of having it or not, of finding or losing it, of leaning into or falling away from it. I’ve interviewed Christians, Jews, Muslims, Mormons, Wiccans, Native Americans, agnostics, and atheists. No matter what the denomination or an individual’s personal beliefs about the existence of God, faith or the lack thereof is always a part of the story.
What has surprised me the most is the way that faith can lead people in similar situations to make drastically different decisions. I spoke with one woman whose God told her to carry her terminally ill daughter to term, knowing that she would die almost immediately after birth. I spoke with another woman whose God gave her permission to alleviate her terminally ill child’s suffering through a mid-term abortion. Both women consider themselves religious — they have strong faith, they try to practice what they preach, and they believe in miracles. And yet their faith led them down radically different paths and granted them completely different experiences of pregnancy, motherhood, and loss.
Faith is both a troubling and compelling subject for me. I am Jewish by birth and my grandmother’s first language was Yiddish, but my family never practiced Judaism. I know very little about the religion, and I never attended synagogue unless it was for a friend’s bar or bat mitzvah. I grew up curious about religion but never feeling religious myself, and this resulted in some interesting experiences — like trying out a Wiccan ceremony in a local cemetery with one of my friends, and later, attending Mass at a nearby Catholic Church with another friend.
Thinking back on that Mass, I don’t remember anything about the service. But I do recall looking around at all the different people, the different clothes and hairstyles and postures, and feeling momentarily at peace with myself. Surely there was a reason we were all so different, and surely if there was a God, He must love us all not in spite of, but because of those differences that He Himself created. And that gave me great comfort during a time when I was absolutely brutal to my big-nosed, acne-prone, stylistically-clumsy, teenage-girl self.
When I went off to college, it was my first time away from home and I was newly bereaved to boot, having just experienced the sudden death of my father. In the last year of his life, my father had became deeply spiritual and I yearned (and still do) to find out what it was exactly that he believed, and why it gave him such peace in that time. I remember sitting at the top of the stairs and looking down at him sitting at the bottom, reading the bible, and wondering what he was thinking.
So, in the angst of that first year without him, I sometimes went to church at Boston College, which is welcoming to secular students but still has strong Irish Catholic, Jesuit roots. I often went alone in the evenings, after it had gotten dark, and sat in the chapel staring up at the stained glass mosaic of Jesus on the cross. I would look at the agony on his face and let loose my own as I wept for my father — and for myself. Once, on Ash Wednesday, I even went to Mass and received the cross on my forehead. I had no idea what it meant, but I wanted to know what it felt like, and I wanted to be included among all those other students proudly bearing the smudges on their faces to the world.
Many years have passed, and I’ve settled into a kind of agnosticism. Partially this is because of the weight of Christianity in America, and my sense that it is a unique and often unsettling phenomenon. From my perspective, our politics have become too imbued with Christianity, and too many people who call themselves Christian seem blinded by doctrine at the expense of tolerance, sympathy, love, or even common sense. Meanwhile, elsewhere in the world I’ve seen religion being used to justify all kinds of brutality and violence against others. I can’t abide by any of this, and so I’ve long felt alienated and even judgmental of organized religion.
But lately, I’ve been wondering if I might somehow be Catholic. I started feeling this way for a silly reason — I saw a documentary about the Marian visions in Medjugorje, Bosnia in which people were praying the rosary, and I thought, very simply, that I would like to do that too. I was in Boston for the screening of this film, visiting a friend who lost her son when she was 5 months pregnant, and herself went to Medjugorge on a pilgrimage to help her cope with her grief. Her experience there comforted her and gave her peace, and she now hosts screenings to raise money for various organizations that help children with heart defects (the ailment that took her own child from her). I told her what I felt when I saw on the people with rosaries entwined through their fingers, their lips silently moving over ancient prayers, their eyes closed in meditation, and her response was to give me her own rosary that she bought in Medjugorge. I’ve been compelled to keep it close by ever since, and I’ve even learned how to use it. My mother and I plan to go to Mass this weekend — “just to see,” we said, and perhaps the following weekend we’ll go to the Presbyterian or the Episcopalian Church, “to compare.” Hedging our bets, in other words.
But while I’m trying to follow my instincts with regard to prayer, faith, and religion, I’m struggling with the idea of associating myself with the Catholic Church. I’m pro-choice, pro-gay marriage, and generally very liberal and progressive in my politics and values. I’m angered by the rigidness of the Catholic Church, its historical abuses of power, its complicity in unspeakable acts, and its doctrinal stances on everything from papal infallibility to contraception. I get frustrated by religious people who convert every conversation into an opportunity to proselytize. And yet — I want to pray the rosary.
I don’t know how to explain it, but I think it might be because of the Virgin Mary. I want to believe in a woman who accepted the task of carrying the Son of God in her womb, to stay strong for Him during His unthinkable suffering, to then give comfort to the world and intercede on its behalf even in the face of some of its greatest sins. I like this conception of motherhood, of choice, of being there for one’s children in even their darkest moments. Many women facing pregnancy loss have had to live up to these ideals in unimaginable ways, and they do so with courage and grace even when they feel frightened and conflicted.
After I lost Sloane, I was infuriated when people would try to tell me it was God’s plan. If God had anything to do with it, then why did he give her to me in the first place? Why not just wait until she was perfect? How could someone so omnipotent be so clumsy in how He brought children into this world? And yet I still thought of Sloane as a “spirit baby” in some kind of Heaven and took comfort in picturing her cradled in my father’s arms, my grandmother looking over his shoulder at her beautiful little face. I railed against a religious explanation of my loss, and yet I clung to a religious vision of what happened to my daughter after she was gone.
I keep asking myself, “why am I suddenly so compelled to learn about God?” I’m so uncomfortable with this new dimension of myself and I’m seeking justification and reassurance that it’s ok to explore it. I’m devouring books on theology, religious conversions, and even Marian apparitions. Perhaps I’m looking for something to ground me in the face of so much tragedy, since I’ve been doing a lot of reading and many interviews on the topic of pregnancy loss for my book. PerhapsI’m trying to give some kind of higher meaning to all these experiences, including my own.
And yet I wonder if I’m simply trying to understand, in a visceral way, the weight of faith for the women who’ve shared their stories with me — because it’s something that feels tantalizingly close, yet still just out of my reach. And I cannot honor those stories in a book until I understand it for myself.
