Out of the Mess, Goop, and Pain, Something Holy is Born
By: Marilyn Flower
Tags: Spirituality, Creativity, Birth, Christmas, Pain

If Advent is a journey, Christmas Day seems to be one of arrival. After all, Mary gave birth to the Holy One in a long-ago stable, right?

Today is the big day with the birth of One, who many consider the — or at least their — Lord and Savior. That concept has come to mean some very specific, carefully — and no doubt — politically codified things in official churches’ doctrines and dogma.

That’s not the page I live or write on.

I am all about exploring the mystical and metaphorical in these teachings and stories. Often that takes me down some exciting side trails.

Today I want to focus on birth.

The Bible doesn’t discuss Mary’s actual labor and delivery process. It skips right to the Blessed Baby, implying that whatever labor pains and suffering Mary might have endured, she did so nobly given her mission, sweetly and quietly. Or at least off-camera.

I have never given birth, but I’m told it’s a messy, noisy, often painful process. For what’s inside to come out, especially through a relatively narrow opening, a lot needs to happen.

The uterine muscles contract, pushing the baby into position and down the birth canal. The baby gets into position via a turning process known as transition. I’m told that can be hell on a delivering mom’s lower back in particular.

The baby’s head dilates the cervix as s/he leaves the uterus for the birth canal. The vaginal opening is also stretched, sometimes tearing, sometimes given a pre-emptive cut.

There’s amniotic fluid and the goo the baby emerges covered with. What about Jesus’ afterbirth? I assume they buried it outside that stable, ensuring nearby crops were extra bountiful come harvest season.

This was well before modern medicine, epidurals, spinal blocks, Lamaze technics, and the ability to deliver via Cesarean Section should need arise.

Mary had it rough.

Deaths of mothers and babies were common back in the day before sterile techniques. Add the whole barn thing with straw that animals have slept, stepped, and peed on, and the dangers magnify.

All this to say, if Mary needed to shriek, yell, scream and cry out, even curse, it would have been totally understandable. If her face contorted in pain, and she did not look her usual beautific self, we’d get it. In fact, many of us would be relieved to know she’s one of us!

And yet, in keeping with the story, it’s a holy pain. It’s a sacred birth. The concepts aren’t mutually exclusive.

It’s all part of Divine Creative Expression. Not just the pretty after pictures, but the before and during as well.

Today it’s about the during part.

The messy, goopy pain of giving birth. Of most forms of creation.

All through Advent, I’ve been asking the question in several ways: What longs to be born in you? What qualities of God are you bringing forth into the world. What light cracks out of your soul in the darkness to illuminate your path?

If we are all giving birth to the Christ Consciousness or God Light within us, we are all Marys. Even men.

This is where the birth metaphor morphs into the creative metaphor.

So if the gestating/birthing images don’t work for you, perhaps creativity is a better fit. So let me say it another way. We are all creators. We are all artists — of our lives if nothing else.

In her Advent collection of colleges and reflections, Night Visions, Jan L. Richardson writes:

The celebration of Christ’s birth beckons us to consider what has lain dormant in our own lives, and what new life lies waiting beneath the surface. As women, and as men, during this season, we share with Mary and Joseph in giving birth to the holy. Bringing forth the sacred depends not solely on the physical ability to give birth. Although that is one way to share in creating with God, we give birth, too, when we create with our hands, offer hospitality, work for justice, or teach a child. We share in giving birth whenever we freely offer ourselves for healing, for delight, for transformation, for peace. And we become, as German mystic Meister Eckhart wrote in the Middle Ages, ‘mothers of God, for God is always needing to be born.’”

The question becomes — what are we creating today? With our lives. With our hands. With our hearts. With our words and deeds.

Like birth, creativity is messy.

Artist’s studios testify to that. But out of that cacophony of paint, brushes, clay, glazes, various oils, rags, funny smells, piles of canvases, stacking drawers of paper, come masterpieces.

Even though I am typing on my laptop, this page is messy. Below these words are quotes and passages I have cut and pasted here from other sources. They inspire me, and some may actually end up in this story.

You don’t get to see the contortions my face makes, especially when I check my word count. None of this negates the sacred nature of creativity.

Are you one of those folks who downplays the significance of your work? Especially when someone compliments it? Oh, this? I just threw it together at the last minute.

You may think so, but then again, you might have been gestating it subconsciously for nine months. Or your whole life.

All our life experiences crystalize into how we express ourselves moment by moment. Even if we’re not aware of it. Sometimes, like when we yell something our parents yelled at us, we’re painfully aware of it.

So value your self and your work.

If you do, others will as well. Picture that holy beam of light illuminating Madonna and Child lighting up you and your work. Bless it. Care for it. Give it the honor it deserves, whether that’s a show, a reading, a publication (that’s why we’re here on this platform, right?) or a production.

Take pride in it and feel the joy of creation in your process. Not just the joy of having the darn thing finally done. But the creative process itself. The brainstorming and initial sketching. The research. The early drafts.

The edits. Oh, the endless edits. The well-worth it edits. The ones that shape, sharpen, and give sparkle.

If the nature of the Sacred is to continually create, that’s our nature too. In one of his works on Meister Eckhart, Matthew Fox says, Joy is intrinsic to the creative process.

This Christmas, let it fill our hearts with joy. Let’s not judge the products of our creation. That is not ours to do; ours is to bring it forth.

Martha Graham to Agnes De Mille:

This reminds me of what modern dancer Martha Graham said to choreographer Agnes De Mille over sodas one day back in the 1940s. De Mille was frustrated that her work for the musical Oklahoma! which she considered “only fairly good,” was touted as a “flamboyant success.”

As shared on Brain Pickings.com, De Mille confessed to Graham a burning desire to be excellent, but no faith that she could be. Here’s what happened next in her words:

Martha said to me, very quietly: “There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep yourself open and aware to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. As for you, Agnes, you have so far used about one-third of your talent.” “But,” I said, “when I see my work I take for granted what other people value in it. I see only its ineptitude, inorganic flaws, and crudities. I am not pleased or satisfied.” “No artist is pleased.” (Graham) “But then there is no satisfaction?” (De Mille) “No satisfaction whatever at any time,” she cried out passionately. “There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.”

Let’s harness that divine dissatisfaction to fuel the fullest exploration of our talents and passions. But let’s also enjoy the process itself, however painful, however “ugly” we think it or we look. Let it be our Holy Creative Joy. Let it be our gift to the world. Namaste.