Labors of Love

IN HER LATEST BOOK, Birthing Hope: Giving Fear to the Light, Rachel Marie Stone spiritually illuminates a painstaking, sometimes isolating, and often highly medicalized event in the life of a woman. In uncovering her own journey giving birth, Stone invites us to question our understandings of pain and passage, deliverance and rebirth, illness and privilege, and theology’s long-complicated relationship to science. Stone uses her new memoir to inspire readers to comb through scripture and rediscover God as midwife.

Throughout the book, Stone includes passages from Isaiah, which “imagines God as birthing mother and midwife more than any other biblical book.” Stone notes, “Christians across the spectrum of cultural, theological, and political points of view seem equally to neglect biblical images of God as a laboring woman.” Chapter by chapter, Stone writes of labor and birth from a variety of vantage points that affirm the God closely linked to childbirth: Teenage Mary, struggling with morning sickness and at the end of her third trimester, pushing the Christ through her birth canal and into the world. A Malawian woman who must walk many miles home with her newborn strapped to her back mere hours after birthing. The Christian understanding of “being born again” as forgiveness, a fresh beginning, and as entering “into the womb of God to be born again.” Each perspective expands the reader’s understanding of rebirth through God.

Stone is, above all, in a raw, faith-inspired, and benevolent relationship with the enduring metaphors of birth. She recounts her time working as an international teacher and doula in Malawi. For Stone, it was in Africa that the metaphor of birth began to expand as a time of suffering set to welcome new life. “Agony and ecstasy,” she writes. “It is the most bodily and most spiritual event I know. It is life touching hands briefly with death.” Her gift in crafting prose flourishes as she exposes the complex, holy, and gritty nature of childbirth.

Refreshingly, Stone’s charge for her readers begins in the table of contents. Twelve of her 15 chapter titles are verbs—active, encouraging, provoking us to “risk, reflect, dive,” all marking specific stories in her life as a daughter growing up in a Christian household with Jewish relatives, as a mother and wife, and as an American doula working domestically and abroad. Throughout the book, Stone skillfully sets scenes.

At times, Stone breaks from her charging rhetorical style, which left me asking, “Wait, where are we?” And her tendency to dwell on her chronic anxiety distracted me from the larger story. Her metaphorical classification of her experience in Malawi as a “miscarriage” may also be off-putting to some of her readers. Throughout the book, Stone’s relationship to the country wavers. After catching a baby at a birth while gloveless, which exposed her to HIV, Stone consults with her physician in the U.S. and thinks about “how much safer it would be just to stay away from Malawi.” But overall, Stone’s passion shines through and these elements don’t detract from the larger journey, which stays true to its course.

Stone’s story concludes with the chapter “Till We Become Real,” which serves as a hopeful promise and encourages a patience for authenticity. “What comes at the end of this life, full of struggles large and small? St. Paul says that the whole creation, including us, groans as if in childbirth, waiting to see what kind of redemption awaits us; what there may yet be.” Stone’s book makes clear that suffering, struggle, and deliverance are very much a part of the human story.