THIS is both a raw and a limpid exploration of the theology of reproductive loss, in which the author draws on her own painful experiences of repeated pregnancy loss and infertility, melding it with many important insights from the fields of feminist, trauma-informed, and apophatic theology. These feel like ideas that really matter, to all of us, but particularly to the author and the many who have been left alone in the chasm in the Church’s thinking about pregnancy loss.
The scope of the work is broad; for reproductive loss forces a reimagining of “who God is, what prayer does, who we are, and what is it we hope for”; but Karen O’Donnell deftly leads us through existing research (for example, Serene Jone’s imaging of the Trinity as a miscarrying person, as the one that carries death inside of itself and yet does not die) towards some startlingly original thinking as she reconceives the body of a miscarrying person as a grave, a “complex tangle of death and life” which is both fearful and culturally taboo.
As the site of such deep trauma, then, it is the body as much as the mind which needs remaking and “re-membering”, O’Donnell says; words fail, doctrine becomes insufficient, only “creative engagement” with our physical being will do. It is a “body theology” that O’Donnell offers: one that reveals a new “theo-logic, that offers ironically fertile land for theological discourse” and “new approaches in spiritual practice”.
Indeed, some of these “new” practices are offered: the final chapter contains a range of resources — prayers, liturgy, rituals, scripture readings — to help those for whom the “rite of passage” that is pregnancy is never completed, and those who accompany them. For another important aspect of this book is its critique of the “toxic” and “deadly”, even if well-meant, practices that currently exist in the Church, particularly in its Charismatic Evangelical wing, which the author once called home. These range from the whispered Bible verses about God’s providence to the offers of healing prayer, and prophecies of exact dates by which she would conceive, all of which augment the trauma.
Rather, to do justice to the reality of her experience of infertility, O’Donnell arrives instead at a hope that has been reimagined, a hope that is held “in tension with hopelessness” and is in “a God who is not in providential control of the universe [and] who has no capacity to answer prayers”, and yet a God who remains.
In these bold apophatic statements, O’Donnell seems to be talking to herself as much as to the reader, and still clearly wrestling with unanswerable questions, as her own work of physical, psychological, and spiritual healing continues: and yet this necessary work will surely offer some long overdue validation to the many more who have survived and persevered, and whose suffering has gone unacknowledged.
The Revd Jemima Lewis is a freelance editor. She is serving her title at St Mary’s and St Swithun’s, Kingsworthy, Winchester.
The Dark Womb: Re-conceiving theology through reproductive loss
Karen O’Donnell
SCM Press £19.99
(978-0-334-06093-2)
Church Times Bookshop £15.99