NOTES on this slide show:
At the end of this slide show I am shown singing the song, Families can be together forever, and then a short clip from A German Requiem is shared. This performance was with the Broomfield Choral Festival. I am standing in the back row on the left. This particular text from Brahms Requiem is simply “joyful JOYFUL! Joyful, Joyful….Joy EverLASTING, FOREVER on their heads….shall be. Joy and delight shall seize them and posses them, and pain and sighing, shall flee, shall flee, from them….Joy and delight shall seize them and posses them.”
I did a huge blog entry last summer explaining my interpretation of the requiem. Go here to read it.
I believe the Biblical Texts Brahms chose to use for this master choral work is simply describing the Divine Feminine as defined by Husband and Wife Unassisted Birth.
Here is the text of my blog post on Joyful Freebirth:
These past few weeks I have been forced to consider once again the difficulty that comes into my life with the Promotion of Unassisted Childbirth. As I have participated in a variety of news, magazine, and online conversations about childbirth, it has been a rude awakening to realize how truly controversial this lifestyle is.
I am so in the habit of socializing with people who have reconciled our life choices, and don’t feel the need to give us any grief about it, that when I am thrust into a situation where that old hostility rears its ugly head, it is always a shock to my sensibilities to listen to and read the pure venom that is reserved for those of us who have pulled away from the Birth Machine.
I have spent some quality time these past few weeks participating in online forums, blogs, and talking to reporters about Freebirth. I am so in the habit of thinking of this as a valid and realistic alternative to hospital birth, that it is easy to forget my own long journey to home birth and give others the same grace and space to reconcile it in their own minds.
I realized during a recent chat that those I was talking to wanted me to erase all of their fears and phobias around birth with a wave of a magic wand. They wanted me to reassure and give them the words and evidence that would allow them to let go of all of their own programming around birth fears and give the evidence that would enable them to quickly shift to a new way of thinking. Wether they knew it or not, this is an impossible task to request of any one person, and the reason why is because those who give birth at home unassisted are working in the faith realm. And for those steeped in medical childbirth, they are so far removed from faith, working in the fleshy realm of the tests, drugs, procedures, and practices of birth that to ask a person of faith to “hand over” a testimony of birth is an unrealistic request.
It is as if an atheist asked a person who believed in God to simplistically and without any effort on the atheists part, impart a faithful testimony of God into their heart.
Life does not work that way. In the faith realm, even after years of difficult reprogramming of mental attitudes towards birth, filling the mind with new beliefs, thrusting out of ones life the people, attitudes, and philosophies that are frustrating the freebirth process (and this is in fact the main reason I took on the task of doing my own prenatal care), and doing every proactive thing possible in terms of nutrition and exercise….even then….
GIVING BIRTH ALONE IS A LEAP OF FAITH!!!
Paul and I were talking about this topic during the days leading up to Bens Birth. We had been in email contact with another LDS couple who were planning an unassisted birth, and the mother had written, “If I could only be assured that nothing bad would happen, then I think I could give birth alone.” She shared with us how she had begged the Lord to assure her that everything would be fine…. and the heavens were silent.
The question is, Would it have been a leap of faith on her part if the Lord had told her before the baby came, that everything would in fact be fine; no worries, no problems?
Nope. The law that governs the universe is the Law of Opposites. If couples want to work in the medical realm where every step of the way they can be assured by technology that “everything is fine”, I believe they are cutting themselves off from the potential JOY and fulfillment that comes with the leap. Wether they are aware of it or not, they also welcome into their lives the various pitfalls and iantrogenic problems that accompany technological birth.
With unassisted birth, it often feels like a couple is standing on the edge of a cliff, with rocks and briars in the valley below. When that husband and wife make the decision to stand away from the edge, grasp hands, and then take a flying leap into the unknown, it can indeed look to outsiders as irresponsible as any intentional jump off a cliff would appear. Yet if that same couple claims the scriptural promises that Faith will indeed proceed the miracle, and assume that God will be waiting with outstretched hands to catch them before they hit bottom, the pure joy and happiness that can be a part of that union of Father, Mother, and Heavenly Father working in harmony together is difficult to put into words.
This is birth. It is a life and death moment. A mother walks into the valley of the shadow of death to grasp her childs hand and walk with him or her into mortality. The veil is very thin and during this moment, just about anything can happen.
Modern Medicine would never have been able to make the obscene amounts of money from the pelvic goldmine if this were not the case. Fathers and Mothers would have never submitted to the level of intervention and costs associated with allopathy, if this were not the case. Heck, Anakin Skywalker would have never become Darth Vadar if this were not the case.
So the question must be asked, How is it possible for me to convince you in a matter of days, weeks, or just a few months that the way I give birth is “safe, best for the baby, best for the family, and best for a husband and wifes married life together”, if it took me years of difficult work to get to the place where I myself felt comfortable with it?
How could I find the words to convince you, if after all these years, I have barely been able to convince my own husband? And I can promise you we have spent more hours talking and discussing birth than just about any other subject in our life together.
That request, that I convince you with just a few written words that unassisted childbirth is safe and desirable, is simply impossible to do.
The challenge I have for those of you reading is to do your own research, to logically and systematically reason it out in your own mind, to learn for yourself the facts of making a healthy baby, and then when the time comes, TAKE THE LEAP OF FAITH THAT WILL LAND YOU SAFELY IN THE WORLD OF PROACTIVE PARENTING. Asking that I prove this with a study or a statistic is simply impossible.
Yet, being personally responsible for this life choice will change everything in your life. Few things have affected me so profoundly as taking personal responsibility for my own life, my own health, and my childrens heath. The satisfaction and thrill that I have felt these past ten years since making the determination that this was what I was going to do, has brought amazing amounts of joy, pure spirit, pure love into my life. Conversely, and this is the law of opposites kicking in again, making this decision has also brought incredible amounts of pain and trauma into my heart.
I have reconciled my life choices. But many around me have NOT reconciled my life choices, especially as it relates to their own life experiences. Non conformity has a price. And it is up to each individual couple how much of a price they are willing to pay for that non conforming to societies expectations and rules of conduct.
Like it or not, we live in a world where technology is God. All of the civic laws, rules of conduct, expectations, and assumptions revolve around that reality. And when you step out of that reality into something completely different, it can make those around you assume that you have lost your marbles. Some individuals are better able to reconcile that rejection and reality. Some are not able, and often divorce or even death results. I have known several unassisted birthing mothers who simply died. No, not during the birth, but in the months after the birth, once the rejection from peers reached fever pitch, a couple of them have simply died. Mostly of heart attack, heart ache. I believe they could not reconcile the reality of the amazing joy and sacredness of the birth experience with all of the layers of dung being thrown at them afterwards by family, friends, social workers, doctors, and society in general.
So, how to do we go from a society that is running at a dead heat towards technological interventions as God, to a society where God is God and we have the faith and trust to believe in him and claim his promises as our own?
I have a few ideas for how this is going to happen. But I am not going to share them in this post. I will share a scripture however, and leave it up to you the reader to ponder it in your own mind.
“When the Lord shall have washed away the filth of the daughters of Zion, and shall have purged the blood of Jerusalem from the midst thereof by the spirit of judgment and by the spirit of burning.”
The Lord will wash away the filth.
Preparing a people for the Millennium.
End of the World.
If anyone believes that Zion living and Zion families are going to be the fruit of Babylonian Birthing and Babylonian living, well, I am not going to try to convince you otherwise.
But I will end this post by sharing my testimony.
I testify in the name of Jesus Christ that a powerful, real, unbreakable bond is created between a father and his children when he is the first to touch that child after birth. This first touching is the key to hearts being melded together in eternal love. If we don’t move towards this type of birth, this type of living, we move step by step away from the spirit of Elijah, towards that wasting place of the whole purpose of the earth being frustrated.
Please consider these realities when making these most important health decisions for yourself and your child. And go find out for yourself if a faith leap around birth makes sense for you and your family.
Jenny Hatch
Healthy Families Make A Healthy World!
