Oh Baby

First, I've been completely flattened by the flu for the past week, so I'm just now struggling to my feet and finding my desk full of even more stuff to be done. (Lent! Aack!) And yet today my mind is stuck in a familiar rut.

It started when I commented on a post linked to Rev Gals, asking for advice about a sermon. On the site, the question was an abstract one: can you preach about something you haven't experienced? More to the point, since preachers do that all the time, can you do so with appropriate grace and humility?

It's an interesting question, so I hit the link, and discovered that the topic at hand was infertility. The author was asking whether it would be okay for her to bring this up in a sermon, even to focus on it, when it's something she has not experienced for herself. I wrote a mini-response to her. And I've been thinking about it the rest of the day.

I have two distinct perspectives on this (possibly three, but let's start with the two). First, my perspective as a preacher.

The first five years of my pastoral life I spent as a single person. And I had all kinds of people - even though they never meant to, I realize - question whether or not I could really preach about family things, parenting, children, marriage, when I hadn't experienced those things for myself. I do have a family, I would insist: I didn't just spring from the loins of the earth. But, nevertheless, I get their point. I'm guessing that they've been lectured at, by the church and its esteemed representatives, about family life - and they're sick of it, and they don't want to hear about having a good marriage from single-girl. I didn't really want to preach on that anyway, so it never mattered much.

I'm reading a book on torture and the eucharist. (I realize this sounds like an impossible stretch - give me a second.) The author traces the use of torture in Chile, and sees it as the liturgy of the state: the state's attempt to atomize people, separate them completely from one another, in order to demonstrate and solidify its power. His call is for the church not to submit to that, or allow that sort of power to run unchecked, but to enact its own liturgy of connectedness and life as a counter to torture. It's not a complicated book, but it's hard to sum up.

And the point for this blog is this: that, in Christ, we are all connected to one another in the church - to one another's joys, and to one another's sufferings. So yes, in that way, I can preach about something I have not experienced myself, because it is part of the experience of my whole body, the Church. And part of being ourselves before God is honesty about the range of human suffering and joy.

But my other perspective is as a woman struggling to conceive. And here I have some different ideas. For one, I cannot at this point imagine getting up in the pulpit and confessing anything about my own fertility problems. That is simply way, way too much vulnerability for me. And I know that my journey with this is not half as complicated or long as that of others, so even my own experience does not guarantee the right sort of sensitivity, or "stupid-proof" me from saying something that would hurt another person.

I know that I need to know I am not alone. And I know that one of the great things the church can do is provide a community of people who are probably struggling with a million things they will never say out loud. I know I need to hear that all things are possible with God, and yet I need to hear that God is still with us when nothing works out the way we thought.

This is such holy ground, and I hardly know what to say about it. How can I be so angry at God one day, and so hopeful the next? How can I be so utterly convinced that we'll never have a baby one week, and so totally convinced that we will the next? Where else can I go but the church, to be honest before myself and God? Who else will tell me, if not the church, that I am loved so deeply in all my imperfections, by a God who knows all about the wilderness?

As a preacher, I continually realize afresh the power of my words - a power I frequently wish to abdicate, actually, since it turns out that people really are listening to what I say. I want to be responsible with that power. I want to say something out loud about infertility. I just don't know what it is, and I doubt it's going to be about myself.