I am enjoying Laura Jansson’s new book, Fertile Ground: A Pilgrimage Through Pregnancy, a new release from Ancient Faith Press, and I’m pleased to share today a wonderful guest post that isn’t just about how she bears witness as a birth doula, but how we can all bear witness in our communities. Fertile Ground is on sale as an ebook for $5.25 on Ancient Faith Publishing’s Orthodox ebooks from now until Sunday, April 26, 2020 at 11:59 pm. Fertile Ground also makes a wonderful gift to anyone you know who is expecting a baby.

By Laura S. Jansson

I’m a doula, and not everybody knows what that is. When I’m asked what my work involves, it’s tempting to resort to the dry textbook answer: “We provide emotional, physical and informational (not medical) support to people having babies.” But a few examples can help to bring the job description to life for people. When my client is in labor, I’ll say, I might cool down a washcloth to mop her brow, take some news out to the crowd in the hospital waiting room, rub her lower back just so, or speak up with a few words of steadiness when discouragement strikes.

But after fifteen years in this role, I’ve been wondering recently if all the tiny actions a doula undertakes in the course of her work don’t add up to more than the sum of their parts. It seems that, as with many roles, what I offer is encapsulated more in what I am than in what I do. And what I am, largely, is a witness. I am fully present for the woman I serve as she faces with staunch grace some of the hardest moments life has ever dealt her. I watch, marveling, as she dredges up the bravery to drink the cup which no one can take from her. I’m there for her – simply there – as she is called on to shed her preferences, her modesty, and her very blood for the love of another. I bear witness as she looks up from the newborn image of God in her arms, saying, “See what I did there?”

And I do see. Not everyone has the privilege of seeing. Some, like the family members in the waiting room, are not invited; they may be too squeamish, anxious or disinterested to attend. Others are present but do not notice the spiritual significance of what is happening, like the nurse who must be on the lookout for blood loss and meconium staining rather than for sacraments, or the protective husband whose doe-eyes become hawk-eyes under stress. In such a situation, to be the one who has not let meaning go unnoticed feels like an important ministry.

It really does seem to make a difference. To witness to another’s struggle turns out to be healing work, allowing green shoots to come forth from a lifeless stump. A laboring woman who says (as most of us do, at some point), “I can’t do this anymore”, can be revived by the mere words, “you are doing it; I’m here to see you doing it, and you’re doing it very well”. And when a mother is looking back on her baby’s birth the work of witnessing often turns out to have a life-long significance. A nurse who happened to be on shift that one night years ago would be impossible to contact; sometimes even a marriage breaks apart, so that the witness of a shared birth experience shatters with it. To know that there is even just one person who saw her slay the dragon is a powerful weapon against future beasts who might cross her path. Whether their relationship develops into bosom friendship or she never sees her doula again, she knows there will always be someone to share the burden of the memory, to hold the truth of what happened, to keep the flame of her human dignity alive.

The spiritual importance of a witness is exemplified, but not confined, within the birthing room. The powerful act of attesting to one another’s struggles is a great gift each one of us can extend to those in our families, friendships, parishes and communities. Daycare pickup time may bring us an encounter with a sleep-deprived mother who is beginning to doubt her ability to go on, and we can stop to note how much she is already doing, and voice what we see in her that is admirable. Or reading between happy social media smiles, we may suspect a co-worker is in trouble, and set some time aside to check in. Perhaps a knowing smile for the discouraged teenager packing our grocery bags is all it takes for him to feel seen. Or at church, we can refuse to take “fine” for an answer from the elderly man in the next pew who seems so lonely.

It may feel like nothing much, but the work of witnessing has a holiness to it because it partakes in the action of the Holy Trinity: “For there are three that bear witness in heaven: the Father, the Word, and the Holy Spirit” (1 Jn. 5:7). The three divine persons are bound together in a relationship of mutual attestation which confirms their Godhead, in keeping with the ancient principle that (in the words of Christ Himself) “the testimony of two people is true” (Jn. 8:17 – see also Num. 35:30, Deut. 17:6, Deut. 19:15-21, Matt. 18:15-16, 2 Cor. 13:1 and Heb. 10:28). The Father is affirmed as the Father by the Son and the Holy Spirit; the Son is affirmed as the Son by His Father and the Holy Spirit; and likewise the Holy Spirit is affirmed by the Father and the Son. And this witness to the truth is so central to the life of God as to be the reason Christ gives for his coming into the world (Jn. 18:37).

As we are drawn into God, we too become witnesses, affirming and drawing forth this divine love in the reality of one another’s personhood. The ones who have perfected this art and already live fully in its reality are the saints: the “forefathers, fathers, patriarchs, prophets, apostles, preachers, evangelists, martyrs, confessors, ascetics, and every righteous spirit perfected in the faith” spoken of in the Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom. They bear perfect witness not only to God but also for each one of us, even when we are without another witness in the world. They surround us like “so great a cloud,” as the writer of Hebrews says (12:1), wrapping us in their support like incense thick in the air. During the times when we feel completely unseen and alone, these witnesses call us back to a proper remembrance of ourselves in the light of God with Us. “Be strong and take heart,” they tell us, “all you who hope in the Lord” (Ps. 31:24).

The words “witness” and “martyr” mean the same thing, and among the unseen witnesses we think of the women martyrs whose blood spilled on the sandy floors of Roman arenas, giving their lives and deaths for the sake of love. These people, whose names we know, feasts we celebrate and icons we venerate, might be considered our spiritual foremothers; without them the faith would have died out long before it could reach our twenty-first century ears. But equally, those who surround us are our foremothers in the flesh, whose fireside instruction and daily example were what ensured that the true faith was passed to each new generation. Their blood was shed in secret on the sheets of birthing beds, not sand, but like those we more typically consider martyrs, their blood too speaks to us of how new life can come forth when we embrace our human pain and death for the sake of Love.

One mother shared the story of the role of the “great cloud” during the birth of her child. Though this was her seventh baby, it was her first as an Orthodox Christian, and as she says, “I get teary-eyes just remembering how very, very sweet and mystical the whole experience was. It felt so… holy.” She labored in a birth pool in her bedroom, overlooked by the icons of saint whose lives spoke to her. There were Blessed Matushka Olga (a midwife with a life story similar to her own grandmother’s), St. Julianna of Lazarevo (her mother’s patroness), St. Anna and her daughter the Theotokos, and St. Sophia and her three daughters – a community of mothers surrounding, protecting and renewing her strength as she worked to bring her own daughter into the world. Her husband stood by, chanting prayers and anointing her head and belly with holy oil. Her prayer rope stretched several inches longer as she circled round it with the Jesus prayer. As the sun was setting over their home, the baby was born. “I’ve never been so cognizant of the “cloud of witnesses” around me as in those moments,” she says.

Let us strive to be such witnesses for one another.

*****

Laura S. Jansson is an Orthodox Christian doula, childbirth educator and mother living and writing at the intersection of birth and faith. She earned her Masters degree in Theology and Philosophy from the University of Oxford (UK) and has also resided in the USA, Serbia, Germany, and Fiji. Since 2005 she has guided scores of expectant mothers on the path to parenthood, witnessing with wonder as bellies and souls grow along the way. Her book, Fertile Ground: A Pilgrimage Through Pregnancy (Ancient Faith Publishing 2019), is the first book for pregnant women arising from the Eastern Christian tradition.

Purchase Laura’s book Fertile Ground from Ancient Faith Publishing here, from Orthodox Christian ebooks here, or from Amazon here (affiliate link).