Wave of Light 2023

Words for the Wave of Light service to mark Baby Loss Awareness Week at Christ Church Alsager, Sunday 15th October 2023.

If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.

Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

Love never ends. But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end. For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part; but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.

1 Corinthians 13

The loss of a pregnancy or baby is a particular bereavement. Excitement turns to sorrow, anticipation to anger, and joy to despair. Thousands of parents experience this bereavement every year, and yet it can be a difficult thing to talk about and come to terms with. It is hard to grieve a reality that didn’t come to pass: to lose a future that was full of promise, and yet so quickly came to nothing.

I stand on fragile, holy ground as I talk about this. I can share my own experience, and I will – but I cannot speak for you. I do not know your pain, I do not know your experience of this – how recent or long ago your own loss was – whether it was your body or someone you loved who could not bring small life to birth. But I know enough to share a few thoughts that I hope might be helpful. And forgive me for where my language is clumsy, or unhelpful – all of these words are contested terms, and what is right for one of us may not work for another. What I do know is that it is better to talk about it than not, even with the frailty of my words. Bear with me.

I lost two pregnancies after the birth of my first child. The first miscarriage I barely knew I was pregnant. I had missed a period, but it was a few weeks later, the day I finally returned a positive pregnancy test, that my body decided to expel the blood and tissue that had made a false start at life.

My second miscarriage was harder. I had known I was pregnant for weeks. I had a little bit of bleeding, got checked out, and was reassured things looked fine. I was booked for a precautionary scan the next day – a Sunday morning. Instead of taking a service in my parish, I lay alone on a hospital bed, counting the tiles on the ceiling as the ultrasound probed around, the sonographer silent. That silence lasted forever. Until it didn’t. I went to the scan alone – my vicar spouse Jim was also on duty and we didn’t want to cause a fuss by neither of us turning up to take services. We thought things would be fine.

They weren’t. I had been pregnant, but the foetus had died. Later that week I miscarried the pregnancy naturally, sitting at home with endless jigsaws to focus my mind on the immediate moment and stop the grief from crashing in too soon, too quickly.

I decided almost immediately to be honest with my church and community about what had happened. As I shared our story, others, too, sent cards or met with me over coffee to tell me their own traumatic, unresolved stories of miscarriage, abortion and stillbirth. Many were recalling losses from decades ago, from a time when these losses were not spoken of – when miscarriages were simply to be ‘got over’ with platitudes like nevermind – you can try again, and when stillborn babies were hidden away without opportunity for goodbyes.

And through these conversations I met a lot of unresolved grief, and a huge shared experience of loss among at least half of the women of my parish – and moreso, among the men who had stood by feeling so helpless, among the many more women and men who had lost unknown siblings, among those hoping to be grandparents – with that hope snatched away as they watched their adult children live through the pain of miscarriage, abortion and stillbirth.

One in four pregnancies ends in loss. The loss of a pregnancy or baby is probably the most common experience of bereavement among people of child-bearing age. And it felt like we, as a church, did little to acknowledge or recognise this.

So I planned in my own church, Christ Church Timperley, to install a memorial stone dedicated to lives lost through miscarriage, abortion and stillbirth. Alongside this I wrote a memorial service, which has become an annual event in Timperley and beyond beyond my time there as Associate Vicar . And, as you know from the work of the wonderful people here in Alsager, the idea has grown. I’m so thrilled that you, too, now have a memorial stone and service to mark these particular losses.

I want to say a little about the wording on the stone:

“See, I have engraved you on the palms of my hands.”
In memory of the babies who were unable to share life with us
Known and loved by God

I came across two recurring questions in my conversations with those who had experienced this type of loss:

Was my unborn child a human person?
Where is my child now?

I know that if you’ve been through this, you may have asked these questions, and you will have asked other questions too.

But the wording of the stone sought to answer these two questions.

See, I have engraved you on the palms of my hands.

 

This is a quote from an ancient Jewish text attributed to a prophet called Isaiah. It more forms part of the Christian canon of Holy texts known as the Old Testament. The text is around 2500 years old, and is written as comfort and challenge to the people of God at that time. The quotation more fully describes the love of God as that of a nursing mother for her baby:

Can a mother forget the baby at her breast,
and have no compassion on the child she has borne?
Though she may forget,
I will not forget you!
See, I have engraved you on the palms of my hands.

Isaiah 49:15-16

So far as God is concerned, God’s love for each life is such that even if a mother were to forget her child, God would not. Those lives, barely started, which we hold and grieve and miss and wonder about – if we do not forget them, how much less so does God not forget them?

We ask:

Was my unborn child a human person?
Where is my child now?

And God says:

I will not forget them. I have engraved them on the palm of my hands.

In the days and weeks after my miscarriage I crashed through emotion after emotion. Anger, shame, grief, sadness, despair. The guilt, especially, was unreal. At one follow up appointment I sobbed while the nurse reassured me that no, my using a hot water bottle in bed at night would not have triggered the miscarriage. I allowed the feelings to wash over me, and through it all, something held me. Something deeper, intangible, something that came both from within and beyond.

I know now, looking back with 10 years’ distance, that it was God who held me. The God who is love – the God whose love pulled me through, as we heard in the reading from 1 Corinthians 13 – with a power beyond me that bears, believes, hopes and endures all things.

God’s love never ends. In grief, in sorrow, in disappointment and hopelessness and despair. God’s love never fails. The gift of my loss was that it opened the door to so much love – so much shared experience that would otherwise have remained hidden.

The pain of baby loss, however isolating it may feel, is not a pain to carry alone. Together we come, together we mourn, and together we will find hope that these lives, so precious to us, are held in the arms of God. And that we too, are held and united together in faith, and hope, and love.