Pregnant with Meaning
Pregnant with Meaning
Abbey von Gohren
“Where there is great love there are always miracles.”
— Father Jean Vaillant, in Death Comes for the Archbishop
Alfred J. Prufrock famously measured out his life in coffee spoons. I had planned to be measuring mine out in weeks of baby growth, prenatal vitamins, and midwife visits. How would I now be ordering the time, my days?
I recently walked through an experience of intense, intimate pain. The baby that had been growing in my womb for about ten weeks suddenly died. Two days later, I quietly birthed the tiny body at home. The only witness was my husband. In just one month, we had already grown to love this little one and the loss was a hard blow. We have two healthy children, and though I knew that one in four pregnancies ended this way, I grieved openly and intensely. It was a season of personal and communal sorrow, but also holy and strangely beautiful at times. One of the most surprising sources of comfort came my way not even two weeks after the miscarriage.
I was cleaning out a storeroom in the basement, transferring my maternity clothes back into the box in a gesture both practical and unavoidably symbolic. I wasn’t sure whether it would be profoundly depressing or help me move on. I crouched on the floor of our funny little storage room which includes the exit for the laundry chute, old phone lines with telephone jacks hanging from them—leftovers from previous inhabitants—and many out-of-country numbers in a boxy script on the unfinished sheetrock next to names like “Maria” and “Chelo.” In the course of shuffling boxes around, my eye fell on a little trinket on the floor, covered in dust, peeking out from under a shelf. I picked it up and recognized it as a necklace I’d seen when we’d moved into this house almost a decade ago, though I’d never taken the time to look at the details.
For reasons beyond my comprehension, I decided to scrutinize this small object—I’ve found grief will either dull your senses or sharpen them; there is no staying the way you are. In my palm was an oval, like a womb, imprinted with an image of a woman. She was the Virgin Mary, surrounded by rays of splendor. I turned it over and perceived writing on the other side, probably Latin. At this point, I snapped out of my trance and put the necklace aside, telling myself I’d look up the inscription sometime later. The pile of nursing shirts still needed to be folded before lunch, and I was preoccupied with thoughts of the future. How to rethink the next months ahead of me? For Prufrock it was coffee grounds, for me, one of these measures would be the books I was reading.
*
Later that afternoon, when my one-year-old had finally settled down for a nap and our kindergartener wasn’t quite home from school yet, I stole a few minutes in an armchair with the latest novel I had been devouring, Death Comes for the Archbishop, by Willa Cather. In this tale, loosely based on historical figures, a priest has just arrived to the southwest territory, newly annexed to the United States. His impossibly large diocese spans more land than modern-day New Mexico.
Another priest visits Father Latour and his vicar and recounts to them the story of Our Lady of Guadalupe, and afterwards presents them with little medallions, shining images of the Virgin apparition. As they turn them over, they see an inscription in Latin: “non fecit taliter omni nationi”—“she hath not dealt so with any nation.” The priest shows his colleagues that these people are loved by God and by the Mother of God in the same way that Israel was loved by Jehovah. (The origin of the phrase is Psalm 147:20, when the Psalmist is speaking of God’s people.) This extraordinary favor is shown to the peoples of the New World, then, primarily through the apparition of Mary as Our Lady of Guadalupe to Juan Diego in the 16th century, and the many miracles that follow.
The divine love is returned in the form of devotion and loyalty by the parishioners scattered across the desert in their adobe settlements. Of course, the people are also betrayed by power-hungry or money-mongering priests, but the people do away with them as they see fit. The complexity of these relationships is brutal and beautiful, much like the landscape of the unyielding desert itself.
I was utterly immersed in this world when a memory began to claw at the back of my mind. Medals? Latin? I jumped out of the chair, fiction jumped off the page, and I sped down the stairway. If I could have fit, I would have dove down the laundry chute to get there faster. I finally found it amidst the mess of half-organized clothing, but sure enough, there it was. The necklace was identical, down to the inscription in Latin.
In that moment, I realized that this small golden object of devotion likely belonged to someone who had been forced to leave their home. Our house was a foreclosure, and we had always imagined that it was a time of tragedy for the family. How much more sad to have realized you left your medal, the one that marked you as chosen by God! Was it a gift from a family member, or had someone who lived here actually made the pilgrimage to the shrine in Mexico itself? And how had it now come to me, in this utterly strange moment of encountering the same in a book? What could it mean?
*
I remember learning about a trend in medieval Europe where relics were stolen from one church only to mysteriously appear in another down the road a few months later. This was at the height of pilgrimages, when the pious crowded around various bits of saints’ bodies (everything from shrouds to toenails) and received miraculous healings and visions. The devotion “trade” (if you will) also provided local businesses, which bolstered the economy. Everyone won. Unless it was your own town’s relic that was snitched, in which case the stream of pilgrims waned and so did the apparent blessings of God. This shifting of holy relics was so common that it came to have a name (furta sacra) and an entire mythology and methodology surrounding it—including the idea that if a relic was stolen, it wanted to be. As I gazed at the gleaming medal, I wondered, had this object found its way into my hands on purpose? It sure felt like it. But did it belong to someone else?
As I read more about Our Lady of Guadalupe, I became more entranced with the story. It has been around a long time—the first written account was published in 1649, but the oral tradition stretches back at least a hundred years earlier. The Nican Mopohua (the main written narrative) details the apparition of Mary to a poor peasant named Cuauh-tlatoa ("Eagle Speaks") in the original Nahuatl language. (His given European name is Juan Diego, which is much more well-known.) When he asked for proof of her appearance in order to convince the local bishop, she sent him to a neighboring hill:
“And when he reached the top, he was astonished by all of them, blooming, open, flowers of every kind, lovely and beautiful, when it still was not their season, / because really that was the season in which the frost was very harsh. / They were giving off an extremely soft fragrance; like precious pearls, as if filled with the dew of the night. / Then he began to cut them, he gathered them all, he put them in the hollow of his tilma.”
This tilma, a rough garment worn only by the poor, is where the image of the Mother of God is miraculously imprinted later on in the story and still stands on display in the shrine in Mexico City. As I devoted hours to learning this history, I learned that not only was the story of Eagle Speaks translated into his native tongue, but specific elements of her appearance made her especially relatable to his people, the Chicimeca. One of these aspects was that she was wearing a black sash, which some claim was a sign that she was pregnant. Maybe this is where my story intersected?
As it happened, though all of this history fascinated me, it wasn’t until I returned to Willa Cather’s story and finished the chapter when I began to perceive what the mystery of the Virgin’s unexpected appearance in my basement meant for me personally.
The two priests, who are friends from childhood, are conversing about the place of miracles in the lives of the people they serve. [He] says:
“Doctrine is well enough for the wise, Jean; but the miracle is something we can hold in our hands and love…Where there is great love there are always miracles… one might almost say that an apparition is human vision corrected by divine love. I do not see you as you really are, Joseph; I see you through my affection for you. The Miracles of the Church seem to me to rest not so much upon faces or voices or healing power coming from afar off, but upon our perceptions being made finer, so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there about us always.”
I pondered this phrase: “an apparition is human vision corrected by divine love.” Had I been given the gift of a new way of seeing? I had to admit, things around me did look a little different. This wasn’t a grubby, old trinket—it was a holy object, waiting to be re-discovered. Eagle Speaks wasn’t just a poor man, he was a messenger of God. The Chichimeca weren’t a people to be exploited—they were chosen by the Creator of all. Mary wasn't simply a peasant woman herself—she became the Mother of God.
Finally, I realized that I was not simply an empty womb, with empty days ahead of me. A strange apparition of that most famous mother—in my basement and in my book—made me feel chosen, too. I too could be a bearer of life, not death. Even as I felt bereft, my arms were filled with love, as if with abundant roses. Even in a season of barrenness, “the season in which the frost was very harsh,” here was a harvest of blooms “open, flowers of every kind, lovely and beautiful, when it still was not their season.”
I breathed in their scent… and exhaled thank you.
Abbey von Gohren
Author & Editor
Abbey is the author of Fledgling Song and is the Managing Editor at Veritas Journal.
Photography by Katie Azi