Love Is the Sacred Bond
There is nothing that highlights the uselessness of man as being the birth partner in a labour ward. While the mother is doing all the work, with the encouragement and support of midwives, all the partner can do is, in effect, stand and watch. When my wife was giving birth to our fourth child, all I could do, and all that was wanted, was hold her hand.
It’s only after birth that my usefulness as a person returned: being the primary carer for our other children, looking after our newborn while my wife sleeps, and generally developing and deepening the bonds between me and our children. The bond between a father and child is not forged in the womb - it is forged in the doing.
Which is why a post I saw a few weeks before the birth stayed with me. A baby had been born to a mother who had received a womb transplant (modern medicine at its most marvellous) and the author of the post was arguing that “the womb is the sacred bond” between mother and child. That the true bond, therefore, belonged not to the mother but to the donor.
For this next section, I’m going to tread carefully as I am not a woman - I don’t have a womb. I’m also not a theologian and I run the risk of being wrong.
For the author to claim that the sacred can only manifest itself through the physical is sacrilegious. The sacred has rarely been about the physical. The Eucharist is not sacred because of the bread; it is sacred because of what the bread participates in. To locate the sacred exclusively in flesh and tissue is to deny that the sacred transcends flesh and tissue - which is, in the end, to deny the sacred altogether.
If we reduce everything to the physical, we deny the role that love plays in the formation of bonds. A womb does not love. A person does.
And we must also confront the inverse: some people are not capable of being parents. Is the birth parent who rejects their child the one who shares the sacred bond, or is it the person who stepped into the role?
Joseph, husband to Mary, stepped into the role of father and shared a sacred bond with Jesus because he loved him.
Mary, mother of God, had a sacred bond with her son. But she also shared one with John the apostle. On the cross, Jesus looked at his mother and the disciple he loved standing beside her, and entrusted them to each other’s care — “Woman, here is your son,” and to John, “Here is your mother.” From that hour, John took her into his own home.
Love is the sacred bond that binds us. Not just mother to child, or father to child, but all of us.