Pregnancy: Privilege, Disease or  creative act?

by Ivana Celent

Defining Pregnancy

The word disease when referring to the pregnancy is an abomination unheard of, striking the root of human race. However, it could be that the selfish heart of this anxious generation has deviated to that point, when every altruism, every giving sees as a threat to one’s own existence. On the other hand, the word privilege has a triumphalist sound, connotation of one being raised higher than the other and does not respond to the pregnancy either. I would frame it in this way: pregnancy is a collaboration with God in the act of Human creation.

The Meaning of Life

To accept the divinity of pregnancy, one needs to accept the existence of God. Moreover, accepting it—when it involves suffering and precariousness—requires trusting in God and in His perfect plan for our lives. Background of the personal attitude towards pregnancy is one’s attitude towards human life on earth in general. What is human life on Earth, what it should be? Is it just merely going where our personal desires take us or exists an engraved path, Gods path, that we should follow because it leads us to reach our true, high fulfilment for which were created for.

Seeking Happiness

My answer to this question was tailored through my personal experience, that starts in Split, Croatia, in a traditional catholic family where I was born as younger of two children. My attitudes towards life, were product of my micro and macro surroundings, my family and the society. I lived with no difference than any other non-religious person, apart from my efforts to go to the Sunday mass. My goal was, as of every man, to find life and live it to the full. So, I was striving after life in money, luxury things, affections and career. I sought out pleasures. I was professional tennis player as young, I studied hard and became a Doctor of Medicine, I grasped for every affection I could get, obliged tight to look for myself in everything.

A Way of faith

From time to time, that, so called happiness or better to say an excitement, would arrive but then again with every new difficulty it would disappear like it was never there. Not only that it would disappear but would leave me in sorrows, confusion and restlessness.

Once I read that he happiness that is not eternal, is not happiness at all. What a truth it was. It became like from Aesop’s fables. Whatever I did, how high I jumped I never managed to reach the taste of the grapes of real, authentic happiness. All those tries stayed very superficial failing to answer the real situations and questions of life especially to the sufferings.

As saint Augustin says in his Confessions “I lived in a misery, like every man whose soul is tethered by the love of things that cannot last and then is agonised to lose them”.  

On the invitation of my grandmother, who I noticed, lived her old age and solitude with such a dignity, I followed my mother and my sister to the Catechesis of Neocatechumenal Way. It attracted me and little by little revealed to me the existence of God and his will for my life. The new Today appeared for me. As Servant of God, Carmen Hernandez Barerra, the co-initiator of the Neocatechumenal Way, wrote in her Diaries, “Know that today is the way…He always makes everything new, he knows deeply the problems of man. He is Love”.

The Life I wanted: marriage and motherhood

Through Word of God, beauty of the Liturgy and communion between the brothers I was led to Jesus Christ, who was sent by God to save me and be with me all the days of my life. Relaying on Him and finally experiencing The Life I wanted to follow Him and do the will of God. Opened to it, I got married. Finding true peace and happiness in doing the will of God, me and my husband opened to the new life. During my first pregnancy I was found to have cervical insufficiency. It was a very precarious situation that required a surgical procedure and 14 weeks of bed rest in and out of the hospital. However, the word of God received constantly, was a light to my path and I have experienced that within suffering I was in peace. When our second child was born with Cerebral Palsy, it put to the test everything that we were living and believing. Exactly in that situation God appeared stronger than ever to be the only one that has a power to draw life from death, giving our family fullness of life and profound joy. This experience infused into my heart the desire to be open to life again and defeated the fears that were terrorising me. We received two more children, and I experienced the words of St. Edith Stein that says: “Each woman who lives in the light of eternity can fulfil her vocation, no matter if it is in marriage, in a religious order, or in a worldly profession”.

Gratitude

Out of gratitude to God, we offered ourselves for the mission and in 2016. by Pope Francis we were sent to Portsmouth, England. In that same year I was diagnosed with Systemic Sclerosis, immune-mediated rheumatic disease characterised by fibrosis of the skin and internal organs and vasculopathy.  Although is uncommon disease, it has high morbidity and mortality. Once again, we were facing a trial and once again we witnessed the power of God, the Lord of life, who within this illness gave us four more children, all born in England. We also experienced the power of his Son, Jesus Christ, who gave us strength and paternal trust to be open to the will of God. My two doctors, world’s leading name for Systemic Sclerosis, Prof. Christopher Denton (University College London, Head of the Centre for Rheumatology Royal Free Hospital, London) and well-established expert Prof. Mislav Radic (Head of Centre of excellence for Systemic Sclerosis Ministry of Health Republic of Croatia) both said that the new life formed in pregnancy helped me and overpowered the illness during that time. The whole body turned to support the new life. For me it was the strong testimony for the Life with a capital L itself, that surpasses all the other realities of human existence.

The principle of life

We admire to the nature, we pond to find the great mystery of the Universe, but of the mystery of our own existence, we barely spend a thought. Yet everything around us, the beauty of the nature, the order of the Universe in all its obedience, respect and love speaks of this principle of life. As Kiko Arguello the founder of the Neocatechumenal Way says in the book “The Kerygma”: “All the nature, all the beauty in nature is a relationship of love. I am an artist, a painter, and I know very well that the beauty of the trees-the roughness of the trees-sings of the smoothness of the sky. The smoothness of the sky sings of the beauty of the rocks. The rocks sing of the beauty of the river, and so on”. Beauty appears only when such a relationship is given. Sirach says that God has created all things one complementary to the other, because each thing should sing of the beauty of the thing next to it (Sir 42: 24-25). In the whole creation there is relationship of love.

This principle of life is written deep in human DNA, that the fullness of one’s life comes from giving it for the other out of love.  Once one Croatian cardinal Blessed Aloysius Stepinac wrote an anecdote of a girl who asked her father to cut the bushes that were hurting sheep on their way to pasture because their wool was catching on it. Her father told her to look further down on the other side and tell him what she sees. She saw merry sheep enjoying the green pasture, but she saw as well a nest full of little birds surviving the coldness because of the warmth provided by the pieces of the sheep wool that mother bird was collecting from the bushes.

Life given for the others is life gained for eternity and in it appears beauty, because beauty is love for men.

A Beautiful History

Following the will of God for my life, as Saint John Paul the II said, did not take away anything from me, but transformed my anxious reality into beautiful history.

Who said that my face pale after night spent by my little son was not beautiful.
Who said that my hands falling down holding my daughter are not strong.
Who said that sufferings we passed relying on Christ did not make us victorious with Him.
Who said that when I was giving my life, I wasn’t living it.
I was, in all its purpose, meaning and fullness.
As F.M. Dostoevsky wrote in his novel The Idiot, “Beauty will save the world!”