Pregnancy: Privilege, Disease or  creative act?

by Ivana Celent

Defining Pregnancy

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. Accepting the existing of God, when it involves suffering and precariousness, requires trusting in God and in His perfect plan for our lives. One’s attitude towards pregnancy reflects the attitude towards human life in general. What is human life on earth, what it should be? Is it merely following our own personal desires or is there an engraved path- God’s path- that we should follow because it leads us to our true, highest fulfilment? That which we were created for.

Seeking Happiness

My answer to this question comes from my personal experience, which started in Split, Croatia. I was born the youngest of two children in a traditional Catholic family . My attitudes towards life were a product of my surroundings, my family and the society. I lived with no differently than any other non-religious person, apart from my efforts to go to Sunday Mass. My goal was to find life and live it to the full. I was looking for life in money, luxury things, affections and career. I sought out pleasures. I was a professional tennis player as a young person. I studied hard and became a Doctor of Medicine, grasping for affection, obliged to look for myself in everything.

A Way of faith

From time to time, a happiness or even an excitement would appear. However with every new difficulty it would quickly disappear like it was never there. Not only that but it would disappear leaving me in sorrow, confusion and restlessnes

I once read that happiness which is not eternal, is not happiness at all.

What a truth this is. It is like something from Aesop’s fables. Whatever I did, however high I jumped I never managed to taste of the grapes of real, authentic happiness. All those attempts remained superficial, failing to answer the real situations and questions of life. Especially to the sufferings.

As Saint Augustine says in his Confessions “I lived in 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 saw lived her old age and solitude with such dignity, I joined my mother and sister to listen to the Catechesis of Neocatechumenal Way. It attracted me and gradually revealed to me the existence of God and his will for my life. A new ‘today’ appeared for me.

As Servant of God, Carmen Hernandez Barerra, 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 the Word of God, the beauty of the Liturgy and the communion between ‘brothers’ in the church I was led to Jesus Christ, who was sent by God to save me and be with me all the days of my life. Relying on Him and finally experiencing ‘the life’ I wanted to follow Him and do the will of God. Being open to it, I got married. Finding true peace and happiness in doing the will of God my husband and I were open to 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 hospital. Receiving the Word of God constantly became a light to my path. I discovered that within the suffering I was in peace. When our second child was born with cerebral palsy, it tested everything that we were living and believing. In that situation God appeared stronger than ever to be the only one that has the power to draw life from death, and gave our family fullness of life and profound joy. This experience opened my heart to the desire to welcome new life again and defeated the fears that were terrorising me. We received two more children, and I experienced the words of Saint Edith Stein: “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 in 2016. A large group of people was sent around the world by Pope Francis, and we were selected to come to Portsmouth, England. In that same year I was diagnosed with systemic sclerosis, an immune-mediated rheumatic disease characterised by fibrosis of the skin and internal organs and vasculopathy.  Although a rare condition, 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 the United Kingdom. We also experienced the power of his Son, Jesus Christ, who gave us strength to be open to the will of God.

Two internationally known doctors, leaders in systemic sclerosis, have been following my health. Prof. Christopher Denton (University College London, Head of the Centre for Rheumatology, Royal Free Hospital, London) and 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. My whole body began to support the new life. For me it was a strong testimony for Life (with a capital L), that surpasses all the other realities of human existence.

The principle of life

We admire nature, trying to discover the great mystery of the universe, but we barely spare a thought on the mystery of our own existence. Yet everything around us, the beauty of nature, the order of the universe in all its obedience, respect and love speaks of this principle of life. As Kiko Arguello, founder of the Neocatechumenal Way, says : “All 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” (“The Kerygma”, Ignatius Press ). 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 entire creation there is a relationship of love.

This principle of life is written deep in human DNA: the fullness of one’s life comes from giving it for the other out of love.  The 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 at the other side and to tell him what she could see. She saw merry sheep enjoying the green pasture, but also a nest full of young birds surviving the cold because of the warmth provided by the wool of the sheep that their mother 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 mankind.

A Beautiful History

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

Who said that my face, pale after a night spent close 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 living my life, in all its purpose, meaning and fullness.

“Beauty will save the world!” as F.M. Dostoevsky wrote in his novel The Idiot.