My husband and I were living abroad while he was doing research and I was studying in a translator’s program. During this time, we were delighted to learn that we were going to have a baby. I’d been studying Christian Science, and I wanted to get a clearer spiritual perspective on the pregnancy. I called a Christian Science practitioner and asked her for ideas on preparing for childbirth and for the baby.
The practitioner agreed to help me think spiritually about the pregnancy and to pray for the baby and me. She recommended that I start with a paragraph in the Christian Science textbook, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy, with the marginal heading “Scientific obstetrics.” There were a couple of big take-aways there for me. One was to see the baby as a “new idea.” Another was that this new idea “is born of the Spirit, born of God” (p. 463). I began to see that this spiritual idea was God’s child.
So what did this mean for the way I would approach the pregnancy? This statement from the same paragraph laid it out for me: “To attend properly the birth of the new child, or divine idea, you should so detach mortal thought from its material conceptions, that the birth will be natural and safe.” Instead of focusing on a material birth process, my job was to pay attention to the fact that this child, this divine idea, was the creation of God, or Spirit. This was a really different take on any obstetrics I was familiar with!
