Returning to the womb of God

What it really means to be "born again"

Every kid has their own weird but wonderful way of soothing themselves. For my daughter, it was pacifiers and, also for a few months, a small yellow wooden dog. She would suck one pacifier, hold another in one hand stroking the nipple, and then rub the third one around her face. What purpose “yellow dog” served is a mystery, but its presence was required for a season.

My son prefers to push his head into the hard wooden sides of his crib; the corners are his particular favorite. Like the hands of a clock, he’ll make his way around his crib, corner to corner, all night long. Around 5am he’ll start stirring and we’ll bring him into bed with us to steal another hour of sleep. While our bed has plenty of warm bodies, it is void of hard wooden corners where one can smash their still squishy skull. Not to be deterred, my son has found a sufficient alternative: my jawbone.

He nuzzles his head right under my chin and curls his knees into my belly, taking the shape he took in my womb, the most primal of human shapes. As in pregnancy, the bigger he gets, the more uncomfortable this is for me, particularly when he presses his feet into my thighs and launches his head harder into my jaw, seeking the sensory input of bone against bone, that soothing pressure of being held by the boundaries of another’s body. Though he has existed twice as long outside my body as inside, I marvel at the way he so instinctually returns to the shape of his first home.

I recently led a yoga class in The Yoga Abbey focused on Jesus’ instructions to a religious leader that in order to see the kingdom of God, one needed to be born again.¹

Oh how this phrase “born again” has been used and abused, a shorthand for drawing boundary lines of belonging, an identity marker that tells us more about cultural practices than heart postures. But that’s another post for another day. What I’m more interested in today is how Jesus uses the metaphor of birth to describe the requirements of encountering God’s kingdom. It’s not more knowledge or better behavior that gives one the ability to see—it’s the experience of returning to the womb of God and enduring the terrifying, mysterious, and bloody ordeal of birth.

When Jesus tells this religious leader that he must be born again he’s inviting us to remember how completely dependent an infant is on his mother—an infant can do nothing to care for, protect, nourish, or sustain itself. He is helpless, entirely reliant on his mother and the pulsing cord that connects them.

This is the existence we must return to if we want to see the kingdom of God.

The physiological phenomenon of birth has not changed much in the two thousand years since Jesus spoke these words. Sure, we have more tools and procedures that save lives and can sometimes make the process more endurable. Having relied on these modern medical interventions to birth both my babies, I am glad they exist. But no one survives the process of birth without immense pressure, pain, and blood.

For the infant especially, the experience must be uniquely shocking. All they’ve ever known is the dark warm enclosure of their mother’s body until the day they are squeezed out of it, thrust into the bright, loud, cold world and the cord connecting them to their first life source is severed. How utterly terrifying.

And also, how utterly exquisite to see the face of the voice that has soothed them from the very beginning. To touch her skin, to smell her body. To know her through all five senses for the very first time.

What pure ecstasy.

As I’ve started tracing the imprints of the maternal heart of God across the Scriptures, I’ve discovered that the images of a mothering God are plentiful but veiled. Much of the imagery has been lost in translation, the nuance of the ancient Hebrew language simplified into our modern English. Take, for example, the Hebrew word raḥam which is often translated as mercy or compassion but also means womb.

In her meaty but brilliant book, God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality, renowned theologian Phyllis Trible writes,

“Our metaphor lies in the semantic movement from a physical organ of the female body to a psychic mode of being. It journeys from the concrete to the abstract…To the responsive imagination, this metaphor suggests the meaning of love as selfless participation in life. The womb protects and nourishes but does not possess and control. It yields its treasure in order that wholeness and well-being may happen.”²

When Jesus tells the religious leader he must be born again in order to see the kingdom of God, the religious man scoffs – “surely one cannot enter a second time into their mother’s womb to be born!” What one must endure, Jesus insists, is rebirth facilitated by water and Spirit – a rebirth of surrender, submission, mystery, and total dependence.

This is the metaphor I return to at 6am as my son pushes his skull into mine and reaches his pudgy arms around my waist. I imagine Jesus squished inside Mary’s body just like my son wedges himself into mine, his human instinct no different than my son’s.

What does it look like to live a life sustained by the womb of God, and then to submit to the process of being squeezed from that womb, by the power of the Spirit, “in order that wholeness and well-being may happen,” as Trible writes?

I imagine myself curled into the warm body of God just like this, returning to my first home, enclosed and held by God’s mercy and compassion.

And, as I inhale my son’s delicious hair and stroke his perfect skin, I imagine God’s utter delight at my presence in his lap, his gladness over my choice to rest one more hour in his mercy rather than go out and conquer the day.

To choose a life lived with God rather than a life lived for God, this is what it means to be born again.

The Womb by Rebecca Louise Law

1. John 3:3

2. God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality, p.33, emphasis mine