Birthed , livre ebook

Chalice Press - Elizabeth Hagan

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87 pages

English

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When infertility painfully interrupted Elizabeth Hagan's plan to start a family, the path of grace offered her another way. Instead of giving birth to a child, she birthed herself instead. Along the way, she learned you can't control how fast your dreams come true, if they come true at all, but you can find grace for embracing your life in the present tense, grief and all.Through her new book Birthed, Elizabeth Hagan offers her story as a companion and guide for living through your own pain and loss. For the one in eight couples who face infertility, you will know you are not alone and a long season of grief does not have to destroy your marriage or your friendships with childbearing friends. For those friends and family members of infertile couples, there are no "one size fits all" answers to a fertility journey-medically, emotionally, or spiritually-and the worst thing you can say is nothing at all. Adoption is never the complete solution to infertility, and through it all, pain can never be fixed, only lived through. So allow grace to help you begin to live today in the present moment.

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Publié par	Chalice Press
Date de parution	06 décembre 2016
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9780827203129
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0950€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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“‘God must hate me.’ If you’ve ever felt that way, I hope you’ll read Elizabeth Hagan’s beautiful new book. No one can read this book without also being helped to see their own story differently, and no less important, to empathize more deeply with all who suffer the grief of dreams long deferred or permanently denied. This is the kind of book you will always remember and be better for having read.” —Brian D. McLaren, Author/Activist
“With emotional depth and pastoral sensitivity, Elizabeth Hagan gives particular insight to the visceral longing for biological motherhood. Her story is instructive for people who are not aware of the trials of infertility, and it is hopeful as Hagan bears witness for the countless women and men who know those trials all too well.” —Carol Howard Merritt, Author of Healing Spiritual Wounds
“An utterly absorbing account of birthing—and allowing God to birth—compassion, pain, hope, solidarity, abundance, and lament. But not only those: in this birth story, what’s born is a richness in the spiritual life, and, ultimately, a self. (Which means that you needn’t be, or want to be, a mother, to find this book good, wise company.)” —Lauren F. Winner, Author of Mudhouse Sabbath and Wearing God
“Raw. Real. Funny. Honest. Hagan’s tale of hope amid infertility will delight readers with its accessibility and nourish them with thoughtful reflections on love, faith and family.” —MaryAnn McKibben Dana, Author of Sabbath in the Suburbs
“As a fellow infertile, I wish my wife and I had this book during our period of sorrow to provide language for our grief. I highly recommend this book to pastors, therapists, chaplains or anyone who is willing to be present with those who are suffering.” —Todd Maberry, Duke Divinity School
“Elizabeth Hagan speaks intimately and powerfully to all who have ever experienced the inability to fully realize a lifelong hope or heartfelt dream. … This book left me feeling refreshingly vulnerable and incredibly inspired!” —Allen V. Harris, Regional Minister for the Christian Church (Disciples Of Christ)
“ Birthed is an unflinching, courageous, and much-needed portrait of what it means to wrestle faithfully with desire, death, and rebirth. By shying away from trite phrases and easy answers, Birthed invites us to reflect honestly and courageously on our own forays into the valley of the shadow of death. Yes, this is a story about one woman’s hard-fought struggle through infertility, but it is also a much-needed reminder that God’s Spirit is always making things new in us.” —Maria A. Kane, Rector, St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Waldorf, Maryland
“In Birthed , Elizabeth Hagan opens her heart, describing with exquisite intimacy her excruciating feelings of biological failure, human disappointment, and divine abandonment. The reader looking for support while living through infertility will find a friend who understands, and the friend looking for ways to offer support will find answers in this warm and real account of the author’s attempts to have the baby she so dearly wants.” —Martha Spong, Executive Director, RevGalBlogPals, and Editor, There’s a Woman in the Pulpit
“ Birthed moves infertility out of the shadows where shame, guilt and discomfort have lodged it for far too long and teaches us that giving voice to our deepest fears and pain is the only way for hope and possibility to take root and flourish.” —Edith Guffey, UCC Conference Minister, Kansas-Oklahoma
“Tired of the infertility taboo? Elizabeth lifts the veil with humor and raw emotion, guiding her reader through the journey of parenthood, interrupted.” —J. Dana Trent, Author of Saffron Cross: The Unlikely Story of How a Christian Minister Married a Hindu Monk
“Elizabeth speaks with honesty and integrity about the excruciating reality of infertility. But somehow, in spite of such, she magically and miraculously weaves (and lives) a story of surprising beauty and blessing. Birthed is a true and tender book that offers its readers the priceless gifts of redemption and hope; she honors and models the enduring capacity of a woman’s heart.” —Ronna Detric k, Transforming Women’s Sacred Stories blog

Copyright ©2016 by Elizabeth Hagan.
All rights reserved. For permission to reuse content, please contact Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, (978) 750-8400, www.copyright.com .
Cover art and design: Jesse Turri
ChalicePress.com
Print: 9780827203112 EPUB: 9780827203129 EPDF: 9780827203136

To Kevin: truly the best man I’ve ever known

Foreword
This story is your story.
It’s mine too.
And that’s the thing that’s so alluring about the book you’re holding in your hands, though you might not know it quite yet. At first glance I assumed this story was someone else’s: a story of infertility, sad and painful, worthy of something like detached appreciation from those of us who have never spent a moment wondering whether or how we would become parents.
But once I began to read, the story gradually started to seem familiar.
Like every one of our stories, like my story, this one is filled with pain and decorated with beauty so intense that we can’t believe it.
It takes a good amount of courage to voice the bleak desperation that is our shared human experience. We’d much prefer everyone saw the shiny veneer we so painstakingly cultivate in every way we can possibly muster. But you will read in this story an eloquent expression of pain, words to hang onto or appropriate to speak of your own.
Because we have to speak of the pain of human life so we can speak with any integrity of the joy we experience: the long-awaited realization of a lesson learned, the deepening of love, the assurance of the presence of God. The light and the darkness both color our humanity, and to speak of one without the other will never show us the landscape we so desperately long to see, the full story of each one of our broken and beautiful lives.
This book is about pain, but it’s not just about pain. It’s about love, too, and that’s why it’s your story. And mine. When I say love, of course, I’m not talking about a flowers and rainbows kind of love, or even a Harlequin romance love. In these pages you will read and remember what happens when love comes to find us curled up, alone, broken. And the times love pulls us close and holds us tight when the tears won’t stop. And the times when love slaps us in the face and tells us it’s time to pull ourselves together, get up off the floor, and do something, for God’s sake.
In these pages you’ll read about the flawed and miraculous love of a spouse, that person with a front seat to all the pain life throws our way, the person who gets splattered with all of the ugly and stubbornly refuses to give up his seat. And when you read this witness you’ll recognize the beauty of that unique kind of love as you have experienced it.
And as you read, you’ll recognize from your own life the love of friends, those people whose lives intersect our own lives, people who will not leave us to our own devices but instead walk through the darkness with us, holding our hands. These are the people who show up when nobody else wants to be there. They are the ones who pass the Kleenex, and they are the ones who tell us once and for all to get over the destructive fascination we have with our own pain. They cuss with us and at us, and sometimes they’re the ones pouring the wine when all other options have been exhausted.
And when you read this story, you will recognize the unfailing love of God, in whichever way that has made itself known in your own life. While this one is a beautiful story, this is most certainly not the story of an over-achieving pilgrim whose exceptional holiness is rewarded with an extra dose of God’s presence. No, like your story and mine, in this story you will recognize a wandering disciple naively demanding a rightful answer to the pain of human life. She doesn’t know when she starts out that an answer isn’t what she needs at all, that what she needs, in fact, is presence, a divine audience to her human outrage at the pain and injustice of it all. Just like you and me.
Read the beautiful, pain-laden words in this book. Read every single one, because when you do you will recognize yourself. And when you do you might find, as I did, that this story will help you grasp the courage you need to speak of your life in its fullness. You will know in the core of who you are that your experience is not a lonely aberrance.
And when you wake up to that awareness, like Elizabeth, you might just begin to recognize your own pain for the holy honor it represents, the rushing water that has smoothed your hard edges and the terrible chisel that has chipped away at everything superfluous and shaped you into who you were meant to be.
Whether you are a pastor, too, or whether you’re the most faith-less person you know, whether you’ve agonized over IVF cycles or whether you’ve never spent a day in your life worrying about reproductive realities, I am telling you: you will find yourself in this story. Why?
Because this is not really a story about wanting to be a parent.
This is a story about becoming fully human.
This is a story about setting out to conquer the world and finding yourself on the side of the road, heart cracked wide open.
This is a story about finding a family, perhaps not in the places we thought at first, but instead in ways we’d never dreamed. It is a story of finding unlikely parents in our lives and learning to parent each other.
And this is certainly not a story about an inviolable faith that can withstand any pain and injustice that comes its way. It’s rather a story about giving up control, finally, and letting God do the excruciatingly beautiful work of shaping us into the masterpieces we were created t