In honor of my very good friend enduring a painful 27 hours of labor in order to bring her first child, boy Kale, into the world yesterday morning I share this passage from Scott Hahn’s book, First Comes Love. It is a beautiful commentary on what it was like to witness his wife, Kimberly, go through 30 hours of labor and the birth of their first child (it also corresponds nicely to my previous post, Sacred Femininity):

I married Kimberly Kirk on August 18, 1979. We made our home and we knew the pleasure and the joy of the union of a man and a woman. It was not, however, in the ecstasy of our bodily union that I first glimpsed how a family most vividly manifests God’s life – though that union surely had something to do with it.

For me, the first revelation came when Kimberly was nine and a half months pregnant with our first child. Her body had taken on new proportions and more than ever before I realized that her flesh was not created merely for my delight. What I had enjoyed as something beautiful was now becoming a means to a greater end.

When she felt her first labor pains we rushed to the hospital with the anticipation that our baby would soon be in our arms. Kimberly’s labor was difficult, however, right from the start. I joked that if men could get pregnant, the human race would have been extinct soon after its creation.

The hours dragged on, hours of hard labor, and Kimberly’s pain grew more intense. My heart gave lie to my joking, because I would gladly have taken on her pain at that moment.

We passed a day this way, and then a night, and then another day began. After thirty hours of labor, the doctor saw little progress, and he recommended a cesarean section. This was not at all the way we had wanted things to go, but we saw that the choice was being taken out of our hands.

Exhausted, I watched the nurses move Kimberly to a gurney and wheel her down the hall to another room. I walked alongside, holding her hand, praying with her and telling jokes – anything to lift her spirit.

When we arrived at the operating room, the nurses moved Kimberly again, now to a table, where they strapped her down and sedated her. She was freezing cold, shivering, and afraid.

I stood beside my wife, her body spread out and strapped cruciform to the table, cut open in order to bring new life to the world.

Nothing my dad had told me about the facts of life, nothing I had learned in high school biology class, could have prepared me for that moment. The doctors allowed me to stay, to watch the operation. As the surgeon made his incisions, I beheld all of Kimberly’s major organs. “Truly,” I thought, “we are fearfully and wonderfully made!” Then came the moment when, from amid those organs, with a few careful movements of the doctor’s hands, came the beautiful body of my baby boy, my first born son, Michael.

But it was Kimberly’s body that became something more than beautiful for me. Bloody and scarred and swollen with pain, it became something sacred, a living temple, a holy sanctuary, and an altar of life-giving sacrifice.

The life she gave to our world – this life we had made with God – I could now look upon and touch with my hands. A third person had entered the intimate unity of our home. This was the beginning of something new for me, and for Kimberly and me together. God had taken two starry-eyed lovers’ gazes and redirected them – but they were no less starry-eyed and no less loving. Now there were three in a happy home, whose love kept leading them to a home still happier.

Congratulations Mary Jo and Kyle! May your marriage and family always be a sign of the life-giving love of the Trinity.