Anam Cara

Imagining the Time Before Coming Here

Despite its endless and vital artistry, Nature maintains great secrecy and reserve. When we see a pregnant woman, we know that some new person is coming here. Everything else remains unknown. Who that person is, and what she will bring to her family, and world, and what kind of life she will have remain unknown to us and even to the mother, the carrier and the labyrinth of this creativity. This is one of the great privileges of women, to be able to give birth. Mothers are the priestesses of the greatest Eucharist. In and through the mother, empty space is changed into person. The anonymous water element becomes face, body, soul, life, and inner world. To give birth can also be a great burden. Sometimes the weary face of a pregnant mother reveals how her essence is being rifled and her body and mind become implicated in the baby’s destiny. A bond is being developed from which she will never be released. In a sense, she can never part from the one she has carried under her heart. To be involved in Nature’s most powerful mystery can also destroy all illusions and innocence. A friend told me recently that her moment of bleakest disillusionment was in hospital shortly before she went into labour with her first child. She walked out onto the hospital fire escape, looked into the night, and realized her absolute isolation and saw opening before her a never-ending path of responsibility.

There is no other way into the universe except through the body of the woman. But where were you before you were conceived and entered the womb? This is one of the most fascinating in-between times in any life. It is also the one we know least about. Yet it is a journey that each of us has made. In the Western and Oriental traditions, we have a vast architecture of theory regarding life after death; there are bardos, purgatories, Nirvana, and beatific visions. There is a carefully thought-out path of continuity, transfiguration, and final homecoming after death. It is interesting to note the substantial absence, especially in the Christian tradition, of any geography of the time before we were conceived. Maybe it sounds ridiculous to explore this, since we did not exist before we were conceived. This may be true, but it is surely too simple to imagine that one moment there was no sign of you, everything was blank and empty, and then the next moment you began to be there. If you came out of somewhere, then you had to be somewhere before you came. There can be no such apparitions or pure beginnings. As well as having an “afterwards” every person has a “before.” The difficulty in imagining this is that the other world is invisible, and all we have are intimations of our invisible past.

Each of us comes from somewhere more ancient than any family. Normally, if someone asks you where you are from, you can name a house, a street, a landscape. You have an address, parents, and family. This is indeed where you are from now, but this information becomes weak when the question deepens to where you are ultimately from. When you think even simply about your parents’ life, they had a whole life as strangers before they ever knew each other. You were not even a twinkle in their eyes then. Even when they came together, there was no sign, talk, or notion of you. When you reflect further, you begin to see that your ultimate address is Elsewhere. Though you are now totally here, you are essentially not from here. You are a child of the invisible. You were not in any physical form before you were conceived. You emerged in seconds from the invisible and began to grow within darkness. This is why birth is always a surprise. It is the first sighting of the invisible one. Everyone wants to see the new baby. Suddenly, there is someone here who has never been seen before. In the excitement of the new baby’s arrival, we often fail to notice the silent wound in the invisible world which allowed the new arrival to come through. We also forget the whole background which the new baby has had in the invisible world: the dream of its destiny, body, face, life, and temperament. Many silent questions accompany a birth: Why did this baby come here now, to this family? What changes will it bring? Who is this new person? In each new heart a bridge between the invisible and the visible world opens.