Knowing

"I will make your pains in childbearing very severe..."  This is the first promise spoken directly to the
woman.  Eve's recorded response after Adam "knew" her:    "With the help of the Lord I have brought forth a man." Or more literally:  "I have gotten a manchild from (with) the Lord." 

The more I investigate the Hebrew in this passage the more I am convinced that the sexual union between a man and a wife is a way of intimacy with God - by knowing one another, we know God better.  This applies to relationships even outside of a sexual context, but the intimate knowing of the "opposite sex" in my mind is a completion of the image of God that is difficult to know in any other way. 

And yet this knowledge comes with a promise of pain.  Why do we expect it to be any different?  To know God is to know pain.  Sexual union outside of the sacred context of marriage is to know the pain without knowing God in the process.  For me this is not simply an intellectual interpretation of scripture - my own experience points to sex in the proper context as a road to intimacy with God.

The ability to give birth is an amazing gift and could easily lead a woman to the sin of pride.  The concept of goddess worship and the personification of "Mother Nature" is one way in which idolatry of the feminine excludes the masculine nature of God.  Nature is not our mother - God is both mother and father to all of creation.  This is a pendulum swing, in my opinion, in reaction to the concept of God as a masculine figure.  I believe that all feminine and masculine qualities are housed in the person of God - and have no problem with those who prefer to use the feminine pronoun when referring to God.  For me, however, it is most helpful in referring to God as father and husband because it leads me in submission to that which I am not.  It helps me to recognize in God that which I lack.  It challenges me to trust that there is safety in the masculine presence - even when my experience of human masculinity has proved unsafe for the most part.  I am grateful that the desire to know that which I am not has not yet died inside of me.

Eve was reminded in her pain that she could not bring forth life on her own.  She needed God's help.  I did not have much choice in my case but to give up as I lie there on the operating table.  Left to my own abilities - the three of us would have died.  "Let go and let God" is agonizingly cliché - but in my case, I had no strength to hang on to anything at that moment.  Even so and even now - I do a lot, I accomplish a lot - somehow I pull through day to day in this crazy job of mothering in spite of myself - even without a man at my side.  It is easy to fall into the sin of thinking that it all depends on me.  I have a choice each day to rely on my own strength or on something greater than myself.  Fortunately, even in my bold wrestling with God, it doesn't take much to bring me to the end of myself - and I have a very deep sense that my own strength is not enough.