I Cried in a Hallway Again: LDS Women Anointing Each Other

This week was a bit rough. I’m not exactly sure why. I was tired, coming off a weekend in which I couldn’t remember what it felt like to not do homework, so maybe that was it.

I don’t think so, though. I think this week I just felt very, very small and afloat. Which is why finding information about pioneer women anointing each other during childbirth in one of my school books made me break down in tears in a school hallway.

I was reading a book by Tikva Frymer-Kensky called Motherprayer. It’s a collection of prayers, rituals, and stories about and for expecting mothers from all over. (If you’re interested in the book, you should know ahead of time that it is also the most second-wave feminist thing I’ve read in a while, by which I mean it’s very mystical, in a sixties, mother-goddess but still weirdly Judeo-Christian, celebrating the female body, one-size-meets-all in terms of meaning way. But still, it’s pretty cool.) It’s a collection with beautiful writing that speaks to ways women have thought about childbirth over millennia and across the world, from ancient Babylon to (surprise!) the early LDS church.

This prayer, written by the author, encapsulates the book pretty well:

And that—a community of women that stretches backward and forward—that’s my jam. It grounded me to think of connections across time woven through pregnancy and prayer.

I know this is complicated. My mom couldn’t get pregnant for thirteen years, and it hurt in ways I don’t understand. And I’ve watched people I love suffer through complicated pregnancies, through miscarriages, through haunting fear and pain. The thing is, these prayers talk about those things too. They plead with God to give them a child and they beg Him to protect them from pain, petition Him for protection of their babies, reminding him of his promises, of the ways He did those things for other faithful women.

As I read, I thought about all the birth metaphors in Christian scripture. In Isaiah and Psalms, God often refers to himself as a mother—nursing, delivering. In the New Testament, Jesus compares himself to a mother hen. It occurred to me that God uses these metaphors to communicate with us, to explain his experience and our relationship—but when women are experiencing the physical reality of birth, these metaphors take on new meaning, and God can be known in new ways. The road is already built; they can travel the metaphor back to him. They approach Him with His own words.

The connections, then, are not just with other women, but with God. And even though I’ve never come close to having a child, reading about this interlacing experience and being made me feel less small and alone.

And then—guys, and then—the next page had this prayer from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, used as women anointed and blessed their pregnant sisters.

So that’s when I started crying. I love this blessing so much, I can’t get my arms around it.

I love the parts of my religion it reminds me of. I love that, in our early church when things were so theologically creative, women laid their hands on each other and pronounced blessings, the way we still do in the temple. This prayer sounds a lot like those temple blessings. It uses some of the same words, it has the same tendency to dart back and forth between the spiritual and the physical, nearly scientific, with its talk of marrow and ligaments, its attention to the details of the body. I love that about my religion too—the insistent mixing of the mundane with the divine, the assurance that the body is permanent, is part of our soul, is a necessary part of salvation, and therefore worthy of our theological attention and love.

I wrote my masters thesis on how ritual helps us deal with in-betweeness, and there is nothing more in-between than birth. Especially for the woman who would have received this anointing, whose babies so often miscarried, were stillborn, or died young. For them, delivery and pregnancy walked the line of life and death. The process of having a baby was a constant reminder of their own mortality and the mortality of everything they loved.

Ritual helps us in these moments by reminding us that we’re part of a community, that there are people who are bound to us and take responsibility for us. It lets us feel less alone. in the case of this blessing, the woman would have been surrounded by women of her faith, her peers in priesthood. The ordinance would have connected her with them and with all those who shared the ability to pour oil and lay hands and speak this blessing.

More than that, it would have connected them with their mothers and grandmothers, with everyone who ever gave birth. Because the primary thing ritual signals is that other people have been where you are. This blessing exists because women get pregnant and it’s scary and hard. This blessing exists to tell them, when they are feeling those things, that they are not alone. It says that others have been here before you and others will come after, and through that all there are women who will stand next to you and call down the blessings and presence of the Lord.

And while I loved so many of the blessings and prayers in this book, these were my people, and that made me feel less alone too.

Also, this blessing comes from the Relief Society minutes, which means that it was almost definitely written down by Eliza Snow, who was a boss. She’s the first published recorder of Heavenly Mother and (Laurel Thatcher Ulrich and others suggest) possibly the originator of that doctrine. So anything from Eliza Snow is already my favorite thing.