Excerpts from “Risk: Mary,” from Women Rise Up: Sacred Stories of Resistance for Today’s Revolution

The first place I ever saw a nativity play was in the fellowship hall of the First Southern Baptist Church down the street from my childhood home. As I’ve shared before, my family wasn’t the church-going type, and the only reason we were there was because my brother’s friend was playing the part of one of the shepherds. I was around five or six years old at the time, and I hadn’t the slightest clue as to what the play was about or even who Jesus was. What I did know was that the girl playing Mary must have been special because she got to hold a baby.

Years—and many nativity plays later—I attended a church that hosted a live, walk-through nativity each year during which the sanctuary and surrounding buildings were transformed into the ancient city of Bethlehem. They even managed to bring camels in for it, though I have no idea from where. In a small town like that, it was a great source of entertainment, and people flocked from all over to see it.

That Christmas Eve I saw that a young girl I’d babysat only a few years earlier was playing the part of Mary. She was dressed in an iconic blue robe fashioned from an old sheet, and as she and the boy playing Joseph made the long, slow walk to the front of the congregation, she delicately carried a swaddled bundle in her arms while the church’s music director tenderly played “Away in a Manger.” When they reached the front of the church, the young girl leaned down to place the baby gently in the wooden manger, but somehow she misjudged the side of it and ended up smacking the poor baby Jesus in the head. (Don’t worry; it was a doll). We might’ve missed her error entirely had it not been for the look of panic on her face—or for the loud thumping sound of the hard plastic meeting wood that reverberated throughout the sanctuary. With flushed cheeks and an averted gaze, she dashed to the pew where her family was sitting. With that, I was over my unmet desire to play Mary in the Christmas play.

As much as I celebrate the opportunity to include children as storytellers in our sacred spaces, I worry about what happens when we turn the event of Jesus’s birth into a children’s production. The story becomes sanitized. When we clean up the birth so much, we lose touch with the reality that Jesus was born like we all are: through the bloody, sweaty, and tearful efforts of the women who give us life.

This propensity to make the birth of Jesus more palatable has a long history. If we look at various artistic depictions of the nativity throughout the ages, we see scenes that resemble illustrations from a children’s book—light shining brightly upon a group kneeling before a calm, peaceful baby who looks more like a toddler than a newborn. The entire thing is like a fairy tale detached from reality. I suppose that’s why I loved the moment when the girl in my church accidentally thumped the baby Jesus—because it was so very human. Her kerfuffle reminded me that no matter how much we may try to orchestrate our lives, we are beautifully imperfect human beings with slippery hands that sometimes fumble.

Though I never dropped the baby Jesus on his head (I never had the opportunity), there were lots of painful moments I endured during my teenage years. Looking back, most of my embarrassing moments were actually quite mild, despite how intense they may have felt in the moment. They have long been forgotten by most. What about in the case of Mary, the mother of Jesus? What kind of experience did she have as a young, unmarried, pregnant girl? How did she find a way to endure the judgmental looks and the pitying glances?

The student handbook for my small high school stated that becoming pregnant was grounds for automatic expulsion. I recall only one incident in which a student carried a pregnancy to term; undoubtedly others had abortions. The school administration turned a blind eye to her boyfriend who remained enrolled there, but the young woman had no option other than to drop out once she could no longer hide her pregnancy. Despite my indoctrination in purity culture that shamed girls for having sex, I still thought the whole situation was terribly unjust. Why should she be penalized while her boyfriend continued on in school? I remember visiting her not long after the baby was born, imagining how isolated she must have felt. I wonder if she ever saw herself in Mary’s story.

Sometimes I think we forget that Mary was a young girl when she became pregnant with Jesus. Our depictions of Jesus’s mother often portray her as pensive and serene, her facial features more closely resembling those of a grown woman than a young adolescent girl. Do those portrayals of Mary aid us collectively in coping with some of the discomfort we feel around the story of a young girl taking on the enormous task of holding God within herself, of giving birth to God, of nurturing God as a helpless, tiny baby? What if we were to set these images aside and reimagine Mary as a girl like the ones who play her in our church nativities? What if we reflected on the reality that the baby she birthed and cared for wasn’t made of plastic but was made of flesh and spirit?

THE WAY I thought about Mary began to shift years before I became a mother myself. In my early twenties, I moved to Washington, D.C. where I launched a grassroots maternal health advocacy campaign for a worldwide denomination. Nothing quite like this had been done before, and I spent the first year just trying to get my footing. A good portion of my work early on involved speaking to churches and other communities around the country about why people of faith should care about global maternal health and universal access to family planning. I said yes to nearly every invitation, hoping that the more practice I got, the better I’d be at delivering my message.

When I had the opportunity to speak to congregations, I often spent most of my presentation time rattling off shocking statistics and heart-shattering stories about maternal mortality, which was effective at creating a somber mood but left little room for hope to enter. At the end of each talk I could sense a heaviness in the room. I’d explained the tragedy of the situation without sharing any good news. Over time I learned that when communities invited me to talk about creating a more just world for women and girls, they needed to learn the facts, yes, but I needed to frame my message differently. I needed to root my talk in something beyond the immediate crisis—something that would give rise to hope for a better future.

Those of us engaged in advocacy work get so wrapped up in identifying the problems and root causes of injustice that we often forget to imagine what we actually want the world to look like. In the face of tragic stories and statistics about poverty, disease, violence, and corruption, daring to dream of a better world can be challenging.

When I began my campaign on maternal health, the global statistics for maternal mortality were startlingly high—a woman died every ninety seconds from complications during pregnancy or childbirth. That number has declined steadily ever since, but not fast enough: nearly eight hundred women continue to die every day from mostly preventable complications like hemorrhaging and infection. It is geography and systemic poverty that determine a woman’s level of risk in childbirth. Nearly all maternal deaths occur in the developing world where many women lack access to basic medical care. That being said, in the United States maternal mortality rates continue to climb, especially among black women who are three times more likely to die in childbirth than white women are.

One year as the season of Advent approached I was asked to write a piece about Mary and maternal health for a denominational publication. At first I was stumped. How could anyone possibly write something new about the birth of Jesus? I had very little interest in writing about Mary at all. In my view she was a troubling model of womanhood, embodying passivity, purity, and asexuality.

Reluctantly and skeptically, I turned to the first chapters of the Gospel of Luke. As I read and re-read the story of Jesus’s birth, I began to see Mary’s situation differently. She was a poor teenager with an unplanned pregnancy. Given her young age and the circumstances of her life, we might consider her pregnancy high-risk. The potential for complications, possibly even death, ought not be dismissed. Laboring in a space shared with animals leaves her vulnerable to infection, one of the most common causes of death for both mothers and babies. Infections account for fifteen percent of all maternal deaths and thirty-five percent of all neonatal deaths.

I see Mary in the women today who cross borders and give birth in a land far from their homes. Remember that she and Joseph have traveled to Bethlehem for the census.

I see her in the millions of mothers who live in areas lacking even a single health care provider. Luke’s Gospel mentions no birth attendant who might accompany Mary during her labor.

I see her in the adolescent girls who become pregnant before their eighteenth birthdays without fully understanding how it happened. All of them could use the reassuring voice of an angel. Do not be afraid.

When I consider the circumstances of Mary’s pregnancy—young, unplanned, high-risk—and her birthing conditions—unsanitary, possibly unattended—I strongly believe that the miracle of nativity is not only that Jesus, the Son of God, is born among humans, but also that Mary survives the labor and recovers birthing him into our world. We take this for granted. Even in the best of circumstances, pregnancy is risky, and childbirth is dangerous, even life-threatening. Every day hundreds of women lose their health or their lives while bringing new life into existence. We would be remiss not to acknowledge these sobering realities.

Mary’s survival is something we ought to talk about more. If we stop to consider the risk to her life, could we imagine how this loss might shape Jesus’s ministry? What would the life of Jesus look like without the love, care, and guidance of his mother?

The more I reflect on Mary as the mother of Jesus, the more I see that there is nothing passive about her role at all. Raising a child is unpredictable and ever-changing. Parenting is a constant state of action: nurturing, guiding, reminding, explaining, advising, worrying, and anticipating. Mary is the bearer of holy miracles in more ways than one.

Mary says “yes” to what Pierre Teilhard de Chardin called “the slow work of God.” She holds fast to the vision that Gabriel revealed of what is to come for her son, and she endures many challenging years of preparing him for the moment when he is ready to live into his divine purpose fully. I give thanks for her strong and faithful nurturing of the one who gives us hope and healing today.

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Rev. Katey Zeh is a strategist, author, and speaker who works with nonprofits and faith communities on organizing for social change. She is the Chief Executive Officer of the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice and a member of the Clergy Advocacy Board of Planned Parenthood Federation of America. A highly sought thought leader and speaker, Katey has presented on faith and activism at conferences and universities across the United States. The Center for American Progress named her one of their top justice-seeking faith leaders to watch. She has written for many outlets including the Washington Post, Huffington Post, Sojourners, Fidelia’s Sisters, Religion News Services, Rewire and Religion Dispatches, and her advocacy work has been featured in numerous outlets including CNN, The Nation, Colorlines, VICE News, Baptist News Global, National Catholic Reporter, and Religion News Service. An ordained Baptist minister, Katey is the co-host of the Kindreds podcast and the author of a Women Rise Up: Sacred Stories of Resistance for Today’s Revolution, a timely take on the tenacious women of the bible. Her second book A Complicated Choice: Making Space for Grief and Healing in the Pro-Choice Movement will be published in early 2022 with Broadleaf Books.