Guest post by Amy. Human Being. Mother of Two. Deep Thinker. Granddaughter of a Philosopher.

Points of Connection

While carrying my first child, I was minimally concerned about hearing the baby’s heartbeat. My unwritten, quite logical rule was that “Babies have heartbeats. Inside me, I am growing a baby. Of course we will hear the baby’s heartbeat.”  It really felt like that, and really fit into my world narrative.

The second time around, the unsuccessful quest for a heartbeat seared into my soul the innocence of my previous assumptions, and sanctified how hearing my baby’s heartbeat connected my baby to me. We went into the doctor’s office expecting to finally hear the heartbeat. Our hearts shattered temporarily over and over again when we heard no heartbeat, saw no baby on the ultrasound monitors, and eventually my body no longer carried traces of what might have been.

During my third pregnancy, a stethoscope was one of the main tools of reassurance that I cherished for a few months to reassure myself that my baby was “OK” and maintain that connection to my unseen baby. And yes, being the paranoid soul that I was, for a few months, I attempted to hear my baby’s heartbeat every few hours. My talismanic stethoscope was a figurative lifeline for those few months between when the baby’s heartbeat was strong enough to be heard through layers of skin, fat, and fluid and the baby could kick like a mule. It mattered.

Flourishing and Growth

Scientists have investigated and confirmed that babies can hear while still in the womb. Babies can hear the mother’s heartbeat, the mother’s voice, the mother’s digestive tract, and more distantly, the voices of others.  Any newborn provider can tell you that babies need to hear a heartbeat outside themselves. It matters.

Both baby and mother listen to each other’s heartbeats as a reassuring, sustaining point of connection. It matters enough to be a life or death point of connection that crosses gender, nationality, race, or religion lines.

We sometimes forget that, just as human tools can fail to pick up a baby’s heartbeat, the baby can still be flourishing and growing.  Conversely, a baby can flourish in utero despite not hearing a mother’s voice or identifying a mother’s heartbeat.  In both instances, other ways of describing and navigating reality are implemented as ways to connect.  Just because a heartbeat or voice is not heard one way or at one time, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.

God as Life-Giver

Because of my parent/child (specifically mother/baby) relationship experience, I can easily try to imagine God as a parent, and myself as a child.  Things I learned as a parent I can transfer to God as a parent. Things I learned as a parent, as a nurturer, as a provider, transfer into what makes me secure, protected, and connected as a child. I thought I knew what God’s voice sounded like, and it connected me to God.

Until, one day, I wasn’t.  I didn’t hear God’s voice anymore as I understood it or as I expected it to sound like.

In my faith transition, I have felt keenly the absence of that Voice – the Voice I associated with God.  I have tried to analyze the loss of this Voice, to process/work through it, to wring meaning from it – to bargain it out of existence as it were. In doing all this, a part of my soul remembers the dense, immersive sensation of grief, of bawling my eyes out while listening in complete silence for that one quiet, steady sound that meant the world to me in that moment.  But another part of me is different.  It is cautiously hopeful and tentatively curious, while daringly tiptoeing around, asking different questions and coming to different conclusions.

New questions bubble to the surface of my thinking.  “What if there is the possibility that just because I no longer hear the Voice of God doesn’t mean that God doesn’t exist or that God has dropped/disowned me?  What if I am not cut off?  Or what if I am, but everything is just fine?”. The most daring, almost counter-culture question that I have come up with is, “What if I am expecting God to communicate to me as methodically and as often as a baby hears a caregiver’s heartbeat, and the reality is that communication with God is less frequent and more intentional?  What if I should expect and normalize the times when God won’t be speaking to me?“

This is comforting to me.  As a sleep-deprived, child-carrying mother, I had hours on end when I wasn’t talking to my child because I was sleeping, working, thinking or doing something else that didn’t require prodding and talking at my expanding belly.  This wasn’t a crisis for either of us – my baby was sleeping and growing, and I was trying to sleep, provide my baby’s shelter,  and grow into a better human. So, I can easily relate to it not being a crisis that God isn’t talking to me – I can be in a comparative state of respite and growth while God could be running the universe and/or resting in a Godly rest, and/or advancing into a better God. The possibilities are endless.  A refreshingly new and paradoxically always existing status quo may be that both of us are connected but comfortably silent.

But more importantly, I may be able to hear and identify God’s heartbeat in ranges outside of God’s Voice throughout the world.

What does God’s heartbeat sound like when I stop mistaking it for the Voice of God?