by Lauren Winner
Gospel Reading: Luke 1:39-45
For Sunday, December 23, 2012: Year C—Advent 4
Do you remember Midge? She is Barbie’s best friend, and for a while she was pregnant, but her pregnancy was controversial: would playing with her somehow encourage teenage pregnancy? And—why was Midge not wearing a wedding ring? Soon enough Mattel corrected their armillary oversight, painting a band on Midge’s left ring finger.
Of course, the same parents who did not want kids thinking about unmarried women being pregnant may also have been vying for their daughters to play Mary in the church Christmas pageant.
Pregnant without the Social Protections of Marriage
For at least two generations, feminist theologians have been pondering Mary’s pregnancy: was this really the Holy Spirit, or had Mary slept with a man, or been raped by a man, and gotten pregnant? Isn’t that why, some scholars have suggested, she rushed in great haste to see Elizabeth— that rushing not abut bursting with joy eagerness, but rather anxiety, fear concern? [See: Jane Schaberg, The Illegitimacy of Jesus: A Feminist Theological Interpretation of the Infancy Narratives, esp 84-88]
One doesn’t, I think, have to make that argument— one doesn’t have to take on Matthew, Luke and the Creed, arguing against the virgin conception and birth, to say this: Mary was pregnant and unmarried. She didn’t have the social cover of marriage. She probably received a lot of censure. A lot of sidelong glances; a lot of whispers; maybe some frank stares and outright rudeness. And the church celebrates Elizabeth’s welcome of her, Elizabeth’s pronouncement of blessing. Yes, this was blessing because she was pregnant with Jesus. But it was also true that it was welcome of someone that people today still spurn: the pregnant woman who wears no ring.
I wonder what kind of welcome we practice to pregnant women without wedding bands. I mean “we” the church, and I mean “we” Americans in general, and more narrowly, speaking just for my own backyard, I mean we the polite middle-class. What kind of calculations or assumptions do I make when an unmarried woman tells me she’s pregnant? Do our local churches throw unmarried expectant mothers the same baby showers we throw the married mothers-to-be? Or do we cast aspersions, and subtly (or not-so-subtly) convey that these women are not welcome?
The New Normal?
Earlier this year, the chattering classes devoted a week or so to discussing the recent finding that today, more than half of the children born in the US to women under 30 are born to unmarried women. The New York Times said (using that maddeningly ubiquitous phrase) that this is “the new normal.” And yet it doesn’t seem to be socially normal in all circles. As one woman wrote about her pregnant sister-in-law “One of the things that surprised my sister-in-law was how judgmental people, even in this day and age, were when she would refrain from wearing her wedding ring. I guess folks thought she was an unwed mother. … They were wrong…. But she says they looked at her funny when she didn't wear her wedding ring.” Christina Robert, an unmarried woman with a PhD in Family Social Science and Marriage and Family Therapy, recounts telling a colleague that she was expecting. “Her eyes got bright and she looked very excited. And then she said ‘Oh!!! I didn’t know you were married!’”
There is now a whole mini-industry of fake wedding rings to tide women through the months of swollen fingers because (in the words of one website) “Some women have found that strangers even give them judgmental looks when they are pregnant with no wedding ring!”
Maybe in our churches every married pregnant woman whose hands swell should resist the temptation to buy a fake ring. Maybe no pregnant woman should wear a ring. It would be a small act of solidarity with those pregnant women who don’t have the social, financial, and political protections of marriage. Women like Jesus’ mother.
The Hardest Question
This Gospel reading is: Mary’s great song of reversal; Elizabeth’s humble faith; John the Baptist’s recognition of Jesus.
It is all those things. It is also the story of an unmarried pregnant woman receiving welcome.
So the hardest question may be: How do our communities welcome pregnant women? What do we think when we see a pregnant woman without a ring? How would it feel to welcome those women as though they were Mary?
Reverend Dr. Lauren Winner writes and lectures widely on Christian practice, the history of Christianity in America, and Jewish-Christian relations. Her books include Girl Meets God, Mudhouse Sabbath, Real Sex, a study of household religious practice in 18th-century Virginia, A Cheerful and Comfortable Faith, published by Yale University Press in the fall of 2010, and, most recently, Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis. Lauren is also a contributor to sparkhouse’s animate series for adult faith formation. In the midst of lecturing and writing, Lauren serves as a priest associate at St. Luke's Episcopal Church (Durham) and a member of the board of the Episcopal Preaching Foundation.
