A time of waiting, listening for His heartbeat

By Colleen Roy

I can still remember the feelings of anticipation and awe during my first pregnancy.

The first hint that I was expecting came one morning when I woke up at 6 a.m. I was probably a week along. I ran in a frenzy to the fridge and ate half a watermelon. I stumbled, satisfied, back into bed and thought, "That was weird."

Once the pregnancy was confirmed I felt as though the world revolved around my belly. I began a journal to my yet unnamed son: "To the little baby within my womb, I can't imagine where you are hiding inside me, growing and changing in the palm of Abba's hand. No matter what anyone tells you, it is God alone Who gives and takes life, and you truly are a life, and God Himself is forming you."

I heard my son's heartbeat when he was a tiny 7 weeks old, only the size of a thimble, with rounded fingers and toes budding, and there it was pounding away like a tribal drum, almost in defiance to those who wished to philosophize his very being away.

I taped that heartbeat. My doctor said it was the earliest he remembered finding with his Doppler. (I actually saw my second son's heartbeat at 3 weeks.) I brought the tape with me everywhere and played it for friends and strangers.

At the library where I worked I played the tape over the sound system. One man I worked with, a university educated man, asked me what it was. When I told him he looked at me incredulously and said, "What? Isn't it still just a blob?"

I could have cried. This child of mine had shaken my world. He had made me a mother. He had given me the gift of himself, and allowed me to somehow, mysteriously, participate in the workings of the Holy Trinity. This gift of mine, and someone dared to believe the lie that he was "not."

I forgave my friend for his untimely ignorance, (or perhaps perfectly timely) and continued about my wonder and bliss. Scott and I would spend evenings laughing together as we considered names and guessed whose features the child would take.

Scott would sing to my belly and kiss it while he pondered the theological meanings behind conception and creation (if you knew Scott you would understand). Every priest who crossed my path was grabbed and asked to bless the little one. Andrew grew and kicked and lived within me, and I wondered what the world had been like before him.

Sometimes when I am in the presence of Christ in the Eucharist I find myself thinking that I am in some type of supernatural womb. Within this sacred place a true, living Presence breathes. We ponder and think about this miracle of Life that is somehow mystically touching us.

I sometimes sit and ask God why I find it so difficult to see Him there in the monstrance. The sceptic inside asks, "Isn't it just a wafer?" As I pray, I think of the tiny, miraculous life that grew within me: this tiny life, truly present, truly alive, truly changing the world, yet still unseen, unrealized, unnamed, unknown.

I think about how my unborn child depended on his mother's existence, and grew daily, little by little, as he rested in my womb. He heard the watery echo of my voice, the pounding of my heart; he felt the counter-pressure of my hand as he first started kicking me.

When the time was right, and the child was ready, he was born, looked into my face, and rested in my arms, with a new realization of his mother's presence.

"Am I like the unborn," I ask Him, "growing slowly as I rest in Your Presence, when I rest in Your Presence? The whispers I hear, the sound of Your heart, are they all bringing me nearer? And when the time is right, death maybe, will I finally recognize You and allow myself to rest in Your arms?"

I sit in the presence of the King, the universe's Creator. I sit in the presence of Yahweh and truly await Christmas. My Advent will be a time of waiting and listening for His heartbeat. My Advent will be a time to rest in the peaceful quiet that answers me.

I praise my infant Saviour, trusting that as I sit silently in His womb-type sanctuary, I too will grow, develop, and learn to distinguish His voice above all the others fighting for my soul.