Posted on 10/23/2019 2:38:21 PM PDT by karpov
I recently came across a quotation by Vincent van Gogh, and it triggered something in me. “There may be a great fire in our soul, but no one ever comes to warm himself by it, all that passers-by can see is a little smoke,” van Gogh wrote, in an 1880 letter to his brother, Theo. The line haunted me for days; I was struck by this concept of the fire within. How many people do we pass every single day who are carrying around raging fires — who have a passion or a pain inside that is so great they can barely contain it?
For me, and for thousands of other people, infertility is that raging fire.
We kind of know that cousin or aunt who loves kids, and we kind of see the sadness in her eyes at baby showers, but we don’t really know the depth of her pain. We see how our co-worker lights up whenever other people talk about their children, but we don’t really know why he and his wife never had any. We read something once upon a time about recurrent miscarriage, and we felt sorry or sad, but we couldn’t picture anyone we knew who had lost multiple consecutive pregnancies.
Fire can leave serious damage behind. Because it can be hard to fully grasp what infertility involves unless you’ve dealt with it personally, many people believe that it’s all about the end game, a baby — that if you could just get to that prize, the pain of infertility would fade away. But infertility is bigger than babies. I say this often, because I want people to get it. It truly is. It can affect our physical and mental health in insidious — and sometimes enduring — ways.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Infertility was a burden borne by many of the great women of the Bible; Sarah, Hannah, and Elizabeth mother of John the Forerunner and Baptist.
Holy tradition says that Joachim and Anna, parents of the Theotokos Mary were like wise infertile until their old age.
and an Angel tells at least one of the parents-to-be "fear not!".
Amen
....And Amen
Both Joachim and Anna from their sterility's stigma,
and Adam and Eve from their mortality's ruin have been set free,
O immaculate Maid,
by your holy nativity.
For this do your people hold celebration,
redeemed from the guilt of transgression as they cry to you,
"The barren one bears the Theotokos,
the nourisher of our Life."
Also if not mistaken, the feast of the birth of the Virgin comes a few days after a few days after the start of the Orthodox Church year.
It brings a sense of springtime....as conveyed in this stichera from Vespers:
Today the glad tidings go forth to the world.
Today sweet fragrance is wafted forth,
foretelling the glad tidings of salvation;
and the barrenness of our nature hath been united:
for the barren one hath become a mother
to the one who remained a Virgin after giving birth to the Creator;
from whom cometh God in nature,
taking a foreign nature and working salvation in the flesh for the lost,
Christ, the Lover of mankind,
and the Deliverer of our souls.
And the irony is, many of those who can have babies kill them before they are born....
I’m looking at you Alyssa Milano.
I love this poetry -— and of course, 10x better sung.
Especially this is to be sung in Plagal Second (Tone Six), the most esoteric and "Middle Eastern" sounding of the Byzantine Tones.
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