ACC E-Accord Summer 2022

plans and control and toward
a sense of personal agency in
relational dynamic with the divine.
Rather than focusing on God as
King with power to make things
happen, instead, Providence
can be seen as human beings
working in partnership with God
to effect change. Babies, then,
are not gifts from God but rather
results of biological processes.
If a miscarriage is not a result of
God’s divine hand then neither is a
healthy live birth.
What then should we pray for
those who are experiencing, or
have experienced, miscarriage?
We should pray that they know
God’s love, that they might know
God’s comforting presence with
them, and that they might know
how to grieve and be angry. We
should pray that our communities
might learn how to support
people having these experiences
better. We should pray that
such experiences do not destroy
people’s faith in God but rather
give them space to reimagine
their faith and come to know God
afresh.
REIMAGINING HOPE
Reproductive loss is mis-carried
hope. When a pregnant person
miscarries, they miscarry not only a
pregnancy but also the multitude
of hopes bound up in that
pregnancy. In the church context
I was in when I experienced these
losses, the hope Christians have
in Jesus was translated into a
specific hope for a successful
future pregnancy. Indeed, this
‘hope’ that Christians have is often
declared in response to difficult
and challenging circumstances.
I wanted to unpick the nature of
this hope and to consider what
a reimagining of hope from the
perspective of the miscarrying
person might look like.
In Scripture, hope is virtue – it is
to be cultivated alongside faith
and love. But Scriptural hope
has a distinctively eschatological
orientation. It finds its fulness
only in eternity. Various scholars,
including Moltmann and David
Elliot (Hope and Christian Ethics)
pick up these themes, and for
Elliot particularly, this hope is one
that is ‘supremely confident and
triumphal’. It has assured certainty.
I argue that this kind of hope acts
as a denial of real-life experience.
It is focused on brushing aside
experience in favour of Scripture
or lines from worship songs.
And it relies on a traditional
understanding of Providence.
We can be assured of our
eschatological hope in Christ but
that does not necessarily translate
into victory in every circumstance.
Real life disrupts hope.
In order to reimagine hope, I
turn to the Mystical Theology
of Dionysius and explore the
paradoxes of apophaticism.
Reimagining hope might mean,
therefore, finding a way of holding
eschatological hope in tension
with present hopelessness. Hope
becomes therefore not futureorientated
but rather present
practice. In this practice of hope,
we can hold affirmation and
negation together. Hope is not
based on confident expectation
but rather is grounded in
uncertainty, risk, and danger.
The possibility of hope is then
present-oriented and grounded
in ethical action. This kind of
present-hope requires a sense
of hopelessness that rejects the
triumphalism of the cross. It is
instead, a praxis of resistance and a
solidarity of remaining with those
who are hopeless and sharing in
their hopelessness. This sense of
hopelessness might embolden us
as it allows us to confront realities
and pushes us into ethical action:
it is accompanied by an ethical
imperative toward justice and
mercy in the present.
HOW, THEN, SHOULD WE PRAY?
In the final section of The Dark
Womb, I reflect on the relationship
between theology and spirituality.
Having reimagined various
theological doctrines, I wanted
to put them into dialogue with
spiritual practices. I position
miscarriage as an incompleted
rite of passage that may require
ritual intervention to help move
the person who has miscarried on
from the experience of pregnancy
loss. I include, therefore, rituals,
prayers, and practices that may be
useful for the person experiencing
pregnancy loss, and the
community around them. I wanted
to offer some theological language
that might be beneficial both to
12 accord Summer 2022 www.acc-uk.org • www.pastoralcareuk.org