All May, we dare, you and I, to speak of spiritual life. You have already started to tell me about your gods, your relationship with mystery and the sacred. We talk to each other about it with the hint of words at first, with the tips of our eyes, very gently, as we would approach a still fresh wound, a bird found outside its nest or a secret that we keeps you warm under the layers of ambient noise.
Making space for what seems to interest no one on the surface, while, collectively, we adhere to secularism – with a fervor which itself seems to stem from what it rejects: religion – is a perilous thing, let’s face it. Because if there is one discourse dominated by the empire of amalgamation in Quebec, it is the discourse on religion.
I know this well, since I am pursuing studies in a Center dedicated to this. I often face this reaction which turns its nose up at my field of study which “isn’t really one”, “religion no longer interests anyone these days”. It’s hard not to smile in my shrink’s beard every time someone in the office says they don’t “have an unconscious” or even “not be a big case”. Almost every time, the sentences that follow will reveal the exact opposite of what has just been so adamantly denied.
It is therefore in no way necessary to serve me here what is currently being served to anyone who dares to speak about belief in the public space, that is to say this anthology of combinations, both intellectually dubious and reductive. , who confuse, without any distinction, institutionalized religion, its abuses and spiritual experience, belonging to a nationalist project and the defense of a culture which has its source in the rejection of that which crushed it, ‘a manner which is reminiscent of the post-traumatic rigidity of any survivor.
If I do not judge the need to reject outright what is associated with so much shame, both that of the abused and that of the abuser (let’s think of the abuses of the Catholic Church towards Aboriginal people), I am less at comfortable with what often appears to me as a negation of what, whether we like it or not, continues to exist in ourselves, but in the most total absence of consciousness. Freud would speak of taboo, I would also speak of denial, since to deny spiritual life is to deny, most of the time, a part of oneself which ends up no longer having words to express itself, which opens the door wide to all forms of abuse.
Everything that grows in the dark, with or without a circumflex accent, offers the world an easily influenced interface. Talking about religion therefore allows, paradoxically, to ensure better intellectual and spiritual self-defense in the face of all potential abuses in this area. And it is from birth, very often, that the question of the sacred is simply removed from human life. Rituals involving a spiritual dimension having been largely replaced by celebrations carrying both the capitalist ideal (the “ shower “) or individualist (the “ gender reveal “), it is also in settings devoid of spiritual references that babies are born.
It is in part this question that we could describe as “religious literacy” that Marie-Noëlle Bélanger-Lévesque is interested in. A graduate of the Center for the Study of Contemporary Religion at the University of Sherbrooke, a colleague therefore, she has sought since her master’s degree, then through her doctorate and her postdoctorate, to track down the religious experience invited into birth. Its results reveal a lot about our ambivalent relationship to spiritual things. “Like the passage from life to death, the passage from the uterine world to the one we know is mysterious, even disturbing: thus, through history and cultures, beliefs and ritual practices make it possible to give it meaning and to accompany her,” we read in the introduction to her article on the spiritual life of women who give birth.
“Throughout time, birth has always been accompanied by rituals, anthropologically. There is a void here,” she told me. “But what I discovered is that it’s not a void, it’s a silence. It’s lived, but when we present our results to doctors, they are always so surprised when we tell them that a quarter of mothers pray in the maternity ward,” the woman tells me, asking parents before and after birth if the sacred was invited into their experience.
Its results also allow us to note this gap between the rejection, first, of any experience linked to the spiritual and adherence and, secondly, responses which reveal the exact opposite. Thus, if many of them say from the outset that they experienced nothing on a spiritual level during the birth of their partner, fathers can then admit to having invoked their own deceased father in the form of prayers during the work, having become aware of the beauty and fragility of life, having felt a deep meaning in their life or even having felt gratitude. Thus, it is by bypassing negatively connoted language (“religion, spirituality”) and by naming spiritual dimensions without presenting them in this way that most parents recognize having experienced a spiritually charged experience when giving birth to their child.
Doctors will also admit to praying in silence, and above all in secret, like this gynecologist who told him “each time I leave a birthing room, I say a little prayer for the new family, that they be guided in welcoming and supporting this new being.” There is a lot of beauty in the silence that Marie-Noëlle talks about, don’t you think?
Sometimes you have to take a “very, very big detour” as the song says, to arrive at what ultimately seems so obvious to us. Because the mystery of a birth, through the power and the fragile that it summons at the same time, obviously, invites the question of the meaning of life, at least in an existential way, then, why not, in a deeply spiritual way. What if, together, we dared to stand in the face of taboo, to shed a little of this light that only makes us more real?