Birthing Hope

Pain marks our journeys. Pain is borne alone.

Rachel Marie Stone is an English teacher and the celebrated author of Eat with Joy (IVP, 2013), the 40th Anniversary edition of the More With Less Cookbook (Herald Press, 2016), and numerous articles on justice, faith, food, public and maternal health. In her new memoir, Birthing Hope: Giving Fear to the Light, she opens up about the ways pain has shaped her journey, alongside risk, anxiety, tenderness, and hope.

Stone describes the birth of her children (she is the mother of two boys), her family and personal history with osteogenesis imperfecta (O.I) (a genetic condition, she also passed on to her children), her teenage diagnosis of Scoliosis and the anxieties which have plagued her through life. She opens up about a painful chapter when she and her husband Tim were in Mawali teaching at a Presbyterian Seminary that was marred by scandal, and the anxiety-ridden weeks after Stone caught the newborn baby of a HIV positive mother with her ungloved, cuticle-chewed and papercut fingers (Stone is an American doula who was in a Mawali hospital to observe). There were also life-threatening illnesses in Mawali that affected her and her family (e.g. the dehydration that accompanies malaria). Later, she described to a group of beer-drinking-hipster pastors that her whole time in Mawali felt like a miscarriage.

Stone is open and vulnerable about the painful parts of her story, and the particulars of her story are pretty different from my own. As a man, I will never know what it is like to carry a tiny, invasive being inside my own body, much less the pain of labor. I have never gone to Africa or been exposed directly to the threat of HIV. Though I have had my own anxious encounters and painful life chapters that have felt like miscarriages. There are worries I carry and episodes I can't put a pretty bow on. As different as our stories are, Stone opens up for me a space to reflect on the ways pain and fear have shaped my own journey.

But Stone's book is not just a book about the pain and anxiety, but about hope. Hurt and joy come intertwined. And so the osteogenesis imperfecta that plagues her family story, also reveals a rootedness—a connection to her mother, grandmother, and great-grandparents. The pain of birth and bearing children is intermingled with the joys (and travails) of motherhood, and the special, physiological and psychological attachment between her and her children. Even the painful feeling of miscarriage in her time in Mawali comes commingled with relationships and connections she and her husband made there. While the pain was hers alone to bear, she was strengthened in her journey by sympathetic guides, a supportive family, and joyful encounters with others.

Hope is born as Stone risks, faces down the pain, endures and emerges. Birthing is a poignant image. I underlined several passages. I particularly loved the "Blood" chapter when Stone describes the messiness of birth, relating it to the incarnation of Christ (calling the often misogynistic Christian tradition to task for the ways they sanitize Christ's birth). I also loved how her own experience of pain and bringing life into the world gives her compassion and extend forgiveness toward's mothers facing hard choices who chose to abort, even those in her own family history. Perhaps one of the gifts of pain is it gives us empathy and compassion for the painful journeys of others.

This is a great book. Read it. I give it 5 stars. - ★★★★★

Notice of material connection: I received an electronic copy of this book from the author and publisher in exchange for my honest review.

While I've heard Rachel Marie Stone's name before, and skimmed over some of her articles, it was the first time I had picked up one of her books and actually dug in. Birthing Hope caught my attention - because of both its premise, and the fact that I am a recent first-time mom.
From the first page where she quoted Micha Boyett's poem "Darkness" to the last page, I was hooked. As I read this book, I found myself nodding with enthusiasm, shedding a few tears, and even laughing because I related so deeply to what she was saying. Just listen to a few of my favourite quotes:

"That's what it is to be a mother: to love and nurture that which is fragile, mortal, unpredictable, uncontrollable and ultimately not even truly one's own."

"To love is to unshield oneself - shield coming from a German world meaning "to separate" - and I was unshielded, unseparated, exposed, a fisherman caught in a storm in a dinghy on a churning sea."

"The scandal of the incarnation is that God became a human, not by being beamed down from on high but by being born in the usual way...The scandal of the incarnation is that a woman - we may even be tempted to refer to Mary as a girl, she was so young - was in labour with God."

These are just a few of my many highlights in this book. Rachel Marie's honesty and transparency about her own birth experiences, her experiences working with women giving birth in Malawi, and the way she connects both to Scripture and theology are beautiful. I clung to every word, and will recommend this book particularly to young mothers - and well, to everyone!

Birthing Hope
Giving Fear to the Light
by Rachel Marie Stone
InterVarsity Press


Christian , Religion & Spirituality
Pub Date 01 May 2018



I am reviewing a copy of Birthing Hope through Intervarsity Press and Netgalley:


In Birthing Hope the author points out that bringing something to light requires us to dive fully into water.

We are reminded that love is always a risk, from the time a woman agreed to nurture a child with her own body and then allows it to be torn open for the sake of the new life that grew inside of her, the author points out that, that is the miracle that saves the world. The author reminds us that is where fragile hope is found.

Author Rachel Marie Stone unexpectedly caught a baby with her bare hands, drenching it with HIV blood while working as a doula, as well as a teacher in the world's most impoverished countries.

The author reminds us that all who are born or give birth will someday die, but amongst our fears and doubts birth is a deeply hopeful act of faith, new life is brought into a hurting world that recalls for redemption.


I give Birthing Hope five out of five stars!

Happy Reading!

Sometimes a writer puts words together so eloquently, you feel like you're reading a painting. Rachel is one such artist. This one is a bit hard for me to describe. It's a bit memoir, a bit of theology, at bit of Bible teaching. I want to read it again already.

A beautiful memoir that examines not only the author's own life, but also the cultures in which she has found herself, life, death, and, as the subtitle suggests, what we do with fear. Rachel Marie Stone's writing is stunning, her voice both strong and gentle. I could have read another 500 pages simply because I enjoy her style so much.