According to some recent research, scientists now think that women may, in fact, produce new egg cells throughout their reproductive years.  In many ways, this is good news.  For decades, scientists have held that a woman is born with all the egg cells she will ever have in her lifetime already within her reproductive organs.  This new research means that there is some new hope for those of us who have struggled with infertility, so overall good. 

But, I’ll admit, for me personally, the new findings make slightly less powerful the image of the beginnings of my faith that I have held dear for most of my faith-conscious life.

This is a picture of my maternal grandmother, Bahi, and me at my diaconal ordination in 2008:

But my spiritual journey, the starting-point that I imagine led to this moment, begins 60 years earlier, in 1948, when my grandmother, four months into her marriage to my grandfather, fled Haifa, Palestine where both of them had grown up and where they had made their new home together.  I was very close to my grandmother before her death some years ago and she told me stories of her life in British-occupied Palestine in the first half of the 20^th century.  So I know that at the time of her fleeing, mere months before the state of Israel was declared, she and my grandfather had hoped to be able to return to their home after the violence calmed down, but of course, they never did.  So far as I know, no one in our family has ever been back to the home my grandparents left behind in 1948. 

And Grandma told me that in that moment, she was filled with such depth of fear and loss and anxiety that it was all she could do to hold on to her new husband’s hand for dear life as they boarded the crowded ship that would take them to Beirut.  She was four months pregnant with my mother.  Grandma said that her faith then was nothing compared to what it became – that she did not trust in God as she should have.  Still, I imagine that the only thing that brought her and Grandpa through that moment, and through the many changes and chances, dangers and fears that followed them from one city to another until they landed at home in America, was the strong Christian faith that I always knew them for. 

And, see, if a woman is born with all the eggs of her lifetime, then when my grandmother fled Haifa in 1948, with the forming-body of my mother inside her womb, then I can see the beginnings of my own self, my own identity caught up in that moment, too.  I see my self, the future daughter of the baby who grew in my grandmother’s belly, nestled within that very baby, itself nestled within her mother, like a living series of Russian dolls.  I imagine that the loss and fear of that moment somehow seeped into me and I have been holding it in the core of my being ever since, like an egg, too.  And that if you break that egg open there’s this even more hidden part, golden and warm.  And that is my faith.  It is the faith of my mother and grandmother and it is the thing that carried us all, one inside the other, through that awful moment and will carry us through the rest, too.

Certainly, my faith and my family have always been linked together inextricably.  Every Sunday, from the time of my birth, I would go with my mother and sister to our local Episcopal parish.  We would sit in the second pew on the right side, behind my grandparents and my grandmother’s sister and in front of my grandmother’s brother.  After church, we would caravan to the house of my grandmother or one of her six siblings in the area for “coffee,” a glorious gathering of the entire extended family in Houston – great-aunts, great-uncles, cousins galore – meeting for Arabic food and gossip, American coffee, and usually a soccer game or two on TV.  Sunday morning church and Sunday afternoon coffee with my large and loving Arab family were the spiritual staples of my childhood.  And it is not surprising, then, that I related the breaking of the bread (a moment that my mother always made sure I didn’t miss) during the Eucharist with the breaking of the pita bread as my great-uncle Sami would take a loaf and start its being passed from cousin to cousin only an hour or so later.  A true communion. 

Each and all of us are so closely tied to our childhoods, to the places where our roots first took hold.  Perhaps some of us are people of faith because, like me, we had such good religious soil in which to be planted, soil abundantly rich with images and experiences of God’s love and with people who served as role models and embodiments of such love.  There are those who are people of faith because they lacked such things in their youth and thus desperately sought it as they grew older.  There are some who have no faith because those who spoke to them of God showed little or nothing of such love.  And I suppose there are some for whom there has never been a source or a desire for such knowledge at all. 

Recently, a parishioner – a good, righteous, thoughtful man – told me that he believes his Christian belief is almost entirely an accident of birth, that had he been born in India, he’s sure he would have been Hindu, or in Saudi Arabia, Muslim, or in China, Buddhist.  And that had he been born in any of these other places, his faith would have been just as good and acceptable in the eyes of God.  I think he was afraid he would shock me or elicit some kind of religious scolding from me about the right-ness of Christianity and the consequential wrong-ness of all other religions. 

But, of course, my response to his statement was complete agreement.  Because, ultimately, whatever the latest science says about the biological processes of fertility, we are all of us products of our ancestors; each of us is the smallest (so far) in our own series of Russian dolls nestled within others and through whom and by whom we have received the gifts of faith and identity.  And the way I see it, that fact is itself a blessing from God, who is all things and knows all things. 

“For now we see in a mirror, dimly,but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known.”  (I Corinthians 13:12)