After a false start the day before, my husband and I drove to hospital early in the morning, eagerly anticipating the birth of our first child. With an induction, growing contractions, and intensifying pain, our son was born just after midnight. He was placed on my chest as I lay in an exhausted yet empowered daze. Those first few hours of our new baby’s life were a blur of hormones, love, and fear of the unknown. I wondered what I was meant to do now with this tiny human. The experience profoundly and overwhelmingly changed my life from living as an independent, married woman, free to spend my days however I chose, to suddenly being responsible for the wellbeing of a baby whose life depended on me. In that moment, my deepest identity undertook its own death and re-birthed into something new.
Gather a group of mothers together and you will find the conversation inevitably turns to birth stories. There is a solidarity found in the life-changing experience of childbirth. The discovery of one’s new identity and the many sacrifices made as mothers unites women from all spectrums of life.
Perpetua was one such mother in very early Christian history. She was approximately twenty-two years of age and lived a noblewoman’s life in Carthage (in modern-day Tunisia in North Africa) with her husband and newborn son in early 200 AD. Although the birth story of her child is not recorded, she kept a journal that detailed her experience as a mother under arrest because of her faith, which eventually led to her death. These diary entries, now called The Passion of Saints Perpetua and Felicity,1 were read annually in Carthage’s churches for centuries, and her strength of faith through martyrdom is celebrated as inspirational. The church Father Augustine (354–430 AD) wrote about her in his sermons hundreds of years later. Perpetua’s powerful example of faith in God is a story that needs to be shared so we today continue to be inspired.
Perpetua’s journal records how she, along with her slave Felicity and four others from her household, became catechumens, preparing for baptism into the Christian faith. At that time, Roman rule considered Christianity a threat to the well-being of the Roman Empire, and the baptism candidates found themselves under investigation. They refused to denounce their faith in Jesus and would not make an offering to Caesar. For this they were thrown into prison and sentenced to death by wild animals in the public arena.
Perpetua shares her experience as a woman of faith struggling not only with being in prison, but also with being a mother removed from her newborn. She describes the pain in her breasts from the engorgement of milk and her request that her son be brought to her so she could breastfeed. Her request was granted—a momentary reprieve.
Adding to this heartache, she writes next of her father’s repeated pleas for her to think of her family and renounce her Christianity so she could be released. It saddened him greatly when she would not agree. “My daughter, have pity on my grey hair!” he cried.2 Perpetua was steadfast in her commitment to Christ and was prepared to sacrifice her life to follow Jesus. She tried to comfort her father saying, “Know that we are no longer in our own power, but in God’s,”3 but it did not convince him. Heartbreakingly, she gave her son into the care of her family, trusting that God would take care of him through them.
Perpetua served as a source of encouragement to her fellow prisoners. She records four visions while in prison, which she shared with her companions, reminding them that God was with them and would receive them into his presence after they died.
Perpetua also writes of Felicity, describing her as an example of faith through martyrdom. Heavily pregnant at the time, Felicity was committed to suffering for her faith alongside the others. She asked the group to pray that she would go into labour early so they would all be sentenced together. This indeed happened, and she gave birth to her daughter at eight months pregnant. Perpetua describes the guard watching over them, commenting how Felicity suffered greatly during childbirth and that being thrown to the wild animals would be too much for her. Felicity replied, “Now alone I suffer what I am suffering, but then there will be another inside me, who will suffer for me, because I am going to suffer for him,”4 speaking of her understanding that Christ’s Spirit would strengthen her. Heart-wrenchingly, the baby was given up for adoption, and Felicity was martyred alongside Perpetua.
In the early church, martyrdom was seen as an honourable expression of one’s commitment to Christian faith. “Martyr” in its original context meant “witness,” and it developed into an ideal of voluntary suffering and ultimately death. For the church fathers, martyrdom became a completion of Christian witness. The belief grew that the most admirable way to die was through suffering and death, just like Jesus. To deny oneself, take up the cross and follow Jesus became motivation towards such suffering. In this early Christian era, the example of such suffering and courage in the face of death contributed to an emerging respect for Christianity from the wider population. Many people who witnessed such courage became believers in God because of the martyrs’ devotion to Jesus and inexplicable joy in suffering.
Perpetua and Felicity are thus honoured in the memory of the early church, not just as women who voluntarily suffered for their faith, but as mothers who did so. Their devotion to Christ is perhaps amplified in their maternal longings and is something which mothers (and all parents) can relate to. Both women were devoted to their children, but not at the expense of their faith in Jesus. Their love for God, demonstrated by their willingness to give up everything they held dear, is testament to how their identity in God changed their priorities in life and their attitude towards suffering.
In the post-Christian West, we rarely experience such dramatic suffering, but we can relate to feelings of deep struggle, grief and loss, and the tension of divided loyalties. How does a woman, a mother, prioritise herself, her commitments, and her purpose in light of Christ’s call to deny herself and take up her cross to follow him? In childbirth, there is a death and rebirth of a mother’s identity. This can be extremely challenging work as she learns to set aside the longings of her former self and move into her new life as a mother. Her priorities must shift as she follows the call to put the needs of her child above her own. This may require sacrifices related to her career, bodily independence, financial freedom, and emotional energy, at least for a time.
These sacrifices that a mother or a parent make for their child, whilst not to the same degree as Perpetua and Felicity, are nevertheless a type of “living sacrifice” (Romans 12:1). I remember holding my son to my chest on the first day of his life, and concurrently my own new life unfolded before me. The continued process of giving up what I think is important for God’s calling on my life is something I continue to be challenged by and grow in, as God helps me to see what needs to be sacrificed and what truly bears witness to his love for those around me. I am encouraged by Perpetua’s words as she faced death in the arena: “Stand fast in the faith, and love one another, all of you, and be not offended at my sufferings.”5
Notes
- Thomas, J. Heffernan, The Passion of Saints Perpetua and Felicity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).
- Heffernan, The Passion of Saints Perpetua and Felicity, V.2.
- Heffernan, The Passion of Saints Perpetua and Felicity, V.6.
- Heffernan, The Passion of Saints Perpetua and Felicity, XV.6.
- Heffernan, The Passion of Saints Perpetua and Felicity, XX.10.
