the churching of women: women's experiences
So far in this series on the churching of women, we’ve looked at the history of the practice and its various theological interpretations, but we haven’t heard much of women’s own experiences with the practice. That’s where we’ll direct our attention today.
Since most of our earliest knowledge of churching currently appears to come from ecclesiastical and legal records, individual women’s stories of churching before the modern era are few and far between. Still, we can glean some insight into how the practice was viewed. Paula Rieder documents that in medieval France (and elsewhere), the common practice was to have a big feast after the church ceremony, emphasizing the communal, celebratory aspect of churching. Recovery from childbirth and the passage into motherhood were occasion for a party!
Regarding the pastoral-care aspect of the rite, Rieder concludes, “Women knew that they had a unique set of physical and spiritual needs directly related to the act of giving birth. Their efforts to be churched suggest that they recognized their right to have these needs addressed.” And in a rare early-ish first-person account of a woman’s spiritual experience of churching, she notes that “Margery [Kempe] was moved to ecstasy and tears when she imagined that the Virgin Mary joined the women being purified and their friends in procession.”1 It seems plain that from the beginning, many women embraced both the celebratory rite-of-passage aspect of churching as well as the sober ritual blessing, thanksgiving, and even “purification” aspect.
This aligns well with what David Cressy writes about the English Reformation era. He draws on the work of Susan Wright, who documents that “for many women churching represented little more than an opportunity to meet and celebrate with their peers.” Cressy goes on, “There is … strong evidence from visitation processes that many women wanted the ceremony in some form or other.” He also notes that “[the] solemnities of the service could be offset by chatter and giggles, making it a moot point whether childbirth warranted purification or thanksgiving.” But a notable number of women of that time and place seem to have valued the spiritual aspect of the ritual as well. One woman is even recorded as having attempted to church herself: “she coming to the church to thanksgiving, and the minister having warning overnight and not coming to church accordingly, she did take the Book of Common Prayer and read the thanksgiving herself openly in the church.”2
Remarkably, according to Margaret Houlbrooke, by the 20th century, some English clergy were so busy that they actually encouraged women to read the service over themselves! Houlbrooke also documents that by the 20th century in England, new mothers who were churched sometimes did so as a result of (unwanted) pressure from female relatives and midwives. It seems that by this time, the communal aspect of churching had perhaps taken on a new and less celebratory character.
However, from her interviews with women who were churched, Houlbrooke also records some noteworthy positive experiences. A woman churched three times from 1960 to 1970 “felt that giving birth to her children had taken her through the pains of Hell: she was grappling on her own to bring these children into the world; maybe she doubted God. Then it was over, and she found that God had been with her. In the churching ceremony she got over the feeling of isolation.” Another woman, following a very medically difficult pregnancy where it was uncertain whether either she or the child would survive, arrived eager for the rite. According to a letter, she was “accompanied by her whole family, all rejoicing in the situation, and glad that the church had provided a special service for her”.3
Carrie Frederick Frost documents the present-day Orthodox observance of churching: “In some parishes, it has simply fallen out of practice. In many others–this seems to be the near-universal situation in American Orthodoxy–the priest alters the Churching rite on the fly, excluding the harsh and theologically poor connection between childbirth and impurity. In some parishes, the mother and baby show up exactly on the fortieth day after childbirth, in others they come just before the mother resumes her worldly activities, like going back to work, which may be well before the forty-day mark.”4 (This quote is a great teaser for my next planned post in this series, on ways that mothers and clergy are revising and practicing churching today.)
To sum up, it seems that women’s experiences of churching have been as diverse as their times and places and birth experiences. Certainly many women have experienced churching as oppressive and regressive, like the women highlighted in this article I shared earlier. However, for today’s post, I particularly hoped to explore the way that women throughout the history of churching have understood and embraced both its individual-blessing and communal-celebration aspects. It’s in their experiences, I think, that we can find something to reclaim from this ritual.
Paula Rieder, On the Purification of Women: Churching in Medieval France, 1100-1500
Quotes from David Cressy, “Purification, Thanksgiving and the Churching of Women in Post-Reformation England”
Margaret Houlbrooke, Rite Out of Time: A Study of the Ancient Rite of Churching and Its Survival in the Twentieth Century
Carrie Frederick Frost, “The Churching of Mothers in the Orthodox Church”