Spiritual Midwives from Christian History: Lilias Trotter and Simone Weil

The Spiritual Midwife Metaphor

After experiencing the typical hospital birth that included multiple nurses too busy to be present and a hasty doctor, a midwife assisted birth was a completely different experience for me. Midwife Anita Damsma-Young guided me through the growing of a human being—from an egg and a sperm to a 10-pound 4-oz baby boy who splashed into our Canadian Tire blow-up swimming pool in the comfort of our living room one early April morning. I remember her respect for the female body, her consistent reassurance, and her wise suggestion of various positions that successfully turned him from his late onset breech position. Instead of an anxious pregnancy, birth, and post-partum experience, a midwife companion put me in a state of empowerment, wonder, and deep gratitude for the natural processes of life.

In her book, Holy Listening, Margaret Guenther proposes midwifery as a powerful and ideal image for spiritual direction. As a spiritual director meets with a directee for personal spiritual conversation, there is a sense of journey and discovery towards something new. As Christ followers with the Spirit dwelling within, spiritual birth of new life and new depths of love and life are natural processes, but it is marked with vulnerability. Pregnancy is exciting as new life is anticipated, but it is also unnerving as it places people in unfamiliar places. Just as a physical midwife provides expert guidance, a spiritual midwife companions and attends to those on a spiritual journey. Throughout the ages, there are sisters, aunts, and grandmothers in our Christian history family tree who can guide and assist us in our spiritual journeys as we wait and give birth to new life. These are our spiritual midwives.

Life Stories of Lilias Trotter and Simone Weil

Born in 1853 to a wealthy London family, Lilias Trotter was seemingly destined to become the famous water colour artist that art critic John Ruskin believed she could become. Though her interest in art and the natural world was keen, Trotter became more and more invested in her work with London sex workers, the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA), Welbeck Street Institute, and even opening the first restaurant for women. However, the prompt for North Africa persistently appeared and ten years later, she was living in Algeria, learning Arabic, and painting sand lilies. Trotter’s health faltered, even being the reason she was denied working with North African Mission. Trotter’s Christ-centric approach to understanding life meant her inner life and life of service were one: “Everything in us, everything to us, everything through us. To live is Christ—Amen.”[1]

            While Trotter was serving as an older woman in North Africa, a young Jewish French girl named Simone Weil, born in 1909, began to rock her carefully cultivated parents’ lives and, later, the world around her. To her parents’ dismay, Weil pursued physical labour, such as potato digging, fishing, or more famously, assembly work at various factories including the Renault factory. Immersing herself in the world of unskilled female workers fueled her interest in unions and formed her thinking regarding such issues as suffering, self-care, and beauty. Weil’s ascetism, in solidarity with the soldiers and those who suffered, led to her refusal to be properly nourished, which ultimately culminated in her early death in 1943. Weil’s struggle with anorexia and her spirituality were deeply connected; she embraced suffering and yet was so drawn towards beauty. Her conversion was unsought and unexpected but became the guiding light for her.

Companionship and Guidance for Times of Uncertainty

As spiritual midwives, Trotter and Weil can guide us towards a patient and purposeful sort of waiting during a time of uncertainty, while reassuredly directing our attention to Divine Love and Life, and demonstrate for us a practical and delightful orientation to the world around us.

Patient and Purposeful Waiting

There is often a long period of waiting involved with spiritual new life. The birthgiver may question if they are even pregnant and wonder if they have misread the signs of anticipated new life. A spiritual midwife, though, is adept at paying attention. Since spiritual growth tends to be slow and often goes unnoticed, a spiritual midwife is to be fully present, alert to the Spirit, and to notice what is and is not being said. Waiting puts us in a vulnerable and uncomfortable position. It can seem like nothing is happening and yet a spiritual director trusts that something is always happening. In Guenther’s words, “when in doubt, I always assume that God is at work, that is, the person is pregnant.”[2] A spiritual director learns the art of patiently waiting, knowing that spiritual life takes time to implant, grow, and mature.

            Spiritual pregnancy often takes longer than nine months. Waiting and suffering are close companions and together are recurring themes for those on a spiritual journey. Both Trotter and Weil see waiting, suffering, and even death, not as difficulties to avoid, but as the doorways to deeper and more abundant life. Trotter uses the metaphor of a seed in her book The Parables of the Cross, exploring the idea that for a flower to avoid death would be to miss out on its intended purpose of reproduction. The dandelion waits all spring until it can surrender its golden petals and reach its “crowning stage of dying.”[3] Trotter observes in nature the cycle of death, resurrection, and life and so is confident that waiting that often involves suffering and death is not the final destination. Rather, there is a purpose in waiting.

Waiting and suffering for Weil makes space for God and eliminates the superfluous. Weil views the suffering of Christ as:

a transmutation rather than a destruction. The contact with perfect purity dissociates the suffering and sin which had been mixed together so indissolubly. The part of evil in the soul is burned by the fire of this contact and becomes only suffering, and the suffering is impregnated with love.[4]

Therefore, suffering is not to be avoided but purposefully embraced as making space for God as we look beyond ourselves. Waiting means making room for what is real and eternal as it is a time of purification and clarification. Both Trotter and Weil view waiting as good and necessary and to rush or to avoid suffering would unfortunately abort the natural process of spiritual life.

Attentiveness to Divine Life and Love

Labour and delivery of new spiritual life almost always involves a certain level of discomfort and pain, which can be distracting. Something is finally happening, but it is unfamiliar territory. Things seem out of our control and the fear of abandonment is real. It is easy to lose sight of the new life that is entering the world. However, a spiritual director/midwife not only offers the gift of attentive presence but she can also see things from a different perspective. Her experience and wisdom allow her to speak with authority and provide practical spiritual guidance. She has seen many births before so she knows the general movement and pattern of growth. She is not easily frightened and rises above the anxiety because experience and training have taught her patience and an intuitive trust over the years. Listening attentively to the birthgiver with one ear and to the Spirit with the other, a spiritual midwife keeps her eyes focused on new life.

During pregnant waiting times, Trotter and Weil encourage an attentiveness to Divine Life and Love. Patiently navigating a season of waiting and suffering includes a sense of curiosity with an implicit positive suspicion that God is up to something good. Trotter and Weil advocate for a patient and purposeful sort of waiting and suffering with our attention focused on God, who is Love and Life. Trotter reminds us that “time and space count nothing” with God.[5] God is portrayed as not being concerned with physical time and space as we are. Therefore, we are to learn how to see through the physical to the eternal. Her different, deeper way of seeing encourages a heartsight way of seeing, rather than just eyesight, which requires learning how to see with singleness of heart for the real and Divine.[6]

During times of waiting and uncertainty, what we pay attention to is most important. Weil likens religion to looking: “Looking, the mere turning of the head towards God, is equated by Simone Weil with desire and that passive effort of waiting for God.”[7] Weil would argue that “one of the principal truths of Christianity, a truth that goes almost unrecognised today, is that looking is what saves.”[8] In fact, looking or focussing one’s attention on God is her definition of prayer. Therefore, directing our attention towards the Divine is looking in the right direction, more with ready anticipation and desire than with muscular effort.

A Practical and Delightful Orientation to the World Around Us

Our duet of spiritual midwives gently guides us towards a patient and purposeful sort of waiting, while directing our attention to Divine Love and Life and, finally, demonstrating a practical and delightful orientation to the world around us. Physical pregnancy and birth are embodied events, firmly grounded in reality. These are flesh and blood events. Likewise, spiritual direction has a direct and meaningful connection to our interaction with the physical world around us. Guenther reminds us that the spirituality of a long and uneventful marriage, housework, and childcare are often dismissed but are in fact the “raw material of spiritual direction.”[9] Practical theologians like Claire Wolfteich, Elaine Graham, and Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore insist that mothering, women’s work, and domestic labour are fertile ground for spirituality.[10] We have been slow to recognize the spirituality of the lives of women, particularly in the domestic sphere, but women’s connection to and involvement with the pragmatic matters of life actually lend themselves to transcendent encounters with God.

Despite their mystical bent and deep focus on the inner life, Trotter and Weil prompt us towards a deep connection to those around us and the realities of the worlds in which we live. Trotter notes that it is the everyday life in which God works and in which we must be firmly planted as well. She says, “it is no mystical, imaginary world that draws out the latent forms of self, but the commonplace, matter-of-fact world about us.”[11] Weil’s factory work experience especially put her in touch with the misery of the working class, while her front-line experience placed her firmly in the realities of the Spanish Civil War and then World War II. Her encouragement is to “love the country of here below,” reminding us that this world is real and it is the country that God has given us to love.[12] The spiritual birth of new life is not portrayed as a mystical, other-worldly experience that is detached from everyday life. Instead, it is in our very human experience and interaction with others where we attend to the birth of new depths of God’s love and life.

Conclusion: To Become History Students

As a spiritual director, Guenther “writes a great deal about listening, waiting, and presence—all attributes that are associated with the feminine.”[13] During pregnant times of expectation of new life, women from our spiritual family tree can accompany and guide. That spiritual lineage continues from ancient times throughout Christian history and provides us with a multitude of potential spiritual midwives. Therefore, we need to embrace the study of Christian history. As we anticipate the birth of new life and love in our own lives, there are a multitude of spiritual midwives throughout the pages of history ready to companion and assist.

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References

[1] Lilias Trotter, Parables of the Christ Life, (Lilias Trotter Legacy, 2020), 77.

[2] Margaret Guenther, Holy Listening, (Cowley, 1992), viii.

[3] Lilias Trotter, Parables of the Cross, (Lilias Trotter Legacy, 2021), 44.

[4] Simone Weil, Waiting for God, (HarperPerennial, 2009), 124.

[5] Lilias Trotter, A Way of Seeing, (Lilias Trotter Legacy, 2020), 45.

[6] “Heart sight as deep as eye sight” is a term that Ruskin used in reference to his mentor J. M. W. Turner, the great Romantic British painter. This sort of seeing means seeing things as they really are. (Miriam Huffman Rockness, A Passion for the Impossible, (Discovery House, 2003), 73).

[7] Simone Weil, Waiting for God, (HarperPerennial, 2009), xxxii.

[8] Simone Weil, Waiting for God, (HarperPerennial, 2009), xxxii.

[9] Margaret Guenther, Holy Listening, (Cowley, 1992), 125.

[10] For further reading, Navigating New Terrain: Work and Women’s Spiritual Lives by Claire E. Wolfteich, Mothering, Public Leadership, and Women’s Life Writing: Explorations in Spirituality Studies and Practical Theology by Claire E. Wolfteich, “Feminist Theory” in The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Practical Theology by Elaine Graham, and In the Midst of Chaos: Caring for Children as Spiritual Practice by Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore are excellent resources.

[11] Lilias Trotter, Parables of the Christ-Life, (Lilias Trotter Legacy, 2020), 34.

[12] Simone Weil, Waiting for God, (HarperPerennial, 2009), 114.

[13] Margaret Guenther, Holy Listening, (Cowley, 1992), xi.

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© Elizabeth Millar, 2025.

This work is licensed under Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).

Cover Image: “Tree of Life: My Son’s Placenta Print” provided by the author.