Menstruation

I became a woman and a child in the same year. I experienced menarche at the age of thirteen; two months later I offered my life to the Father in response to his great love in Jesus, with which he had been wooing me all my life. I doubt that in my naiveté I had any grasp at all of what it would come to mean—either to live in the world as a woman or to live as a child of God, the joys or the sorrows. This article reflects on the relationship between the two journeys: being a woman and being a child of God.

My menstrual cycle has always been a source of frustration, anxiety and pain. Not only is my cycle highly irregular, but I suffer from a more extreme type of dysmenorrhea. There are limited medical solutions for these. I have accepted some treatments and chosen to reject others. Most women experience only mild symptoms, but I am one of the unfortunate few, a statistic in medical journals. Though I often dialogue with God on these matters, my end of the conversation usually consists of fragmented thoughts: Oh God, please don’t let me get my period today—I’ve got so much to do! Oh, why didn’t you make me like my friends who barely notice their cycle? Why does this have to interfere with my life? Oh, make this pain go away . . . please! But with recent inspiration I have been engaging in a new stream of reflection. It is nothing so grand as a theology of menstruation; it is rather a more personal inquiry into the relationship between my spiritual formation and my rather unique monthly rhythms.

The Spirituality of Every Month Life

If God is forming me spiritually in my everyday life, is he doing the same in my “every month” life? For me this is the quintessential test of the idea that God is present in all aspects of life. If he is involved in the very dimension of routine that causes me such frustration and anxiety, then surely he is present in every other aspect of my life. If he can work through my menstrual cycle to form me into all he knows me to be, then he can work through every other “nonspiritual” part of my life.

The physiological event and the rhythms of menstruation are not only biological processes. Psychological research has attested to the fact that these are an integral part of women’s emotional lives (see Femininity). And if this is so, then any discussion of spirituality for women cannot afford to ignore them. The type of gnostic dualism that divorces the spiritual from the body may have done far more harm to Christian women throughout history than to Christian men.

In her reflection on family spirituality, Wendy Wright discusses the importance of setting this dualism aright:

In contradistinction to our Christian heritage that has been shaped by men’s perceptions and has drunk deep of philosophical springs that often make a sharp distinction between body and spirit, the experience of woman in family cannot separate the two. Woman’s attention is given much of the time, at least subliminally, to the experience of being held and entered, to the cyclical wetness and dryness of fertility and infertility, to the flow and cessation of menstruation, to the profound body-changes of pregnancy, to the fluids of lactation, to the carrying, washing, feeding, and caressing of bodies, to the physical sensations of menopause. To pray a woman’s prayer is to celebrate . . . and grieve out of the miracle of the female body. It is to pray the whole person, body and spirit entwined. It is to pray with the rhythms of all created life. (pp. 113-14)

For a woman to set out to learn to pray with the rhythms of her created life is to embark on a lifelong journey. And this is what I hope to do.

The menstrual cycle itself is a fruitful concept for spiritual reflection. One can consider its link with the miracle of life and reproduction or images of the womb in Scripture (Psalm 139). It involves the flow of blood, which is a rich symbol in the Christian faith, related to our very salvation. The changes from one stage of the month to another are reminders of all the cycles of life—the change of the hours, the seasons, the monumental shifts in our life cycles, even the ups and downs of our spiritual pilgrimage. The changes are also a comforting monument to the constancy of God, whose character, unlike ours, is the same yesterday, today and forever.

Beyond these, there are two streams of thought that have been especially meaningful to me. The first is that the distress and pain my body suffers cause me to consistently affirm that I am integrally connected with the “groaning as in the pains of childbirth” (Romans 8:22) in which the whole creation engages as it is subjected to frustration. I join with the entire world in groaning as I wait eagerly for the redemption of my body. For who hopes for what she already has (Romans 8:24)?

The second is menstruation’s reminder of how sin has affected women. Menstrual disorders are linked to childbearing pain, the first result of sin mentioned in Genesis 3:16. Both the groaning and the curse lead me to consider the other result—patriarchy. Though as a woman I live in an unjust world which oppresses women, I am sustained by a God who, through incarnation as the Word, displayed once and for all that he is not a patriarchal tyrant. On the contrary, Jesus came to set me free from the law of sin and death, and he inaugurated the kingdom within which the effects of the curse begin to dissipate. I feel especially comforted by his act of healing a bleeding woman, which is found in all three of the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew 9:20-22; Mark 5:25-34; Luke 8:43-48). Although through the centuries misreadings of Old Testament regulations for women such as Leviticus 15:19-31 have “canonized the view that something natural to women . . . was especially unsuitable for intimacy with God” (Carmody, p. 20), Jesus clearly demonstrated a profound distinction under the new covenant by drawing public attention to his willingness to become “unclean” by touching and healing this woman. The good news for women is one of liberation. So my menstruation is to me a reminder of both the kingdom to come and the kingdom come.

Reflection has also led me to see that the structure of my experience month after tedious month shapes my spiritual life. It does this by providing built-in gifts that I would never be drawn to seek voluntarily but are gifts nevertheless.

Rhythms of Grace

First, and most obvious, my cycle ensures that I am given weeks of peak performance. I tackle my tasks with strong determination, efficiency and abundant energy. I sleep peacefully, love courageously and laugh at life. It is not difficult to see the gift of God here, although it must be acknowledged that these weeks would not seem so precious were it not for the others. After ovulation I experience a time in which my emotions are tender and I am prone to gentle tears. I have tended to label this as just an emotional shift caused by fluctuating hormones, but I am beginning to see that it is more. Through the shift God often miraculously grants me a deeper awareness of his loving heart, as well as a softening of my heart toward family and friends.

The part of my cycle that causes me the most consternation is the week or more in which I invariably experience many symptoms of what is commonly called premenstrual syndrome. Symptoms may include water retention (causing tenderness, bloatedness, weight gain, backaches), altered blood sugar levels (causing hostility, headaches, food cravings), and sodium and potassium imbalance (causing fatigue, tension, depression; Wilson, pp. 21-30). I use the term premenstrual syndrome (PMS) for simplicity’s sake and with caution, fully realizing that there exists a current and unwarranted fascination with PMS.

Most studies of premenstrual syndrome have been based on poor research methods, but due to a propensity—by both men and women—to attribute women’s behavior to their biology, PMS has grown in popularity, sprouting its own myths. The term has been mindlessly applied to all women even though evidence suggests that only a small percentage of women suffer from the syndrome. Most women merely experience normal premenstrual changes.

During this time I feel extremely jittery, experiencing elevated levels of unrest, irritability, anxiety and tension. This change invariably drives me back to God, for it is then that I become aware of my deep need for the power of the Holy Spirit to live a holy life. At other times I rely heavily on my habits of courtesy and deference in my relationships and forget to love with his strength. But during PMS days the illusion of niceness is shattered. I come face to face with the awful humiliation of knowing that without his love I am nothing. Without a continual prayer for his love to overcome my irritability, I am completely capable of treating those closest to me with angry injustice. Without God’s intervention the potential for discord and heated conflict lurks in my very cells.

This experience is a matter for both a theological and an experiential understanding of sanctification. How do I walk the balance between being compassionate with myself during a vexing temptation and simultaneously taking responsibility for my own actions, refusing to slough off any sin committed by blaming it on “that time of the month”? This is the time when I am especially conscious of the war of sin within me.

I have known victories, celebrated with God, but I have also been forced to confess that in anger and anxiety I have sinned. This repentance has a uniquely bitter taste to my pride, for it is unlike other times when my sins may be to me less glaring and I can still shy from the label “sinner saved by grace.” Here, I have no choice but to acknowledge my actions as wrong. It would be impossible to do otherwise. God does not bring this temptation to test me (James 1:13-14); he has always proved faithful and just, readily forgiving and purifying me (1 John 1:9). Even more humbling, though, is asking forgiveness of those close to me. Because any irritation or hostility is always directed toward people, I need to exercise the discipline of asking to be forgiven for my sharpness and unfairness. Here is where I reluctantly learn that “our successes and our glories are not the stuff of community, but our sins and failures are” (Palmer, p. 31).

The most disheartening part of my monthly life is the actual onset of menstruation. This is due to the extreme nature of my dysmenorrhea—debilitating cramping that causes pain to shoot outward from my uterus to my entire body. I feel the pain from the tips of my fingers to the tips of my toes. If I fail to take medication at the first awareness of cramping, I will invariably spend an hour or two huddled on the floor in agony. After this, medication and the administration of heat dull the pain to a tiring ache that puts me out of commission for a day and leaves me in need of extra rest for another.

There are many reasons why this is a discouraging time. Because my cycle is highly irregular, I cannot accurately predict the exact day I should expect my period. My body can spend days sending me false alarms in the form of cramping; this has often led me to refuse to act, quite certain my period will interfere. Often it does not. So it is with resolve that I have recently begun to change my perspective and be as engaged in life as I can, until the moment the real pain strikes. This shift to active waiting, to participating fully in plans and forming commitments, knowing they may be abruptly canceled, is a metaphor of the life of the church as we await the return of Jesus. While we live and act in anticipation, we are not to “stand here looking into the sky” (Acts 1:11). The unpredictability of such a disrupting event gives me twelve times each year to decide to accept God’s timing or resent it and chafe at it.

Accepting the timing is no easy task, for menstruation often comes in what I judge to be extremely poor timing—in the midst of a crucial assignment or just before a long-anticipated celebration. I do not control my cycle, but I can choose my response. This means twelve opportunities a year to practice submission and acceptance. Hannah Hurnard speaks of this very process in the introduction to her allegory Hinds’ Feet on High Places:

The High Places of . . . union with Christ cannot be reached by any mental reckoning of self to be dead to sin, or by seeking to devise some way or discipline by which the will can be crucified. The only way is by learning to accept, day by day, the actual conditions . . . permitted by God, by a continually repeated laying down of our own will and acceptance of his as it is presented to us in the form of . . . the things which happen to us. Every acceptance of his will becomes an altar of sacrifice, and every such surrender and abandonment of ourselves to his will is a means of furthering us on the way to the High Places which he desires to bring every child of his while they are still living on earth. (pp. 11-12)

The recurring encounter with physical pain is also part of my discipleship. Although the pain is to a certain extent controllable, is always alleviated each month and is from a known cause, I monthly share in the fellowship of suffering with those who suffer chronic pain. I wonder what level of patience I would be able to maintain with others’ physical ills in the absence of this always-ready-to-return experience. Through sharpness of pain God sharpens my compassion, as Tilden Edwards also observes: “Though I hate aching, I recognize that tinge of grace in it that brings me closer to the suffering side of everyone, and opens up a little more compassion” (Edwards, p. 208). My own experience with pain means that I join the many, identifying with and learning from their insights. As Christians we are called neither to masochistically enjoy pain nor to focus much attention on the cause of suffering. Rather we are to take concern for our own reactions to it. The result God often appears to be concerned with is our spiritual formation (Romans 5:3-5; Hebrews 12:10-11; James 1:2-4; 1 Peter 1:6-7). If this is so, then my own responses to bodily aching each month need redemption so that I may become more like Christ.

So the question becomes, How can I give God my trust, believing that he will bring something of value from the inevitable down days in my life’s rhythm? And if this commitment is the decision to rejoice, then I am led to an even more difficult question: How can I rejoice in the midst of what, on the surface, would seem to be an entirely unredeemable part of my everyday life? The answer may lie primarily in an openness to the truth that God is present and wants to bless me with that presence—not only in the structure of my cycle but also in the days of suffering themselves. It is through a new awareness of that presence that I will be able to rejoice at all times of the month (Phil. 4:4-5).

God is present in my menstrual period, not through any conjuring of my own, but through his grace, a concept I experience yet hardly comprehend. Tim Hansel, who himself experiences chronic physical pain, calls grace “the central invitation to life . . . a glimpse, not just of what life can be, but of what life really is” (pp. 107-8). He maintains that our limitations can “become the very invitation to discover fully the dimensions of grace, the improbable path to God’s otherwise hidden blessing” (Hansel, pp. 108-9). Through the limitations imposed by my menstrual period, God issues an invitation to experience his gracious presence in ways that are otherwise foreign to my daily life.

Menstrual Sabbath

The most prevalent obstacle to entering this “invitation to life” is my propensity for what Susan Muto and Adrian van Kaam call functionalism. Functionalism takes over our lives when we “feel pushed and pulled to perform efficiently and effectively, no matter what suffers . . . [thinking that] to do is vastly more important than to be” (Muto and van Kaam, p. 146). Christians are not exempt from functionalism, for we come to value service as the meaning and measure of Christian commitment. If we relax, the guilt we exhale shakes the unvoiced conviction that the only meaning of life is to be useful to God. The fruits of functionalism are incompatible with grace. How better to come face to face with grace than through a humdrum time when “my relationship with the world is one of giving in and giving up, surrendering, yielding, and letting go,” when I must “renounce temporarily all agent and manipulative purposes” (Cummings, p. 71)? How better to let grace heal my overrefined conscience, which convinces me that to see a need is to incur an obligation to meet that need? How better to let grace set me free from the “cramping legalism of time” (McConnell, p. 69)? How better to renounce self-justification and grasp the significance of the gospel I so often betray with my functionalistic lifestyle—that it is through Christ’s work alone that I find worth, acceptance and justification?

Precisely because it is a useless and unproductive time, my monthly menstruation is one of the means that God, in his grace, has given me for dealing with the principalities and powers (Ephes. 6:12) that exploit my weakness in this area. Parker Palmer believes there is a vast conspiracy against such times. So it is vital to pay attention to those unintentional moments that come “whether or not we seek them, are ready for them, or know what to do when they arrive” (Palmer, p. 26). I have no control over the limitation of painful, exhausting menstruation. But it is possible for me to more consciously pay attention to God’s grace in the quiet, contemplative moments that come unbidden during each monthly downtime. A helpful way to do this is to view this time as a type of sabbath.

There are a striking number of sabbath elements present in my time of menstruation. Marva Dawn describes four elements of sabbath: ceasing, resting, embracing, feasting. With the exception of the last, all are possible within these two days each month. Ceasing is the most naturally embedded in my experience precisely because my body is too exhausted to allow any other response. In my debilitated state I cease not only from work but also from anxiety, from my “incessant need to produce and accomplish” (Dawn, p. 29) and from my self-sufficient striving to be god of my life. This stems not from a noble heart but from a weary heart that has no choice but to let go. I become acutely aware of my poverty.

There is more intentionality involved in resting. I can choose to go beyond physical repose to spiritual rest. I recall times when I have received spiritual rest in the midst of the aching, the moments when God has had my exclusive attention and we have had meandering conversations. But I am now interested in how I might set aside this recovery time as an intentional sabbath, embracing sabbath values. I can choose to deliberately fulfill the spirit of the command to keep the sabbath by cultivating an attitude of “rejoicing in God’s care, trusting dependence . . . renewed dedication to him . . . remembrance of his saving deeds” (Cummings, p. 73). Is this possible in the midst of physical pain? After the first few hours of sharp pain are gone, it is.

Wasting Time with God

My menstrual period can make space in my life for what Richard Foster calls the sabbath prayer or the prayer of rest. I am in no shape for long bouts of intercessory or authoritative prayer. But I can choose to renounce both manipulative control over God and my world and “listless passivity,” in favor of leaning into cultivation of solitude, silence and recollection. After abstaining from normal patterns of activity and interaction in order to discover that my strength comes from God alone, I need to go further and renounce all the “agitated creaturely activity” of grasping control, which hinders God’s work in me (Foster, p. 101). This is an active choice, for without it my menstrual period can easily degenerate into an impatient time of frittering away the aching hours with television or novels or demanding my husband’s company in my misery. But if I cannot engage in this type of prayer during a day characterized by the grace of limitations, how do I expect to do it on any other day?

Foster encourages me to radically alter my expectation of menstruation, to look forward to the recovery hours as a lovers’ tryst with God: “Our Eternal Lover lures us back regularly into his presence with anticipation and delight. . . . We are glad to waste time with God, for we are pleased with the company” (Foster, p. 77). And as I know from my walk with him, “the hour of discomfort and anxiety is totally forgotten. What we remember forever is the hour of love” (Saunders, as quoted in L’Engle, p. 33). To engage in sabbath prayer is to encounter God not only in that moment but in all of everyday life. It is also to bow to the truth that God’s purposes for my life (unlike my own) do not need to be revised to adjust to limitations embedded in any part of my menstrual cycle. Rather, the rhythms of my life move according to his original plan. My call is to be alert to the realization that these rhythms find true life within the larger rhythms of God’s amazing grace.

» See also: Body

» See also: Femininity

» See also: Sabbath

» See also: Sexuality

References and Resources

D. L. Carmody, Biblical Women (New York: Crossroad, 1988); C. Cummings, The Mystery of the Ordinary (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1982); M. J. Dawn, Keeping the Sabbath Wholly (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989); T. Edwards, Living Simply Through the Day (New York: Paulist, 1977); M. J. Evans, Woman in the Bible (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1983); R. Foster, Prayer (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1992); T. Hansel, You Gotta Keep Dancin’ (Elgin, Ill.: David C. Cook, 1985); H. Hurnard, Hinds’ Feet on High Places (Wheaton, Ill.: Tyndale, 1977); M. L’Engle, And It Was Good (Wheaton, Ill.: Harold Shaw, 1983); W. T. McConnell, The Gift of Time (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1983); S. Muto and A. van Kaam, Commitment: Key to Christian Maturity (New York: Paulist, Press, 1989); P. J. Palmer, The Active Life (New York: HarperCollins, 1990); R. Wilson, Controlling Pre-Menstrual Syndrome (Markham, Ont.: Fitzhenry & Whiteside, 1988); W. M. Wright, Sacred Dwelling (New York: Crossroad, 1990).

—Valerie Pyke Parks