ABSTRACT
In Chapter 6, the lived spirituality of motherhood is presented in two sections. The first section outlines the result of a literature survey from 1988–2015 on mainly journal articles on the theme of motherhood and spirituality. It was not until the end of the 1980s and beginning of the 1990s when spirituality started to be explored in the literature. The beginning of the twenty-first century will mark the opening of much bigger and deeper research into spirituality and birth. Table 6.1 in this section shows this maternal literature survey.
In the second section, the articles from the survey are investigated in the light of the spiritual capacities emerging from the theory of SQ and also the three themes uncovered by the maternal pilot study. This exploration will reveal unique maternal spiritual capacities.
In the final section, the recurrent theme of ‘disruption and crisis’, from the pilot study and the maternal literature survey, are discussed through the concepts of ‘spiritual emergence’ and ‘spiritual emergency’.
