There are parts of this search that I enjoy - I like to visit these different communities of worship. I like to hear different pastors speak to their congregations. I like the exposure to different Lutheran communities of worship. I was not raised Lutheran, and my comittment to attend a Lutheran church is really part of my comittment to my husband, who has a long family history of Lutheran faith (both father and paternal grandfather were Pastors).
Today we heard a homily about giving. It was a good homily. It hit me just exactly where I am and it has stuck with me all day. There was one profound sentence in response to a reading from Mark: "what about the woman who gave everything she had?" All I could think of - the ONE AND ONLY woman who came to my mind - is Blueberry's first mom. She, SHE gave ME everything she had. She gave me her son. HER SON.
And then I read this today. Third Mom says,
"No action is moral if it ignores the bad fruits (think Matthew 7 16) that result from it. This happens in adoption; this good thing that so many promote has led to some appallingly rotten fruit from people who know how to game the system for personal, institutional or governmental profit. Even when an individual adoption is done ethically, if the adopter never gives a backward glance to the families left behind or forward glance to the rights of the adopted, the fruit is just as rotten.
Promoting material and social justice for surrendering parents and equal access to identity for adopted people has to be the starting point for any discussion of adoption. Promoting adoption without equally addressing these, and not just paying them lip service, creates a lie by omission, an untruth. This seems so incredibly clear to me, I honestly don't understand why people don't see it."
She's right. She's so right on. I have to be careful about being arrogant. I have to be cautious about feeling somehow clearer or more enlightened than others on this same complicated journey in IA. I have to be wary of my own "knowing" and "certainty" about my own giving - even if I see it as inspired and right. Social justice is not clear as day in all cases. And yet, HIS first mom gave me everything. She gave me her SON. I won't participate in a lie by omission. I won't pay just lip service to her, the one who gave me everything.
I'll muddle through, as awkward and difficult as it feels sometimes. I'm totally on it - right now - on it.
How do you do it - you know, make sense of having been given everything?
2 comments:
I know how your heart feels. But I don't know how to give appreciation back. I don't know how to give back in the same quality or quantity that I have been given. Just giving thanks every day isn't enough... there has to be more.
I am really looking forward to what you find.
The conditions of my own life feel so hard right now to me that I feel like Zufan's mom and I are in the same boat, living parallel lives, just a few details changed, on different continents. I feel like we are one, a spiritual team, raising this child.
Of course I know it is more complicated than that and if that was ALL I believed I'd be deluded. The depth of the injustice in the world makes me nauseated. Yet for now, on some level, it is a struggle for survival for both her birth momma and for me.
(I so often feel SO, SO guilty that Zufan didn't get a more well-to-do adoptive family. What was I thinking, that I "deserved" the right to raise this smart little baby, anyway?!)
Anyway, that's only one little side of it all. Back to work now. :)
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