Best of Both Worlds Adoption Conference
Jury's Ballsbridge Hotel
Dublin, Ireland
February 25-27, 2003
Adoption/ Religion/ and the Missionary Position
Father Tom Brosnan
My name’s Tom Brosnan and here’s a brief sketch of some of the significant statistics of my life. I was conceived in 1952 on St. Paul’s Street in Baltimore, Maryland. I was born in 1953 in New York City and adopted some six months later by me parents and went to live with them in Brooklyn. In 1981, with special dispensation from the impediment of being a bastard, I was ordained a Roman Catholic priest for the Diocese of Brooklyn. In 1983 I searched and found my birthmother and had been in reunion with her until her death. I am still in reunion with the six other children to whom she had given birth after me. I have met my birthfather -- but he still denies paternity. My adoptive father died six years ago and my mother just last year – leaving me, once again, an orphan.
But, we are in Ireland, and should acknowledge one of the things the Irish do so well – tell stories. And so, did you know that the great Irish writers of the past got together in the great beyond and came up with a formula to create a really good story? There are three ingredients to every great story, they discovered: religion, sex, and mystery. Well, this formula filtered down to all the schools of Ireland and one day a teacher related it to her class. “Class,” she began, “I want each of you to write something incorporating the three ingredients of every great story – religion, sex, and mystery.”
“Ready,” she said. “Begin.”
Well, not even a minute goes by and Sean Brady in the last seat has put down his pencil and is gazing out the window. “What are you doin’, Sean Brady?” the teacher yells. “Why aren’t you writing your story?’
“I’m finished,” Sean says.
“Finished,” she says. “Finished writin’ a story of religion, sex, and mystery in just one minute? Stand up and read us what you wrote.”
Sean stands, clears his throat, and reads. “My God. She’s pregnant. Who did it?”
The title of this presentation was originally Religious Zeal and Adoption. But I thought you might get the wrong idea about my perspective so I’ve added a clarification: Adoption and the Missionary Position. If you’ve heard about the missionary position, you know it has a lot to do with religion and sex – though it comes up short on mystery (very little romance involved). But, then again, when we think about how religious institutions handled, and continue to deal with, adoption and post-adoption issues – we might conclude there’s actually a lot of mystery involved.
To say religion has played a major role in the history of adoption in Ireland the UK and America would be an understatement. Religion has played a major role. Unfortunately religion doesn’t always have the stereotypical good effect that we might wish it had on the things it gets involved with. Take the history of Latin America, for example: the cross and the sword were often confused. Or the recent scandals concerning sex and priests that have swept the United States and the UK, and had started even earlier here in Ireland – they are not unrelated to the way the church and religion approached the “problems” it figured were involved with illicit sex and illegitimate children. Indeed the secrecy that many now say was so downright evil in these recent sex scandals was the same secrecy employed -- and still employed by the church -- regarding the histories of adopted peoples placed under its care.
If you’re Irish and you’re Catholic you no doubt remember the story of Bishop Eamonn Casey, Bishop of Kerry, who fathered a son by an American woman, Annie Murphy, back in 1973. His meteoric downfall signaled the beginning of a catastrophe the Irish Church still is experiencing. When Bishop Casey placed Annie in a home for unwed mothers she claims the following argument ensued:
“I told him I wanted my son,” Annie said.
Annie claimed the bishop told her she was not capable of caring for a child, that the child was a mistake.
“He made it clear,” she said, “that through the adoption of the child, I would be cleansed…” (New York Times 5.9.92)
This desire to control sexuality and its expression can take extreme forms as it did in Irish society when illicit sex and illegitimate children were involved. It took a nasty turn – a downright brutal turn -- in the lives of those birth mothers of Ireland of whom the recent film The Magdalene Sisters is concerned. I didn’t yet see the film but am somewhat familiar with the controversy it engendered. In my opinion, even if it might be a cinematic exaggeration of the actual events, the underlying truth is still scathing: the way religion, in this case the Catholic Church, treated unwed mothers in an attempt to keep the secret (at all costs, it seems – at any cost) to keep the secret. And so thousands of women were forced to work virtually their entire lives in convent laundries; and some buried in unmarked graves – right here in this city – right her in Dublin. In places with words like Mercy and Charity engraved over their doors – but no mercy, no charity for those birthmothers.
But Ireland, and the Irish Church, have no monopoly on secrets and lies. The recent film Rabbit Proof Fence has brought to light the especially unnerving practice of the Australian government -- and the Catholic Church in Australia – vis-à-vis Australian Aborigines. “An estimated 100,000 Australian Aborigines make up Australia’s so-called lost generation. Under a government policy that ran from 1910 through 1971 (that’s right, I said 1971) as many as one in ten of all Aboriginal children were removed from their families in an effort to civilize them by assimilation into white society, a practice based on a theory of eugenics widely accepted in the early 1900s that thought by few generations.” (Time Magazine 10.2.00) The Catholic Bishops of Australia said they “sincerely regretted that some of the church’s child welfare services assisted assimilationist policies and practices.” (New York Times 7.18.96)
Canada’s government and church also conspired to (shall we say) practice a missionary position regarding what have come to be known as the Duplessis Orphans). “Between 1930 and 1960 at least fifteen hundred children born out of wedlock to parents too poor to support them were wrongly labeled as mentally ill or mentally retarded and interned in psychiatric institutions, gaining for the orphanages subsidies tripled what they would have gotten otherwise.” (Montreal Gazette 5.31.00)
Just last year the pope beatified one of his predecessors: Pope Pius IX aka Pio Nono. Pius IX ruled the church a good part of the nineteenth century. With his beatification came a discussion about his extraordinary and, to my mind, very un-saintly behavior regarding Edgardo Mortara. In 1852 Pius IX was still temporal ruler of the Papal States and, one fateful night, sent his police to the Jewish home of the Mortara family in Bologna. It seems that when the Mortara’s son Edgardo was an infant and sick their Catholic servant girl had secretly baptized him. When the boy was six the story of the baptism was told to the papal inquisitor and relayed to the pope himself. Pius IX intended to apply a dubious church law claiming that a baptized Christian child could not be raised by Jewish parents. The papal police then took the boy from his parents -- never to return him. David I. Kertzer, in his book The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara (Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), makes a good case in saying that the incident was pivotal in the collapse of the Papal States and the unification of Italy: European governments were so appalled at the pope’s action and subsequent refusal to return Edgardo to his parents that they withdrew military support for the defense of the Papal States.
There’s a revealing scene between Pius IX and representatives of the Jewish community when they met him some ten years after the event and after Edgardo was placed under the pope’s personal supervision. Edgardo had become a seminarian. The pope addressed Edgardo that day: ‘My son,’ he said. ‘You have cost me dearly, and I have suffered a great deal because of you.’ And then turning to the Jewish community he added: “Both the powerful and the powerless tried to steal this boy from me, and accused me of being barbarous and pitiless. They cried for his parents, but they failed to recognize that I too am his father.” The missionary position makes others feel guilty for your fault; there’s an innate arrogance to it.
Edgardo would eventually become a priest and travel the world preaching for the conversion of the Jews. He took as his religious name, Pius, in honor of his spiritual father – as he called the pope. He would be the first to testify in favor of Pius IX’s beatification. (You see, Edgardo was that loyal adoptee to the end). And he lived some 88 years, dying in a Belgian monastery (thankfully) just two months before the Nazis invaded. Thankfully, I think, because the Nazis would no doubt have arrested him and sent him to the camps – because they would have recognized his Jewish blood and the fact that not even the grace of baptism could change the truth. What Pius IX failed to recognize is that baptism doesn’t seek to change the truth, in this case the fact of blood. He failed to recognize that grace builds on nature – it doesn’t seek to annihilate it.
My mother gave birth to me in a Catholic hospital in which I was baptized a few days later. Yet, on the baptismal certificate issued my adoptive parents, it says that I was born to my adoptive parents and baptized at their parish church on a different date, some six months after my birth. This certificate (which I have in my possession is an official church document) yet it is a lie, all of it lies, and implies that I was intentionally baptized twice – a practice strictly forbidden in sacramental theology and by church law.
The current sex scandal sweeping the Catholic Church in the UK, the U.S. and here in Ireland is about sex, yes -- but it’s also about secrecy, the way the bishops chose to keep facts secret, secret from those who most needed to know. And, as was told so well in the film Secrets & Lies – you can never keep a secret without eventually lying. Catholic bishops made such a strategy into an art form. What they wanted to do – all with supposed good intention – was to protect the church from scandal. Ironically they caused a scandal far worse and more damaging by their actions.
“The idea that deception can serve religion shocked St. Augustine so deeply he once wrote that the worst lie is that which religion deploys for its own advance.” (Gary Wills. Saint Augustine, Penguin Press, 1999)
“It is secrecy that is everywhere the soul of bureaucracy,” Simone Weil said. “It is the condition of all privilege and of all oppression.”
Although when I was adopted in 1953 and the adoption agency encouraged my parents to tell me about my adoption early on, they did not tell me until I was twelve, and then only at the insistence of my teacher. We never discussed adoption, my parents and I, but it was the very air we breathed. It was the proverbial elephant in the living room that no one acknowledged but everyone had to accommodate. All family secrets are like this; they eat away at trust – the very fabric of healthy families.
When I decided to search for my birth mother when I was 32, I found her in Baltimore, Maryland. I didn’t have to tell my adoptive parents that I found her – but felt I should. It was one of the hardest things I ever did because I knew, from a lifetime of reading non-verbal messages, that it would cause a lot of pain. But I told -- and it did. My mother cried as if I stabbed her through the heart. But then something very interesting happened. My parents started talking about their experience of adopting me: what they went through, how they felt. Penny Callan Partridge says it best, I think, in one of her stories. “Finding my birthparents,” she wrote, “gave me my adoptive parents.” After being part of the adoption reform community for many years now, I believe it always works like this. It seems to be a law of family physics or something: once secrecy is broken and the light begins to shine, burdens long carried can be let down and memories can be reclaimed. That’s, perhaps, what the strange prophecy in the gospel means to me. You remember, when Mary and Joseph take Jesus to the Temple (Luke 2: 22-35: what we celebrate as the Feast of the Presentation) and the old man Simeon takes the child in his arms and says to his mother: your heart will be pierced as with a sword so that the thoughts of many hearts may be laid bare.
The sealing of birth certificates, amending them, actually creating false certificates in order to keep things confidential is rooted, it seems, in good intention. But even the best of intentions cannot make into good something inherently evil. Yet the intention was never to keep secret from the adopted himself the names of the parents who gave him birth. To alter a birth certificate is to lie. St. Thomas Aquinas had something to say about that centuries ago. “For Aquinas, the most decisive human trait is that human beings are truth-seeking animals, moved by love for the truth (come what may)…so inherent is this drive in human nature it is an imperative – that to address a human being in any lesser mode is to do his nature violence.”
(“Thomas Aquinas, The First Whig” by Michael Novak in Crisis October, 1990). Lies do violence. They desecrate the inherent dignity we possess as human beings.
Secrecy and lies are at the heart of oppressive systems. Orlando Paterson of Harvard would write a lot about slavery. At the risk of offending I would suggest that the phenomenon of natal alienation, as Patterson calls it, can be applied to closed adoption as well.
“The root of slavery’s evil is not racism or even economic exploitation of people as property, but the ritual dehumanization that deprives people of their natal identity in family and society.” (“Paul, Slavery and Freedom: Personal and Socio-Historical Reflections” by Orlando Paterson in Semeia 83/84, Society of Biblical Literature, 1998)
“to be without birthright…is to not be allowed to inform your understanding of social reality with the inherited meanings of your forbears, or to anchor the living present in any conscious community of memory.” (Paterson)
Dr. Lesten Havens of Harvard Medical School once said (“The Psychological Possession of Human Beings” at the American Adoption Congress Conference, April 1989, New York) that “…in some circumstances and places these historical expressions of (physical) possession (of human beings) have been replaced by psychological forms of possession, which lacks the candor of outright slavery, but is possession nonetheless and probably even more dangerous because the possessed may not (even) know (it).”
It is dangerous to employ hyperbole when speaking of adoption, and I do not intend to insinuate that adoptive parents are like slaveholders. But I do believe the system of closed adoption, of sealed and altered records, which employs a subterfuge which in effect intentionally robs the adopted of the knowledge of their natal identity – I do intend to indict that system as an utterly cruel one which should be abolished whether enshrined in civil or church or religious law. It’s time. It is time.
One poignant example of the cruelty that secrets effect, intentionally or not, can be seen in the area of names – so fundamental and problematic for adoptive families. Here are a few stories not necessarily about adoption – but nonetheless about adoption:
In 1988 I had the good fortune to be studying in Korea during the Olympics. It was a great moment for Korea – the feelings of national pride were palpable as you walked through the streets. That was made clear during the opening ceremonies of the Olympics when an elderly Korean gentleman lit the Olympic flame and the entire nation, it seemed, began to chant his name. At first it was clear he was chosen because he was the first Korean to have won a gold medal years back. But there was more to this than simply a man who ran fast. It had been the 1936 Olympics. At that time Korea was a colony of Japan. Korea remained annexed to Japan by force of arms from 1910 through 1945. Japan subjugated Korea, not only through military force, but through a psychological possession of sorts. All Koreans had to learn Japanese. School was conducted in Japanese. If a group of Korean men were found conversing in Korean on the street they were arrested and imprisoned. And then the ultimate subjugation – every Korean had to take a Japanese name. This was especially humiliating. Remember that as a Confucian people Koreans venerate their deceased by reverencing the nameplate representing the ancestor. And so when this Korean man won the gold medal in 1936 he had to receive his award while standing under the Japanese flag. And it was his adopted Japanese name, not his given Korean name, that was broadcast throughout the world as the gold medal winner. In 1988 the memory of Japanese oppression was still very much alive in middle-aged and elderly Koreans. And so, as if to right a terrible injustice, a nation chanted their hero’s Korean name (Son Ki-chong) as he lit the Olympic flame – as if they were righting a terrible injustice, reclaiming what was stolen, all through the power of names.
In Helen Fremont’s memoir of her family, entitled After Long Silence (Delta Dell, 1999), the importance of names and what they mean when they are lost take on poignant meaning. After Long Silence is Helen Fremont’s memoir of discovering as an adult, after having been raised Catholic, that her parents were really Jewish and how she uncovered the story of their terrible ordeal before and after the war in Poland. How they kept their lives and history a secret from their daughters and their neighbors and friends. How her parents, on moving to America became Catholic, brought their children up Catholic, kept Gentile friends. Helen Fremont realizes that there were hints and signs all along the way that things didn’t quite fit, but it is only in hindsight -- after you know the truth -- that things fall into place, that they finally make sense. One poignant episode is about the author’s mother and her aunt – her mother’s sister. During the Nazi occupation of their town, Nazi sympathizers massacred a large number of Jews in the town square. Both the author’s mother and aunt survived the massacre, protected from detection by the murdered dead who covered their bodies. Her aunt told her the story fifty years after the event – after the author confronted her parents and aunt about their history. Her aunt confessed, in shame, that since the day of the massacre fifty years previous, she could not remember her own sister’s name. For the rest of their lives, she called her sister by the nickname she used that day during the massacre. She was too ashamed to tell her sister she could not remember. The author goes on to say: “What I didn’t realize was that all our names had been recently invented. My mother had survived the war using a false name and papers; she had escaped from the Nazis dressed as an Italian soldier, under yet another name and false papers. My parents had changed our family name upon applying for citizenship in the United States. To this day,” Fremont confesses, “I (too) don’t even know what my mother’s real name is.”
I came across another story about names and exile in a very unexpected way a few months ago when a young man joined the convert classes at my parish. It was odd that he should be there since mine is a predominantly Hispanic parish in the heart of Brooklyn; he was from Westchester, an affluent suburb of New York City. He was not of any religion but had met a girl who was catholic and from my area and so agreed to take classes to see if he might be baptized. His name is Z. That’s it, just Z. His parents had just given him the letter Z as a name, which turns out to be a hinge on which a very interesting story turns. Z’s aunt (Thea Halo) wrote a book a few years back entitled Not Even My Name (Picador Press, 2000) about her mother, Z’s paternal grandmother, and her story of forced exile from her native village in northern Turkey in 1920. Z’s grandmother is a Pontian Greek who, like the Armenians, were rounded up and sent on death marches if not outright killed by the newly installed government of the man who would become known as Ataturk. The story begins with her and her daughter returning just a few years ago to Turkey to try to locate the village where she lived until she was ten before she lost all her family. Fearing that her daughter would starve to death, Z’s grandmother’s mother gave her to an Assyrian woman who turned out to be very cruel. The Assyrian could not pronounce Z’s grandmother’s Greek name so she renamed her Sano -- a name which Z’s grandmother kept – as if to remember the horror she went through. It was the woman’s cruelty that led Sano to run away and so take fate into he own hands. The rest of her journey is quite remarkable as well. She is still living and will be her grandson’s godmother at his baptism this Easter when he will, I suppose, have to choose a name for baptism or at least fathom the mystery of why his parents never gave him a full name. But maybe he will be baptized just Z – carrying with him into eternity the reminder of all that loss of name can mean.
When I found for my birthmother she told me she named me for her brother, a Jesuit priest. Never underestimate the power of names.
Another American Jesuit, contemporary with my uncle was the theologian John Courtney Murray, who shares this poignant insight about who we are. “The complete loss of one’s identity,” he said, “is, with all propriety of theological definition, hell. In diminished forms it is insanity.” (“The Achievement of John Courtney Murray S.J.” by George Weigel in Crisis November 1985).
If we are really interested in the best interests of the child, as we all say we are, then the way to insure that child’s best interests is to practice good adoption – ethical adoption – healthy adoption which always seeks to be open adoption. It is founded on truth, not lies, respecting the individual and his unique history. It seeks to acknowledge that part of the adoption experience we would all rather forget but never really can – relinquishment -- that is necessarily the foundation of every adoption. A child doesn’t get adopted unless he has, somehow or someway, been relinquished by his original parents. The acknowledgement of that profound loss, I believe with H. David Kirk (Shared Fate. Free Press, 1964), is the cement of adoptive family relationships.
Since we’re here in Dublin it would only be right to invoke an image to make my point that was first so perfectly written by one of the greatest writers in the English language, James Joyce. You will remember his short story The Dead, made into a film by John Houston. I’m thinking, here, of a scene when near the end of the story Gabriel and his wife Greta, both in mid-life, are readying to leave a dinner party. Gabriel is about to call Greta when he sees her at the top of the stairs listening to the music coming from the next room. She is strangely distant and Gabriel knows that something important, something profound, is happening to Greta just at that moment. Observing her from the shadows enkindles a renewed passion in Gabriel -- he assumes her distant look and tearful eye are connected to him in someway. Later in their hotel room Gabriel is keen on renewing that passion and confidently asks Greta what she was thinking about when he caught her listening to the old Irish ballad. It is then that Greta breaks down and sobs uncontrollably, telling her bewildered husband how before she met him she was courted by a young man named Michael Fury who sang that same song to her outside her window in the drenching rain the night before she was to leave for a convent school. Young Michael Fury caught his death that night. And she knew he died for love of her. This poignantly tragic but beautiful memory was Greta’s, but it was not Gabriel’s. The cold fact that Greta had a history before him is like a slap in the face to the middle-aged Gabriel. It was the tune of the ancient ballad that triggered the memory in Greta, and Gabriel realized – because he loved her so much – that he had no right to trespass on such sacred space. Human beings have a need and a right to grieve their own losses. No one can grieve for you – it is personal. Love sometimes demands distance.
For the adopted person to acknowledge he had a former life before he came to his adopted family is a threat to the adoptive parents, but I don’t think it’s the kind of threat they imagine. Their thinking that if the adopted search they are looking for parental love in other places. But it’s not really about love. Stephen Dubner wrote Turbulent Souls (1998) a few years back a memoir about finding out as an adult that his parents were both Jewish – a fact they never told him or his siblings. His parents had converted to Catholicism before they married. They did so, not out of necessity or force, but from their own conviction. Dubner would eventually convert to Judaism. His discovery and return to Judaism was a pilgrimage to his origins. “Was it love,” he questioned, “that had inspired my return to Judaism? No I told myself, not love. It was something smaller than love, less desperate. It was instinct. My noisy soul had demanded that I follow the flow of my blood.”
There’s something to be said about blood, about the power of genetic inheritance to shape your life and inform your choices. Malcolm Galdwell, in his book The Tipping Point (Little, Brown & Co., 2000), is not particularly interested in adoption but reminds us of the importance of genetics, quoting the Colorado Project of the mid 1970s, which followed 245 pregnant women who decided to give up their children for adoption. The children were given a battery of tests in their new homes throughout their childhood…same for a group of non adopted children as a control group – the results: “on things like measures of intellectual ability and certain aspects of personality, the biological children are fairly similar to their parents. For the adopted kids, however, the results are downright strange. Their scores have nothing whatsoever in common with their adoptive parents: these children,” Gladwell says, “are no more similar in their personality or intellectual skills to the people who raised them, fed them, clothed them, read to them, taught them, and loved them for sixteen years than they are to any two adults taken at random off the street.”
I’ll always remember when I was in grammar school hearing another boy refer to me as “chink eyes.” I had always noticed this about my eyes, a physical phenomenon I would only recently discover is called the epicanthic fold, that fold of skin that covers the eye’s inner corner. It seemed to have been more pronounced when I was younger. It’s defined in the Cambridge Dictionary as a marker for those of Asian race, “in others,” the dictionary says, “it is an anomaly.” I’ve long felt at home in places I don’t belong. I am a citizen of that land of anomaly.
The geneticist Bryan Sykes cites some interesting anomalies in his recent book The Seven Daughters of Eve (W. W. Norton & Co., 2001): “How a schoolteacher from Edinburgh carries the unmistakable signature of Polynesian DNA. She knows her own family history well for the past two hundred years, and there is nothing that gives any clue as to how this exotic piece of DNA came to her from the other side of the world. And the genetic sequence of a book salesman from Manchester that is so unusual that his closest match is found among native Australians of Queensland, aborigines all. Or how two fishermen from a small island off the west coast of Scotland both possess a very unusual DNA sequence, but are not immediately related to each other. Their common ancestor can only have come from the Siberia of the distant past. Or how the DNA sequence, so common to Koreans, turns up regularly in fishermen from Norway and northern Scotland.
I would go on to study Chinese in college. I later lived in Korea, studying language and culture. As a priest (and the only Anglo) I lived for fifteen years in the largest Korean Catholic parish in the United States, trying to figure out on some level, I suppose, that anomaly made conscious to me by the boy in grade school verbalizing what he saw in my eyes. Who do people say that I am? Who do you say that I am? Who knows: maybe one of those Mongol Hordes of the fourteenth century, I would fantasize, sweeping across the Russian steppe to the gates of Vienna, one of those Mongol Hordes leaving his seed, by rape or romance, somewhere in Poland until, in 1929, my father was born there – in Poland -- before emigrating to Canada. This Mongol-connection-fantasy might seem to be pushing the envelope a bit too far, I grant you that. And I confess I was ready to drop it from my presentation until, just three weeks ago, I read an article in The New York Times [Science Times 2.4.03], making an extraordinary claim. After extensive studies of DNA samples geneticists have discovered that 8% of all the men living in the confines of the former Mongol Empire stretching from East Asia to the outskirts of Vienna (and a significant part of Poland I might add) that is, sixteen million men, are descended form the Mongol royal house and perhaps from the great Genghis Khan himself. I feel somewhat affirmed.
The search for origins is a search for self. Such a search is ultimately no reflection of whether or not the adoptive experience was a so-called good one or not. It’s a spiritual quest, a pilgrimage really. The priest von Balthasar would redefine the purpose of religion as “the re-bonding of previously separated parts.” The word Yoga from the Sanskrit means to join or unite. “First you have to be one with your soul,” Mahatma Ghandi wrote, “then you will be one with the others.” And to plug my boss, here’s something John Paul II said in his encyclical Faith and Reason “the journey toward truth has unfolded, as it must, within the horizon of self-consciousness. It is found in both East and West, recorded in the sacred writings of Israel as well as in the Veda and the Avesta, in the writings of Confucius and Lao-Tze, heard in the preaching of Tirthankara and the Buddha. It is a journey that leads us to heed the admonition carved on the temple portal at Delphi -- the admonition to know thyself -- and to answer the fundamental questions which pervade human life: Who am I and Where have I come from? Those who seek to answer these questions, “ the pope proclaims, “set themselves apart from the rest of creation as ‘human beings,’ that is, as those who ‘know themselves.’” (“Fides et Ratio” Encyclical of Pope John Paul II on Faith and Reason, September 14, 1998)
“The complete loss of one’s identity is with all propriety of theological definition, hell” (John Courtney Murray SJ). And religion, true religion, is meant to lift us out of hell – to save us from the oblivion of ignorance of self, not keep us entombed there with the weight of secrets and lies concerning our natal identity. We want to know ourselves – we want to become human beings.
When the 16th century mystic, the Carmelite nun Teresa of Avila, experienced her mystical ecstasies her nuns marveled at the joy and peace present on her face. Teach us how to have that they demanded of her. Teach us the secrets of the divine. No, Teresa wisely responded No -- “for never, never, however exalted the soul may be is anything else more fitting than self knowledge.”
Richard Rodriquez looked in the mirror, again, and entitled his latest book Brown (Viking Press, 2002). His latest autobiography, that is – his is always a journey of self-discovery. It’s a great book in my opinion -- about race in America yes, but also about sin and Puritanism, about belonging in many places, about acknowledging that we do belong in many places. Rodriguez uses the word brown, “not,” he says, “in the sense of pigment, necessarily, but brown because mixed, confused, lumped, impure, unpasteurized, as motives are mixed, and the fluids of generation are mixed and emotions are unclear, and the tally of human progress and failure in every generation is mixed and unaccounted for…” That’s what he means by brown. Being adopted, even if you’re white, or Korean, or black – you are ultimately really brown – at least according to Richard Rodriguez’ definition.
We do not know the motives of the now deceased actor, Carol O’Connor, in returning the cremated ashes of his drug addicted adoptive son to the Church of Santa Susanna in Rome some 33 years after he and his wife adopted Hugh there with the help of the American Paulist Fathers who cared for the church (O’Connor was in Rome filming Cleopatra at the time). We do not know either the motives of the Cistercian nuns who own the church building and who insisted that the remains be disinterred after they had already been buried in the church. Perhaps the nuns did not want to mix such a sordid life with what they considered a pristine beauty. Perhaps the nuns were turned off by the brown in it all. But at least Carol O’Connor and his wife tried to reconnect with the losses they must have known their son suffered and tried to somehow reconnect him even in death with his unknown beginnings. I don’t know what kind of relationship the O’Connors had with their son, but I believe they were trying to do, even in death, what H. David Kirk (Shared Fate) said was the deep expression of love that adoptive families can uniquely share – respect for each others’ losses.
My adoptive mother died last April after a long illness. Looking back, I do not think we had many things in common, she and I. For me the saddest thing regarding her death was when they removed her body from her home of nearly seventy years. I wondered, as I saw them place her body in the undertaker’s van: did she, could she, from deep in the valley of shadows, glimpse for one last time the house that she and her parents came to live so long ago, the house where she brought her devoted husband to live their fifty-two years together, the house where they in turn brought me to live? Was she able from that valley of shadows -- where many believe the soul lingers for a time within the lifeless body – did she sense that last turn off Webster Avenue? I don’t know if she could, but I could see it for her. I could feel that aching goodbye. And I think I knew what she would have known, felt what she would have felt -- because it was the loss that an orphan knows so well.
We are all brown – whether we admit it or not. We all are mixed, mestizoed, in some way or other. The adopted have a right to the information that will lead them, if they so choose, to explore their history and heritage before they were acculturated to the lives of their adoptive families. The best of both worlds in adoption can mean, I think, that good – ethical - healthy adoption always strives towards openness founded on truth and respect for the individuals’ unique history and acknowledging the loss that all suffer in the adoption experience.
We adopted are sacraments, if you will, of all of you. Our search is the search for self just the same as yours. The difference is that, for us, it is a literal endeavor; and, as such, all the more desperate. We seek, like you, to know ourselves: to become human beings. Our existence – as having four parents – and being the members of numerable families – makes us mixed and blended, mestizoed and proudly impure. It’s the best of both worlds, this existence of ours, provided we avoid labeling ourselves mentally ill or maladjusted. We’re the proof of that Irish story: we’re the product of sex and mystery and in the end pioneers on that greatest of spiritual pilgrimages, reminding all that “the self can (indeed) seem more distant than any star” and that “all journeys,” as a wise Englishman once said, “all journeys are about coming home.“ (G.K. Chesterton. Orthodoxy, 1908)
Thank you for your kind attention.
