Rev. Thomas Brosnan's article on spirituality and adoption will speak to you wherever you stand in the adoption triad or extended family circle. At the American Adoption Congress in Baltimore in April, 1996, Father Tom held several hundred people spellbound during his keynote address - and was greeted with a standing ovation and prolonged applause as he left the podium. The following article is excerpted from that AAC address.
I am a Roman Catholic Priest of the Diocese of Brooklyn, New York, where I presently live and work with Korean Catholics. I am no psychologist, no pastoral counselor, no social worker; in other words, I'm no expert. My remarks come from my own experience concerning adoption and my experience with others who have been part of the Triad, and I offer these remarks as a "confession"of sorts, as a glimpse of one man's journey which hopefully will resonate with some aspect of your own.
So, the theme of this conference is Coming of Age. Now, that sounds to me a bit titillating. Do you think there might be some sexual undertones here? Or maybe it's just because I come from Brooklyn. Coming of age is about maturing and, at 18 years old, which is what the American Adoption Congress (AAC) is this year, the maturing process is profuse not so much with what might be called sense and sensibility, but more, I think, with sex and sensuality.
I would like to suggest to you today that, as hard you might try, you just can't escape it: Coming of age and adoption they're both about sex. So a little background check might be pertinent here. The scenario at present is not an uncommon one, but it has its unique twists and what I might call tricks of grace. A young woman leaves her widowed mother who, after her husband had died, had to support her two children by working as a domestic. In living with her strict mother in the servants quarters of a physician's home in suburban Philadelphia, the young woman finally escapes, in a manner of speaking, and journeys to Baltimore where her brother - the apple of her mother's eye - is a Jesuit priest.
The young woman gets a job and is introduced to a boarding house connected with the Peabody Conservatory of Music. Since most of the students are male, the landlady needs another female boarder to even out the room assignments. The young woman and her roommate, Sophia, become best friends. During the academic year of 1952, the young woman and her roommate are part of a group of friends, and the young woman falls in love with a handsome music student from Toronto.
As the semester ends, and after her boyfriend has gone back home to Toronto, the woman discovers she is pregnant. At first, she tells only her roommate her secret. Later, she travels to Toronto to ask, to plead...but the young man says he cannot, he will not marry her. She returns and confides her dilemma to another music student from the boarding house. A gallant young man from Virginia. He offers to marry her. Very confused and very desperate, she says yes. Indeed , the boarding house gang throw her a bridal shower even, though no one knows she is pregnant save her roommate, Sophia. But, she and the gallant Southerner for some unknown reason call the wedding off within a few weeks. The young woman then confides in her brother, the priest, who arranges for her to go to a Catholic Maternity Home in New York City.
So on January 10, 1953, she delivers her baby into the world. Shortly thereafter, the mother relinquishes her son to the closed adoption system. Within a period of one year, the young woman has left job and home, friends and family, she has given birth, courted and married, and become pregnant with her second of seven children.
I was placed in foster care with an Italian family and, after six months, was placed in my Irish adoptive parents home in Brooklyn and adopted within the year. I grew up in Brooklyn an only child, living in a row house with my parents and my mother's parents. And, after 33 years, I decided to search and was able to find my mother and her family here in Baltimore. My mother died two years ago, and today I have returned to her favorite city to deliver this address to you. Maybe coming of age means something like coming full circle.
"We shall not cease from exploration,"T.S. Elliott said so well. And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive at where we started and know the place for the first time.
I had a dream awhile ago which left a deep impression on me. In my dream I was in a bathhouse of sorts. It was steamy and there were several whirlpools with hot sudsy water swirling around. The floors were marble, but slippery with a gloss about them. Somehow I knew if I entered one of the whirlpools I would be sucked down through the vortex. I felt a sense of dread, but also adventure...a certain exhiliration...an excitement...as I entered one of the whirlpools, then felt myself going round and round, down and down, as if in a tunnel, speeding toward a vale of light. Then I woke up. I came to. If you ask me what my dream was about, I would say at the risk of you thinking me a bit strange that night I believe I dreamt of my own conception. I witnessed, through the detachment that dreams afford, the wonderful workings of reproduction, the mysteries of nature and divine design still incomprehensible. I saw my own self somehow present in the adhesive stickiness of the stuff of life through the intercourse of sperm and egg, riding the whirlpool of physical generation, exploring the compleme ntarity of Yin and Yang, a coincidence of opposites. It's not so important whether that was indeed my dream's objective meaning, but rather this was my interpretation. It's significant because this was a counterpoint to my experience as an adopted person until then.
Many adoptees often express difficulty accepting the sexual origins of their existence. As a boy, I would watch Superman reruns every day. It wasa ritual of sorts to turn on the TV, secretly hoping they would replay that very first episode when the infant Superman lands on Earth... ejected from faraway Krypton only to be found in the open field by the kindly Kents.
Adoptees often feel to be literally alien-aided. We feel like aliens from another planet because we do not see ourselves as born. My dream or at least my interpretation of it came as a great relief and a wonderful revelation. It confirmed that I was conceived, that I was the result of a real union of sperm and ovum and that I was, therefore, born into this world.
These two facts of life are precisely facts because they can be verified. For the non-adopted person seeing similarities between himself and his parents is one type of verification. Being able to read your birth certificate is another. To an adopted person, these two fundamental ways to verify existence are missing or considered top secret, sealed behind impenetrable doors thus fueling fantasies that cannot be challenged by fact.
This need to hide the truth about conception, about birth, about one's origins, which are all the effects of the closed adoption system, have at their base the philosophy of thought that we call Dualism. Dualism is a way of perceiving the world as an either/or situation, everything reduced to either black or white. And, it's especially in the area of human sexuality that Dualism causes problems.
So, permit me to digress a moment and talk in what is considered religious language--not to convert anyone, but simply to make a point--because we see this influence of dualist thinking in the specific history of Christian spirituality in what we might call the Christological controversies. These were debates about the nature of Jesus of Nazareth; the Orthodox position maintained that Jesus was both God and Man, fully divine and completely human. Like us in all things but sin, Catholics pray at Mass. Dualist thought generated many nuance disagreements with this position. Uncomfortable in trying to hold the tension between what seemed to be two contradictory statements, the Dualists opted to exclude the idea of Jesus being both. One group believed that while Jesus was fully divine, he only appeared to be human. In one of its scriptures, the Dualist author claimed that Jesus never blinked and he never left footprints when he walked. Thus, Dualism's inability to hold the tension forced a denial of half the truth. The humanity of Jesus was sanitized to the point that all bodily functions became suspect. The world of matter was considered either unimportant or downright evil. It did not take a long time for this kind of thinking to translate itself into the lives of ordinary people. And here Dualistic thinking sought to denigrate the body in order to glorify the soul. Matter was evil, Spirit was good.
There are many examples of dualistic thinking in Christian morality. In the early Church, Origin--a brilliant and balanced man in so many ways--fell victim to this Dualism when he castrated himself to avoid sexual sin. Dualism infects adoption from the beginning and hinders a healthy coming of age. It lies at the core of the closed adoption system, at the heart of sealed records. It necessitates secrecy, keeping a person's name secret even from himself. It is told that such a practice is done in the best interests of the child, but how can any honest person see it as anything other than a subtle oppression. It tempts all members of the Triad to enter the dual universe, sepa-rating and compartmentalizing the world of flesh and the world of spirit. It seeks to divorce the body from the soul. It undermines the integrity of sex and love. It seeks to exert control over what is not meant to be controlled, namely the creative forces of the human spirit which find their most powerful expression through the marvelous workings of human reproduction.
Secrecy and sealed records impose a schizophrenia of sorts on the adopted person, virtually separating him into two people: One the product of an unmentionable sexual union, the other the result of a hopefully loving environment.
If the institution of adoption is truly to come of age, it must combat this virus of Dualism. Like the razed Berlin Wall that divided a city for a generation, like the dis-mantled statues of Lenin across the Russias, we must seek now more than ever the abolishment of closed records and repudiate with our whole being this terrible scourge of secrecy in adoption.
Adoption is the story of Loss and Belonging. One night recently when I was trying to put these thoughts on paper, I turned on the TV to escape a bit. One of my favorite movies, Come Back, Little Sheba with Shirley Booth and Burt Lancaster, was on. This is truly one of my favorites. I remember this movie so well because the first time I saw it was when I was 14 on a New Year's Eve, and my parents had gone out for the night and I was very lonely. I remembered how I couldn't control the sadness I felt - especially toward Lola Delaney (Shirley Booth) in the movie. So the other night when I was watching this movie, all those old feelings came back to me.feeling again loss, a desire to belong.
The movie's unspoken premise lies in the relationship between Lola and her husband, Doc Delaney, whom she never calls by his given name - but alternates between calling him Doc and Daddy. He, in turn, calls her Baby - except when he's drunk with rage. There's a mystery here though. She calls him Daddy, but they are childless. We learn through his drunken rage that he had to marry Lola, but we are not told what happened to the baby. Did Lola miscarry? Or did they relinquish the baby to adoption? At its zenith in 1952 when the movie was made, the missing piece of their lives is no doubt the reason that Lola is so keen to rent a room to the young college coed. Marie, so young and vivacious, sparks those feelings of loss and desire in both Lola and Doc.
Then there's the title, Come Back, Little Sheba. Little Sheba is Lola's beloved dog who has run away. She calls Little Sheba every day. She runs to the door every time she hears a distant bark. I suppose I react with strong emotion to this precisely because I need to acknowledge the fact of loss in my own life. I think all of us, members of the Triad or not, find this aspect of life one of the most difficult to handle. We don't like to see the effects of loss in others' lives, in others' faces. We want to make it go away, we want to put a bandage on it, we don't want to be reminded of it in our own lives.
There's a beautiful scene at the end of James Joyce's short story, The Dead. Gabriel and his wife Greta, married a number of years, have attended a dinner party. It's time to leave and Gabriel is about to call his wife whom he sees at the top of the stairs. Her expression seems melancholy as she listens to the music coming from the next room. Gabriel knows that something profoundly important is taking place within Greta at that moment. Observing her from the shadows kindles a renewed passion in Gabriel, for he assumes that he is the cause of her wistful look and tearful eye. Later in their hotel room, Gabriel is keen on renewing that passion. He confidently asks Greta what she was thinking about when he saw her as she listened to the old Irish ballad. It is then that Greta breaks down and begins to sob uncontrollably. She tells her bewildered husband how long before she met him she was courted by a young man named Michael Fury, who sang that same ballad to her beneath 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 sad, yet beautiful, memory was Greta's, but it was not Gabriel's. The cold reality 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, and Gabriel realized he had no right to transgress such sacred space.
All members of the Triad experience loss. Many adoptive parents come to adoption via the loss suffered through infertility. Painful loss of the hope and dream of having your own children, flesh of your flesh, it's a devastating loss. The instinctual desire for having children is evidenced by the desperate measure to which couples will go to conceive. The horror and humiliation of the fertility clinics are testimony of the tremendous import we instinctively place on procreation. This devastating pain of the loss of future children is hard to acknowledge, but it is hard for others to acknowledge so adoption is the bandage we offer. The bandage is expressed in different ways, like, Adopt this child and you'll be just like everyone else and This child will be just like your own.
Dualism raises its ugly head here. By the mid-20th Century, it had already infected the psychology of adop-tion which held that it was environment, not heredity, that played the dominant role in human development. If a social worker could more or less match the physical traits of the adoptive and birth parents, the result might be what we call today virtual reality. The child would be as if born to you. The crucial words, of course, are as if. My job today is, of course, to inform you that adoption is like horseshoes: As if doesn't count.
Virtual reality and reality are separated by one very important difference: the truth. Now this doesn't mean that adoptive families aren't real families or that the adoptive parents aren't the real parents. Adoption can be a real blessing and has countless times been the best solution to difficult problems, but adoption cannot do the impossible. It can indeed make an infertile couple into great and wonderful parents. It can even make them the best of parents. But it can never make them fertile.
That infertility is the loss they must acknowledge and deal with the rest of their lives, and it raises its ugly head when the adopted child reaches puberty and his sexual awakening reminds parents of their own youth and desires. Again, the fact of infertility must be faced when the adopted children have children of their own and the now adoptive grandparents must acknowledge their lack of genetic connection.
Loss also is suffered by the birth parents, but especially the birth mother when she relinquishes the child. There's probably no closer relationship than a mother to her unborn child.
Perhaps you saw the movie Losing Isaiah. Whether or not you liked the scenario, perhaps you would agree with me that even a crack-addicted woman feels that powerful bond with her child. The act of relinquishment is so wrenching an event that young women have told me that they chose to abort their babies rather than relinquish them to adoption. Some of us may judge this to be a very selfish thing, but I wonder if there is not some instinctual response involved in making that drastic decision. No matter what the reasons for relinquishment might be, the emotional response to the act of relinquishment is analogous to abortion, an unbloody abortion if you will, but, as Dr. John Sonne said yesterday in his workshop, "a psychological abortion"nonetheless.
Maybe you remember the scandal that broke a few years back about the Irish Bishop, Eamon Casey, who fathered a child some 20 years previously with a young American woman named Annie Murphy. Annie's family had sent her to the bishop to straighten out her life, but she ended up having an affair with the bishop and getting pregnant. The bishop arranged for her to go to a home for unwed mothers. When the time for delivery came they had a heated argument. Annie told the bishop she wanted to keep their child. The bishop was furious and said she must give the baby up for adoption. "The child was a mistake,"Annie remembered the bishop saying. "He made it clear, "she said, "that through the relinquishment of the child she would be cleansed."
Thus, the bishop believed, as do many religiously-inclined people, that relinquishment is tantamount to the purifying fires of purgatory - a notion I would suggest not far removed from the response of those young women who chose abortion over adoption. There is, of course, another possible reason for the bishop's insistence on relinquishment. Once placed in the closed adoption system, his son would not be able to identify the bishop as his father.
For the adoptee, too, there's an experience of loss. And I would be amiss if I didn't tell you that I'm prejudiced to think that it's the greatest loss suffered in the Triad: The loss of genetic connection, ethnic connection, siblings and, most profoundly, the loss of father and mother related by blood to him.
For the adopted person, life and love are intimately connected with the experience of loss and I believe this to be true whether the adoptee admits it or not. There's always either an active curiosity about where you came from or a strong denial of any need to know.
If anyone asked me while I was in my teens or twenties if I wanted to know who my birth mother was I would have vehemently said, "No, of course not." It took me over 30 years to realize what I needed to do. It is the adoptee's dilemma, this feeling of belonging and not-belonging, struggling between the need to know and misguided feelings of loyalty and gratitude.
I can never forget the experience I had when I began my search for my mother over 10 years ago. Before I found her, I discovered that her brother was a Jesuit priest who had died rather young at Georgetown University. One day I got in my car and drove down to Georgetown. I visited my uncle's grave and decided to ring the bell of the Jesuit residence. The priest who answered turned out to be not only to be my uncle's classmate but to be his best friend, having grown up with him in Philadelphia.
Father Dineen was a very kind man and I spent the entire day with him listening to the many stories he longed to tell of my uncle and their friendship. After dinner he invited me to his room, "to see some old photos,"he said. As we were about to open the album, it suddenly dawned on me that this would be the first time in my life that I was to see someone related to me.
Just last week I had that experience repeated when I met with my mother's roommate, Sophia, the roommate from here in Baltimore. This was our third meeting since my mother's death, and Sophia said she had brought me a present. She took out a photograph she said she found quite by accident. It was a picture of both my mother and father, cheek to cheek, posing in one of those quick-picture booths. And, I secretly wondered as I studied their faces whether I was there, too, still unseen - or perhaps about to enter that vortex of that whirlpool I had dreamt of, but forever a part of their lives The losses suffered in adoption are also always there, whether we acknowledge them or not.
Those of you not adopted no doubt take for granted the importance of growing up with people related to you, who look and act like you. Adoptees miss that very primal experience. I would suggest it is at the heart of the dilemma of the adopted person who feels on some level that he does not belong in his adoptive family. This does not necessarily have anything to do with either the abundance of love within the adoptive family, or lack of it. It exists quite apart from the material well-being provided by the adoptive family.
In adoption groups you often hear adoptees classify themselves as either good adoptees or bad adoptees. The good ones never searched while their parents were alive, the bad ones were always running away somewhere getting into mischief. But when the adopted person does decide to search, he is acknowledging his not belonging. The adoptee feels himself to be a literal misfit, not quite fitting in, misplaced somehow. In another manner of speaking, he feels himself to be an exile. Belonging and identity are synonymous for the adoptee, but he must initiate his search, or at least acknowledge the desire to search for his identity, in order for the healing to begin.
A priest friend of mine once told me this rather jarring experience he had when visiting a home for emotionally disturbed adolescents in Brooklyn. The priest walked into the home as a young man was singing the Irish ballad, Danny Boy. The young man had his back to the priest. When he finished the priest went over and tapped the young man on the shoulder, thanking him for such a beautiful rendition of the sad song. The young man quickly turned, revealing an Asian face. The priest instinctively laughed: "I thought you were Irish,"he said. The boy's eyes filled with tears and he angrily shouted back: "I am Irish, my name's Michael O'Brien!"
The American Jesuit, John Courtney Murray, considered by many the greatest Catholic theologian America has yet produced, wrote this about identity: "Self-understanding is the necessary condition of a sense of self-identity and self-confidence. The peril is great. The complete loss of one's identity, with all propriety of theological definition, is hell. In diminished forms, it is insanity."
I have to repeat that: "The complete loss of one's identity, with all propriety of theological definition, is hell. In diminished forms, it is insanity."
In the acknowledgment of the truth about loss and the need to belong, a word must be said about anger. The anger of the infertile couple at the loss of their dream: their intended children. The anger of the birth mother at the loss of her child: the relinquishment. And, in recent years we have seen, thank God, the anger of birth fathers whose rights are so often violated in the adoption process.
And most significantly, perhaps, the anger of the adopted person, who feels the extraordinary loss of parents, heritage and genetic connection...who feels this, it must be remembered, as the primal experience of life. For some adoptees, anger remains suppressed; for others, it becomes destructive and even violent.
I can never forget the day I went to the Catholic Home Bureau in Manhattan to see if I could get any information regarding my adoption. The nun, a professional, sat calmly behind the desk, reading from the papers in front of her. She read me an account of my adoption and gave me the non-identifying information I had requested. I knew she was not supposed to tell me my mother's name, but I asked just the same. She said, of course, she could not give me the name. But then asked in a tone of voice that triggered in me a cascade of rage: "Why would you want to know? Didn't you have a good adoption?" And, I realized that at that moment if I had a gun, I would have killed her.
Psychologists tell us anger is a reaction to being hurt, and since adoption always involves loss for each member of the triad, and loss is a deep hurt, is it any wonder that there is a lot of anger permeating adoption? But anger can be a catalyst for positive change. It can wake us up to the adventure of living. It can be the catalyst which brings to consciousness the acknowledgment of the deep loss the adopted person has experienced, and so let him begin the healing process.
And so a word of anger must be raised against what might be called the mark of illegitimacy. Society labels those born illegitimate, bastards. You may think it strange that I, as an illegitimately-born individual, remain ambiguous about this designation. On the one hand, I disdain the state and the church for creating such a designation because of its repercussions. In order for me o be ordained a priest, I had to request special dispensation because bastards could not receive Holy Orders. Now that has recently changed, but the psychological effects of such a designation always remain.
On the other hand, it is argued that the closed adoption system was created to protect the child from the mark of illegitimacy. If that is true (though I am not convinced it is the real reason for sealed records), then I would prefer to be labeled a bastard, but be able to see my birth certificate, than be denied that fundamental right.
"I'll tell you something,"a famous American once wrote a friend in strictest confidence, "I'll tell you something, but keep it a secret while I live. My mother was a bastard, the daughter of a nobleman so-called of Virginia. My mother's mother was poor and credulous, and she was shamefully taken advantage of by the man. My mother inherited his qualities, and I hers. All that I am, or hope ever to be, I got from my mother, God bless her. Did you never notice that bastards are generally smarter, shrewder, and more intellectual than others? Is it because it is stolen?"
So wrote Abraham Lincoln of his mother, Nancy Hanks. But there's still more to the story. Lincoln always feared that his mother never properly married Thomas Lincoln. President Lincoln died before the marriage certificate he had requested years before had been found. And after his death it was found, but some historians now think that document a forgery.
And still, another twist to Lincoln's story. Many people, and according to his closest friend, even Lincoln himself, believed not only that Nancy Hanks never really married Thomas Lincoln, but that Thomas Lincoln was not the President's biological father. A few years back I was touring the South with a friend who was visiting from England. As we were visiting the home of Jefferson Davis, the President of the Confederacy, I remarked to my friend as we waited in line that I couldn't believe they had the gall to put the picture of Abraham Lincoln in the hallway. The guide overheard me and said, "Oh, so many people say the same thing, but that's not Lincoln, it's Jefferson Davis." The resemblance was uncanny. Some historians actually believe that Samuel Davis was the man who fathered both Jefferson Davis and Abraham Lincoln.
I can't fail to mention Jesus himself in this regard, because I believe Jesus knew the mark of illegitimacy. There is ample proof in the Gospel texts to suggest that many believed Jesus to be a bastard, as is asserted in later Jewish apologetic works written to refute Christianity. For those of you who are Christian and have a hard time accepting the account of the Virginal Conception, that is, the belief that Jesus' father was God, and thus easily accept Joseph as Jesus' real father, I would submit you are on shaky ground. Because the Gospels suggest that, for some unmentioned reason, it was obvious Joseph could not have been Jesus' father. This poses a dilemma for the believer: either Jesus was Son of God, or he was, as the Jewish text asserts, the bastard son of a Roman soldier. In any event Jesus would have known what it felt like to bear the mark of illegitimacy.
A word of anger must also be raised against the closed adoption system and sealed records. Closed records, while purporting to insure confidentiality for the birth mother, mean that I as an adopted person have no right to my own name. Sealed records rob me of my name, my heritage, my medical history, and any connection to those related to me by blood. My question is this: Is the practice of closed adoption which separates child from parents without the child's consent, which suppresses knowledge of family heritage and genetic connection, which refuses to reveal the child's name to the child himself, is this in any way different from the methods employed by the institution of slavery? Who can honestly deny that it constitutes, at the very least, a psychological slavery? Can anyone? I don't think so.
And a word of anger must be raised against the myth of confidentiality. Lawyers, social workers and church officials assert that confidentiality was promised to the birth mother, and a promise given can not be breached. But then, I ask, why was my name...the name given to me at birth by my birth mother...my birth mother's surname... why was that name printed on the very adoption papers given to my adoptive parents, if indeed the state wished to assure my birth mother of confidentiality? Why? Because, I would submit, confidentiality for the birth mother was not really ever intended. It's a myth.
There are many more words of anger which shout to Heaven to be heard, but time is running out and I should say a word about Search. The Search is the antidote to the virus of dualist thinking that creates a chasm between the adoptees genetic heritage and its interaction with its environment. Dualism emphasizes the importance of spirit over body, environment over genes. But all true spirituality seeks to do just the opposite: To bridge the chasm; to rejoin what was divided; to do what one great theologian says is the work of all true religion, the renewed bonding of previously separated parts. Or, as never, never... however exalted the soul may be, is anything else more fitting than self-knowledge."
The adopted person's search for his origins is then a religious experience. Another said, "It is a spiritual journey, a pilgrimage of self-knowledge, it is a holy endeavor.
When I met my birth mother, she told me that she had named me for her brother, Tom, who was also a priest. I was thinking about this a few weeks ago, the Sunday after Easter when we read at Mass the story of when the risen Jesus appeared to the disciples, but Thomas was absent. And it's from his refusal to believe the story that he is told by the others that he is forever known as Doubting Thomas. "I'll never believe it,"Thomas tells them, "without probing the nail prints in his hands, without putting my finger in the nail marks and my hand in his side."
That story resonates with me. It's a graphic story, and it could, I suppose, be considered vulgar. But I think it's meant to be so. Thomas, you see, doesn't want to settle for a belief in ghosts. He's telling the others that if they want to settle for disembodied spirits, that's their business, but he'll have nothing to do with it. And so when Jesus appears again, he indeed invites Thomas to explore his body: "Thrust your hands into my wound,"Jesus says, "do not persist in your unbelief, but believe."Thomas, the one whose faith is born of doubt, demands evidence. He wants a "hands on experience;"he's tired of believing in ghosts.
I would submit to you today that the AAC, at age 18, does not want to settle for a belief in ghosts, either. We want evidence, we want to see what is kept secret from our eyes. But coming of age means to risk, it demands courage, and Thomas is filled with courage. The courage to doubt, the courage to question, the courage to search for real bodies...bodies with scars that signify real wounds, real experiences of loss and the desire to belong. Coming of age in adoption has a lot to do with claiming the missing. We, too, are in search for missing bodies, alive or dead. We need a "hands on" experience.
We must fight the influence of Dualist thinking that views the body with such abhorrence. We must arrive at that proper balance of body and soul, matter and spirit, thought and being, heredity and environment. Perhaps, then, coming of age in the world of adoption means to view the adopted person as a sacrament, if you will, of every man's search to find that holy ground where in the fusion of nature and grace is manifest the search for that sacred place where sex and love have intercourse.
Last updated January 14, 1997