Adoption, An Amazing Gift of Love

Presented to the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Huntington

December 9, 2007

Rev. Paul Ratzlaff

 

Children bring us so much joy – and some grief. It may have been Sam Levenson who said it first: “Insanity is hereditary; you get it from your children.”[1]

On the other hand … “A little girl … climbed up on the lap of Dr. Dewitt Talmadge [an older minister like myself] and looked at his white hair and wrinkles and then asked, ‘Did God make you?’ ‘Yes,’ he said.

“Then she asked, ‘Did God make me too?’

“Dr. Talmadge said, ‘Yes.’

“’Well,’ said the little girl, ‘don’t you think God’s doing a better job now than God used to?’”[2]

Today we celebrate those among us who have committed themselves to adopting children into their families. What a gift of love it is to welcome another being into your home! 

A Polynesian song sings from the perspective of the child arriving on earth. The words express the “dislocation” that any newborn may experience, but the words are especially apt for a newly adopted child.

I have witnessed many ways in which UUs have decided to “offer their hearts as food for another.” Some have tried every which way to conceive a baby. After years of frustration, endless visits, having sex by the calendar, drugs and procedures, they have decided to adopt a child born to another mother. In another case, a couple conceived when they were still teenagers. Way too young, they gave the baby up for adoption. After they married and had two biological children, they decided to adopt a third child. Yet in another family, the father adopted the child that the wife brought into their second marriage. (Kind of reminds you of Joseph who adopted Mary’s son, Jesus.) Yet another family opened their hearts after they watched a TV documentary that revealed the inhuman conditions in the Romanian orphanages. They were so horrified to see babies with no human contact. Their hearts led them to adopt several of two of these children. These are some of the ways I have witnessed UUs who have decided to adopt. All of them speak of profound love.

I have also witnessed some adoption heartbreaks. Laws changing, countries closing their doors, birth-mothers deciding to reverse releasing their birth child, all lead to heartbreak – for the bonds of love already connected the prospective adoptive parents with children that had become “family.” Like a still-birth, a miscarriage, sudden death syndrome, the pain of this loss can be very deep. Too often, the grief goes unmarked, however.  May we be mindful of this loss among us.

When, on the other hand, decisions are made, investigations completed and procedures met, and the life of this child is placed in our arms – what a glorious moment! In the words of the Universalist Unitarian minister, Ken Patton:

When one baby is born it is the symbol of all birth and life, and therefore all … must rejoice and smile, and all … must lose their hearts to a child. (Kenneth L. Patton, From Man is the Meaning)[4]

Of course, a child brings as much love as a parent gives. Remember the song, “love is a circle, it knows no bounds, the more you give the more comes around.” And the children’s song by Malvina Reynolds “Magic Penny.” It contains the lines, “Love is something if you give it away, give it away, give it away. Love is something if you give it away, you end up having more.” As another observed, “The love we give away is the only love we keep.”[5]

Our children teach us, as we teach them, if we will attend. Already David and Ramona have remarked how Kayla has become their teacher as well.

The author, Sue Monk Kidd, tells of a lesson she learned from her daughter.

“I just stand there and shine,” she told me. I’ve never forgotten that response. (in When the Heart Waits)[6]

Greeting people outside our front door, I love it when a child brings me something to show me. Often it’s something that I would normally look past, a berry, a pebble, a feather. Ah, to see again with the eyes of a child, to re-enter that imaginative, playful consciousness.

When I was a child, bored with having to sit through the adult Sunday service, I would play with my mother’s hands. This reminiscence of Annie Dillard’s reminded me of that gift of childish imagination, which we adults can access, if we invite it.

Mother let me play with one of her hands. She laid it flat on a living-room end table beside her chair. I picked up a transverse pinch of skin over the knuckle of her index finger and let it drop. The pinch didn’t snap back; it lay dead across her knuckle in a yellowish ridge. I poked it; it slid over intact. I left it there as an experiment and shifted to another finger. Mother was reading Time magazine.

I refashioned the ridge on her index-finger knuckle; I made the ridge as long as I could, using both my hands. Moving quickly, I made parallel ridges on her other fingers – a real mountain chain, the Alleghenies; Indians crept along just below the ridgetops, eyeing the frozen lakes below them through the trees. (In The Annie Dillard Reader)[7]

Now I don’t want to make too much of this – I don’t want to romanticize childhood – because, surely, love is actually lived in the routines, the dailyness, the emotional ups-and-downs, the minor crises that constitute our everyday lives. 

The poet, Susan Griffin, speaks to this side of love in her poem “Love Should Grow Up Like a Wild Iris in the Fields.”

That, too, is love. Even in this real life, love can be present. Robert Johnson, a Jungian psychologist writes:

Stirring the oatmeal is a humble act – not exciting or thrilling. But it symbolizes a relatedness that brings love down to earth. It represents a willingness to share ordinary human life, to find meaning in the simple, unromantic tasks: earning a living, living within a budget, putting out the garbage, feeding the baby in the middle of the night. To “stir the oatmeal” means to find the relatedness, the value, even the beauty, in simple and ordinary things, not to eternally demand a cosmic drama, an entertainment, or an extraordinary intensity in everything … it represents the discovery of the sacred in the midst of the humble and ordinary. (In We)[9]

What a gift such constancy is in the life of a child as it grows into its own being! Stirring the oatmeal – that, too, is an amazing gift in its own way.

Finally, I want to celebrate another aspect of this amazing gift of love: the willingness to launch another being to a destination, which in the normal cycle of life, we will not see. A favorite reading when we welcome a child is Kahlil Gibran’s. He speaks to parents, “You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.

“The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and [s]he bends you with [her] might that [her] arrows may go swift and far.

“Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness, for even as he loves the arrow that flies, so he loves also the bow that is stable.”

We never know, even when we think we do, where the spirits of our children will take them. We pray that they will go “swift and far.”

The poet, Richard Wilbur, expresses this prayer in his poem “The Writer.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ah, what an amazing gift we give, and receive from life, when we give our hearts to a child, be it as adoptive parents, natural parents, godparents, surrogate parents, teachers, mentors, coaches, whatever. In whatever way we love children, it is precious! “Love is a circle it knows no bounds, the more we give, the more comes around. Love is inside waiting to break out. It lives in us; it’s beautiful.”

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