From the Rector

Dear Friends in Christ,

As some of you know, Karrie and I are out on a short trip with the boys. It’s good to get away, even for a brief time, but it’s been a little strange in talking with folks about the trip. For example, at the barber shop, the stylist asked where we were going. I said, for a wedding.

This is where it gets complicated! She asked a logical next question, “Who is getting married?” I reached for some shorthand answer and a convoluted conversation ensued.

I am going to be the officiant for the boys’ birth mother’s wedding. She’s found a wonderful guy and her life has calmed down in an amazing way. She knows that she couldn’t raise the boys, even though she’s more settled than ever, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t love them.

When we adopted, we decided on an open adoption. That is one in which you keep up some form of contact with the birth family. The degree of openness depends on each circumstance. In our case, we’ve managed to keep regular visits, notes, and the like as a regular part of life. We came to the conclusion that the boys’ needed more love from more people.

So fast forward to this week. 

What could have just been a trauma for their family, for the boys, and for the birth mother has become a new story. It’s not one in which one story is ruptured or abruptly ended and another starts. It’s more complicated. It’s one in which one story of love, of the desire for family, interweaves with the story of another family struggling with how to love when it seems like nothing will make it possible to hold family together.

So, God does what God does. God takes stories of potential loss, brokenness, and trauma and blends them into something new. God calls strangers to look at one another, across their differences and challenges, and find that love makes a family. Jesus calls his beloved disciple, at the cross, to look toward Mary and instructs him to “Behold your mother.” Then he says to the Blessed Mother, of the beloved disciple, “Behold your son.” He forges a new family there in the midst of the grief and loss.

So, we’re heading out on the road. The boys have their tuxedos so they can be ring bearers and groomsmen. I’ve got my cassock and a stole so that I can bless a new marriage, a new beginning, and new possibilities. 

Out of shared needs and longings, God made some kind of new family possible. God is always pointing toward a way for love to heal, to bring us together, and to bind us one to another. God is always at work forging new families, new relationships, and new possibilities in a world where grief makes hope seem stale.

Hope. Love. Faith. These are words that we brush past too often. They can become hollow pablum. Yet, sometimes, we get those moments in which God shows us more of their real meaning. It’s often real meaning that’s hard to explain at the barbershop though!

This weekend, we will try to add a new experience, new memories, to the story of love and meaning that the boys are learning to tell. Each of us, day by day, is called to something like this. We’re called to find ways to add to the story of God’s love which people come to know through our lives, in all their messy, holy complexity.

May God continue to add to each of our stories of love, loss, healing, and hope as he calls us ever forward into the messiness of that love.

Yours in Christ,

Fr Robert