The practice and theology of adoption Womb-love

Christian Century, Jan 24, 2001 by Jeanne Stevenson-Moessner

FATHER RON meant well. He would never have intentionally excluded some children from his sermon. It was Wednesday mass, and the congregation was primarily children--kindergartners through eighth-graders--with a sprinkling of teachers, administrators and parents. The text was Colossians 1:15: Christ is "the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation."

Father Ron developed his theme: Children look like their parents; Jesus as God's Son reveals what God is like. He gave examples, picking out children: "You look just like your mother. You have her eyes, her nose, her dimple." Or: "You are an athlete just like your Uncle Sam. You have his genes." The point was profoundly simple: We know what God is like by looking at JESUS.

The comparison was not lost on the two third-grade girls seated directly in front of me. Both were dark-skinned, one from India and one from Southeast Asia. Both had Caucasian parents. The more passionately Father Bon spoke, the more pointedly one of the adopted girls shook her head in rhythm with his preaching.

Two-thirds of the way through his sermon, Father Ron realized his miscalculation. Perhaps he remembered that the school had a number of adopted children. He then acknowledged that there were those in the church who were adopted into families, and he asked them to raise their hands. Now the children were confronted with a choice: either hide their identity from the Catholic priest, or reveal an aspect of themselves that some children consider personal or private. Hands went up at half-mast.

Having witnessed this scene, I can well believe German sociologist Christine Swientek's account of another well-intentioned pastor's ineptness. At confirmation class, this pastor spoke about being "children of God" and looked for an example to illustrate this special relationship between father and children. He focused on a boy named Hannes, and said in front of 35 snickering and giggling adolescents: "You should try to imagine what it is like to be Hannes at home--his parents are not his birth parents. Hannes's parents are his adoptive parents who took him and raised him. They do not love him any less."

Hannes was dumbfounded. He did not have the slightest idea that he was adopted. He stood up, went outside, and then ran away. He was first found three months later in juvenile detention for stealing food from a supermarket.

These stories indicate how the church has failed to be sensitive to the reality of adoption and failed to recognize adoption is a paradigm for the church--a "family of faith" made up of people who are not biologically related. (H. David Kirk in Adoptive Kinship has gone further to suggest that the adoptive family could be "the compass" for the mainstream family.)

When Father Ron thought of "family," he thought only of the biological family--unwittingly relegating other kinds of families to a second-class status. The church has often followed society in idealizing and even idolizing the genetically linked family. The scriptures themselves bear evidence of a male preoccupation with his blood lineage.

There is another image of inclusion in the Bible: the image of adoption. The invitation and inclusion of gentiles into the family of God occurs by adoption through Christ, the firstborn. Yet many communities of faith exhibit an unconscious aversion and defensive reaction to the notion of adoption. Adoption is unconsciously seen as an aberration from the norm of the biological family.

Adoption is sometimes considered a joke. Kenneth Kaye remembers that he and his cousins "would tease the younger ones by pretending to let slip the fact they were adopted. In reality, no one was; it was simply a way of saying, `You're different; you'll never fit in.' We inherited the joke from our mothers, who have been recycling it on their baby sister for nearly 60 years."

One adopted boy reported being taunted at school that he didn't know who his father [that is, his birth father] was. Another adopted child felt treated differently by her teacher; the teacher made comments like: "You think because you've gone through one experience in your life [the adoption], you've paid all your dues."

An adoptive mother reported this incident in a grocery store: another shopper came up to her and her adopted son, who was two or three, and said, "He's not your child. He must be adopted."

Because of such insensitivity, Christian parents often hide from their children the fact that their children are adopted. They dread the moment of telling. They know that peers of adopted children may taunt them or pity them. Adopted children can feel that their existence is a "mistake." (For example, referring to a birth mother, one parishioner remarked: "She really is a good girl. She just made a mistake.") Voices lower with the words, "She's adopted."

In both subtle and dramatic ways, North American culture has often positioned adopted children on the margins of society. The church has followed uncritically.

Adoption in the New Testament is the central biblical image for entrance into the family of faith. The crucial passages are Galatians 4:5; Romans 8:15, 23; 9:4; and Ephesians 1:5. (At least three Old Testament texts--Genesis 48:5-6, Exodus 2:10 and Esther 2:7,15--also make adoption a central activity.) From a New Testament perspective, adoption is the paradigm for all who come into the family of Christ through God's adoption. This perspective has ramifications for the counseling ministry of the church, for sermons and Christian education and for the life of Christians in communities of faith.