“The secret of happiness is to live moment by moment and to
thank God for all that He, in His goodness,
sends to us day after day.”
St. Gianna Molla
“Faith is to believe what you do not see.
The reward of faith is to see what you believe.”
St. Augustine of Hippo
(St Peter’s /Rome, Italy / Julie Cook /2018)
“Like a child who fears no danger in his father’s protecting arms,
we must cast ourselves into the arms of our Heavenly Father,
confident that those Hands which sustain the heavens are all powerful
to supply our necessities, to uphold us in temptation,
and to turn all things to our profit.
And why should we not have confidence in God?
Is He not the most powerful as well as the most tender of fathers? …
Do not dwell upon your unworthiness or your failings,
but raise your eyes to God and consider the infinite goodness
and mercy with which He deigns to apply a remedy to all our miseries.
Reflect upon the truth of His words,
for He has promised to help and comfort all who humbly and confidently
invoke His sacred name. Consider also the innumerable benefits
which you have hitherto received from His paternal hand,
and let His bounty in the past inspire you to trust
the future to Him with renewed hope.
Above all, consider the merits and sufferings of Christ,
which are our principal title to God’s grace and mercy,
and which form the treasure whence the Church supplies
the necessities of her children.
It was from a confidence inspired by such motives that the saints
drew that strength which rendered them as firm as Mount Sion,
and established them in the holy city whence they never
could be moved. (Cf. Ps.124:1).”
Venerable Louis of Grenada, p. 404
An Excerpt From
The Sinner’s Guide
“The geographical pilgrimage is the symbolic acting out of an inner journey.
The inner journey is the interpolation of the meanings and signs of the outer pilgrimage.
One can have one without the other. It is best to have both.”
Thomas Merton
(the unhappy traveling Mayor when a loved one leaves the car and she does not / Julie Cook/ 2021)
Recently it’s been hard to ignore, but both the Mayor and Sheriff have developed
a bit of separation anxiety when one of their loved ones gets out of the car
in order to run an errand.
I tend to be the lucky one left behind to sit with the unconsolable two
while their mom or dad runs in to a store.
What started out as a content and happy journey of riding in the car
has slowly morphed into the understanding that a loved one is leaving
while they are being left behind.
And so this latest toddler developmental drama has gotten me thinking.
Our past year, meaning both yours and mine, has been anything but pleasant.
To say it’s been trying is simply putting it mildly.
Anxiety ridden?
Yes.
We’ve been forced to mask up, sanitize until our skin cracks, be vigilant against
an unseen enemy, line up for a questionable shot, forced to become TP hoarders…
We’ve put education on the back burner, we’ve worked and lived in isolation,
we’ve balanced home and work all within the home, we’ve stayed put, stayed apart,
watched helplessly as our government has turned on us, wondered who we are as a nation,
struggled to find new ways to reinvent ourselves, labored to balance our physical
and mental health, locked down life as we knew it, missed out on our favorite activities…
etcetera, etcetera, etcetera…
I think the worst has been the separation.
Physically, mentally and emotionally.
It has been thrust upon us… and the jury is still out as to whether it
has been the right choice.
Chances are, when we look back, we will know it was indeed wrong.
Our seniors have been left alone in their Assisted Living facilities…
often falling ill and even dying alone…as family has not been allowed to visit.
Funerals have come and gone without the attendance of the typical respect of attending mourners.
Schools have shuttered their doors, leaving kids to “learn” remotely, alone.
The very nature of our beings, the social creatures that we are, has been stripped from us.
It has just over a year when this madness began.
This virus that has disrupted the globe, originated in Wuhan, China…
I don’t know a single person who has ever blamed the Asian community for any of this…
The CCP, the Communist Chinese Party is who is to blame…not the Asian people.
So for our news media, and even some governmental leadership, to spin that there is
a surge in crimes against Asian Americans carried out by white suprematists…
what we know as those majority of Trump voters who are simply white conservatives,
is blatantly egregious and a glaring lie.
A disturbed man in Atlanta went on a killing spree this past week, killing 8 people,
near and around Atlanta’s metro area.
His victims were all associated with Asian Spas as either customers or workers.
He claims a sexual addiction made him do such.
Shades of Flip Wilson claiming “the devil made him do it”
And that is what it is…the devil.
The Evil One who reigns supreme.
The young man is an unbalanced “nut job” and not a serial killer of Asian people.
He is not a minion of Donald Trump, contrary to what the news and certain leaders
would have us believe…
all because the former president told us that this current virus is from China.
Of which it is.
Our media and leaders are lying to us by creating ghost scapegoats where no
scapegoats are to be found.
Our journey this year has been hard enough.
If we begin being sucked into believing lies,
the year suddenly becomes heavier and even much more difficult.
Our separation from the Father of all creation is at the root of all our angst.
We have turned our vision from the greater to that of the lesser.
We have turned away from our Creator and turned rather to the mortal man.
Allowing man to become our greater god.
A small god who will always disappoint.
This journey has just become even more miserable…all because of our separation…
Separation from one another but more importantly, the separation from our God.
I think the Mayor and Sheriff are on their way to true knowledge.
When the very one who you put your entire life into their hands leaves you…
it is indeed dire.
Our opting to separate from our God our Father is becoming life ending.
In order to continue this difficult journey…we need God.
And if you find yourself laughing at such a thought or mocking this little proclamation of mine…
you just tell me how you want to keep moving forward if you don’t have Grace to
help you keep going…
Good luck with that.
Seek the Lord while he may be found;
call upon him while he is near;
let the wicked forsake his way,
and the unrighteous man his thoughts;
let him return to the Lord, that he may have compassion on him,
and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon.
For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord.
For as the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are my ways higher than your ways
and my thoughts than your thoughts.
Isaiah 55:6-9
“If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy,
the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.”
C.S. Lewis
(our home in December 2017 during a winter storm / Julie Cook)
As we prepare to move homes…from a house we built to one we did not,
I have become keenly aware of what it means to be rooted as well as somewhat uprooted.
What it means to be sheltered.
To be comfortable.
To feel safe.
Yet that’s not always the case for many of our sisters and brethren.
For many, there is no sense of stability.
No sense of security nor well-being.
So within the melancholy I’m finding in leaving,
there is a greater sense of gratitude.
If a house can feel emotion, which we know it cannot, my desire would be that this house
could feel our deep level of not only a bittersweetness in leaving but more importantly,
that it could sense our level of thankfulness for the years of shelter, safety,
and rootedness it provided.
And so it is within this flood of emotion…the type of emotion that only transition
can bring…of which I know is not coming from the leaving, the going, or the coming that
is the root of my unsettledness…it is the longing I have for “home”—
a longing for a home that transcends this world.
I know that our hearts, none of our hearts, will be at rest until we find
ourselves embraced in the arms of our Father…
(Julie Cook / 2019)
The peace coming from the Holy Spirit is more than relief from suffering,
a sense of well-being, or a sense of equanimity.
It is rooted in a deep sense of home, home amid the cosmos
(which we who have faith know is being at home with God).
Fr. Robert Spitzer, S.J.
from Christ vs Satan in Our Daily Lives
“O Holy Family—the Family so closely united to the mystery which
we contemplate on the day of the Lord’s Birth—guide with your example
the families of the whole earth!”
Pope St. John Paul II
(Bartolome Esteban Murillo / circa 1660 / Hermitage Museum)
Joseph, the man tapped by God to be the earthly father of Jesus,
is more or less an enigma…just as he remains an enigma in
ecclesiastical history.
As a preteen, after Jesus was lost from the family’s caravan having hung back in Jerusalem to
visit the Temple following the family’s pilgrimage for the festival of the Passover,
we simply don’t hear /read much more regarding Joseph or of his presence in the boy Jesus’s life.
By the next time we hear about Jesus, he is a grown man who has a predestined meeting
with John the Baptist for baptism.
It is simply assumed that Joseph must have died, leaving Mary a widow.
And oddly, throughout the ages, artists have more or less depicted Joseph as an older man…
as we know that Mary was a young woman when she was engaged to Joseph.
Perhaps that has been the rationale…Joseph was older and therefore passed
away when Jesus was just an adolescent.
But I wonder…was he really that much older than Mary?
There seems to be more questions about the man Joseph than there are answers.
And perhaps that is all part of the Holy mystery that embraces our lives.
But the one thing I know…
the most important thing that we do know, is that Joseph had to be
quite the man to be chosen by God the Creator to be the earthly father to God’s only son.
The example of a man as to what a father is meant to be…
the type of man that our sons and daughters so desperately yearn for in their lives.
Our children, now more than ever, need their fathers.
Joseph reminds us of this.
“Love is an excellent thing, a great good indeed, which alone maketh light
all that is burdensome and equally bears all that is unequal.
For it carries a burden without being burdened and makes all that which
is bitter…sweet and savory.
The love of Jesus is noble and generous; it spurs us on to do great things
and excites us to desire always that which is most perfect.”
Thomas à Kempis, p. 87
An Excerpt From
Imitation of Christ
“Persevere in labors that lead to salvation.
Always be busy in spiritual actions.
In this way, no matter how often the enemy of our souls approaches,
no matter how many times he may try to come near us,
he’ll find our hearts closed and armed against him.”
St. Cyprian of Carthage
“Christ Himself is our mouth through which we speak to the Father,
our eye through which we see the Father, our right hand through which we
offer to the Father.
Without His intercession neither we nor all the saints have anything with God.”
St. Ambrose
All sorts of things are running through our thoughts today.
Some of us are pleased yet hesitant.
Some of us are sad and resentful.
But what we need to remember is that there is One who is so much greater than
all of this mess.
If you’ve been a regular guest here,
then you already know that I am a big fan of the series The Chosen
It is solely a crowdfunded production.
Since I was afforded the opportunity to watch season 1 due to the giving of someone
who came before me…
I have opted to do the same, I have paid it forward, twice.
Here are just two of the “thank yous” I received…
So on election day…I have found that these types of words transcend the silliness of man…
words of anger, divisiveness, and bickering…all of which cast a pall over the
ways of this world.
So today, the day after, no matter how things turned out for you or me…be it good or bad …
remember, there is One who is so much greater than any of this mess…
Be kind and compassionate to one another,
forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you.
Ephesians 4:32 NIV
“Who can tell me what is most pleasing to God that I may do it?”
St. Kateri Tekakwitha
Rarely if ever in the many millennia of human civilization has there been a people group
who has not committed some atrocity.
American Indians are no exception
Casey Chalk, The Federalist
Kateri Tekakwitha—
Her feast day was July 14th and yet I just recently learned about her and her life.
She was of Algonquin and Mohawk roots.
Kateri’s baptismal name is “Catherine,” which in the Haudenosaunee (“Iroquois”)
language is “Kateri.” Kateri’s Haudenosaunee name, “Tekakwitha,”
can be translated as “One who places things in order” or “To put all into place.”
Other translations include, “she pushes with her hands” and
“one who walks groping for her way” (because of her faulty eyesight).
Kateri was born in 1656 at the Kanienkehaka (“Mohawk”) village of Ossernenon,
which is near the present-day Shrine of Our Lady of Martyrs in Auriesville, New York.
Kateri’s father was a Kanienkehaka chief and her mother was an Algonquin Catholic.
At the age of four, smallpox attacked Kateri’s village, taking the lives of her parents and baby brother,
and leaving Kateri an orphan. Although forever weakened, scarred, and partially blind,
Kateri survived.
Kateri was adopted by her two aunts and her uncle, also a Kanienkehaka chief.
(Kateri.org)
History teaches us that many of the Native Americans contracted smallpox from the Europeans
with some Europeans purposefully infecting resident tribes.
Yet history also teaches us that tribal violence and attacks upon other tribes was
a constant threat to a tribe’s way of life.
A Mohawk war party in 1647 attacked and practically exterminated an Algonquin community.
The Iroquois, who practiced both slavery and cannibalism,
routinely tortured to death captured enemy warriors.
Kateri witnessed the torturing of Mohican warriors who had attacked her Mohawk village in 1669.
(The Federalist)
Kateri, upon meeting Jesus, put all of the difficulties of her past behind her.
Her sole focus became Christ.
Kateri often went to the woods alone to speak to God and to listen to him in her heart
and in the voice of nature.
When Kateri was eighteen years old, Father de Lamberville, a Jesuit missionary,
came to Caughnawaga and established a chapel.
Kateri was fascinated by the stories she heard about Jesus Christ.
She wanted to learn more about him and to become a Christian.
Father de Lamberville asked her uncle to allow Kateri to attend religious instructions.
The following Easter of 1676, twenty-year-old Kateri was baptized.
Not everyone in Kateri’s village accepted her choice to fully embrace Jesus,
which for her meant refusing the marriage that had been planned for her.
Kateri became a village outcast. Some members of her family refused her food on Sundays
because she would not work.
She suffered bullying, as some children would taunt her and throw stones.
She was threatened by some with torture or death if she did not renounce her religion.
Because of increasing hostility from some of her people, and because she wanted to be free
to devote her life completely to Jesus, in July of 1677,
Kateri left her village and traveled more than 200 miles through woods and rivers
to the Catholic mission of St. Francis Xavier at Sault Saint-Louis,
near Montreal.
Kateri’s journey through the wilderness took more than two months.
At the mission, Kateri lived with other Indigenous Catholics.
(Kateri.org)
Katei lived a life dedicated to serving Christ and Christ alone– because of
her virtue, modesty and humility, many Native Americans who knew her referred to
to her as a “Holy Woman.”
Kateri died on April 17, 1680, at the age of 24.
Her last words were, “Jesus, I love You.” Like the flower she was named for,
the lily, Kateri’s life was short and beautiful.
Moments after dying, her scarred face miraculously cleared and was made beautiful by God.
This miracle was witnessed by two Jesuit priests and all the others
able to fit into the room. Many miracles were to follow.
Three people had visions of her in the week following her death.
A chapel was built near her grave, and soon pilgrims began to visit,
coming to thank God for this Holy Woman.
Kateri is known as the “Lily of the Mohawks” and the “Beautiful Flower Among True Men.”
She is recognized for her heroic faith, virtue, and love of Jesus,
in the face of great adversity and rejection.
(Kateri.org)
I learned about Saint Kateri when I read an article by Casey Chalk, a columnist for
The American Conservative, Crisis Magazine, and The New Oxford Review.
The article, Saint Kateri’s Story Dispels The Myth Of White People As Uniquely Evil,
brought to light the story of St. Kateri but it also highlighted the complexities of
early Native American tribes.
Indeed, tribes in the American southeast in the 18th and 19th centuries managed plantations
that “rivaled those of their white neighbors.”
In 1860, citizens of the Cherokee, Choctaw, Cree, and Chickasaw tribes owned more
than 5,000 black slaves.
So much for simplistic narratives about the white,
European oppression of American Indians and people of color.
And whereas our past, be it black, white, red, brown, yellow—slave, freeman or tribal member…
the one underlying thread is a single, yet deeply important component—
it is single fact that we are all the children of one God, one Father,
and as those children we have but one Savior found in Jesus Christ.
Mr. Chalk’s article reminds us that history is complicated—
and that man is perhaps even more complicated than his own history.
Certainly, the United States has an obligation to right past wrongs,
of which there are many, against indigenous peoples.
But we also have an obligation to avoid superficial,
Manichean portrayals of history that unnecessarily divide our nation and
inflame ignorant ideologies of hatred and outrage.
“There can never be peace between nations until there is first known that
true peace which is within the souls of men,” said Black Elk,
a Lakota medicine man who was present at both the Battle of the Little Bighorn
and the massacre at Wounded Knee. Later in life,
he converted to Catholicism and became a renowned catechist.
He, too, is being considered for sainthood.
The humble, pious, and patient witness of St. Kateri Tekakwitha
and Black Elk offer a better way of overcoming our national distemper,
one marked by love, forgiveness, and truth.
But a Constitution of Government once changed from Freedom,
can never be restored.
Liberty, once lost, is lost forever.
John Adams
Once upon a time according to Roman rule, in order to help keep the peace during
the Jewish festival of the Passover, the acting governor over the Roman province
of Judaea,in this particular case being Pontius Pilate,
offered a frenzied mob the right to choose which Roman prisoner should be released…
Two political prisoners– one being a revolutionist, zealot and murderer while the other
was an assumed provocateur accused by the leading Jewish elders of such treasonous acts
of healing on the Sabbath, sorcery,
exorcising demons and threatening to destroy the Temple as well as claiming
to be “king of the Jews”.
So would it be Jesus, the presumptive son of God, or would be it Jesus Barabbas,
a son of the world–a son of Satan?
And yes, a little known fact…according to ancient historians,
Barabbas was most likely named Jesus Barabbas…as Jesus was a common name. “Barabbas means, ’son (bar) of the father (abba)’.
Two Jesus’, one whose father is God and one whose father is Satan.
The people condemned Jesus the Son of God to be crucified and set free the Jesus
who is a son of Satan.””https://truthspeaker.wordpress.com/2015/08/18/give-us-barabbas-2/
Jesus Barabbas and Jesus Christ,
represent a clear choice as far as our spiritual destiny is concerned.
Each represents a different kingdom and a different way of entering that kingdom.
Jesus Barabbas represents the kingdom of this world, meaning trying to find salvation in this world.
This kingdom is entered through human efforts, specifically through the use of human power,
including violence.
Jesus Christ represents the kingdom of God which we enter in meekness through faith.
We must realize that there are no other alternatives for our spiritual destiny.
Every person who ever lives will either choose the one called Barabbas–the kingdom of this world–
or the one called Christ–the kingdom of God.”
“The Clear Choice: Jesus or Barabbas”
By P.G. Mathew, M.A., M.Div., Th.M.
Barabbas sought to bring liberty to the Jews through National Zionism.
Jesus Christ brought liberty to all men through his humbling himself unto death
and thereby establishing his Kingdom in the hearts of men, redeeming them from this fallen world.
“The liberation that anti (instead of) Christ brings comes through the political systems
of this world “He was a political animal who believed in self-redemption,
not in redemption through a messiah. The Bible calls him an insurrectionist,
using a Greek word that means one who rises up against the existing authority and institutions–
a seditionist, in other words.
Barabbas had no interest in trusting in the coming Messiah.
He wanted to become the savior of the Jewish people through rebellion and attempted
to liberate them from the yoke of Rome through political means.”
“The Clear Choice: Jesus or Barabbas” By P.G. Mathew, M.A., M.Div., Th.M.
2000 years later, the frenzied mobs continue demanding the liberation of a kingdom…
yet it is the kingdom of this world.
History teaches us that liberation found in the salvation of worldly pursuits is
fruitless.
We have been warned—
“You adulterous people!
Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God?
Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God.”
James 4:4
“Those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it.”
Edmund Burke
“Mostly it is loss which teaches us about the worth of things.”
Arthur Schopenhauer,
(engadget.com)
I caught the following story on a newsfeed Saturday afternoon.
It was a rainy afternoon and I was bouncing between watching college football games and
peeking in on the day’s news.
The following story is one of those types of stories that catches you from out of the blue
and in turn, leaves you speechless.
I tried to tell my husband about the story but the words wouldn’t come.
Finally, I sputtered that there was a story he’d need to read but that I was
unable to read it out to him nor could I even recap it as it was just “that” kind of story…
because the lump would not leave my throat and the tears were becoming heavy.
Maybe I had the reaction I did because I understood this story.
I understood it on a level that goes beyond simply reading the tale of another.
I knew, as I know, that this is due to my own experiences.
How many of us who have ever lost a loved one yet still had a recording of their voice
lingering on our answering machine or phone’s voice mail?
How many texts or letters do we continue to cling to…reading their words,
reliving conversations, tracing the letters of their individual personal script?
And how many of us have taken painstaking steps to ensure that those recordings
or writings reside in our lives forever…never wanting to lose the sound of the voice
or the written words of the one we have loved and lost….
because if we dare lose that recording or those words, we lose that person all
over again…as the sound of their voice or their written words and
their personal cadence slips aways forever from memory.
I know that when my sister-n-law’s phone fell off their boat this past summer, late one
afternoon when they were at the lake, she was frantic and beside herself with panic.
Her late daughter’s final voice mails were on that phone.
The laughter, the “I love yous”—that surreal sense that she wasn’t truly gone
from her life was dependant upon that phone.
She called us from her husband’s phone frantic to know if we knew how or if she could ever
retrieve those voicemails on a new phone.
We didn’t.
I was almost 26 when my mom died.
I mourned and grieved albeit very stoically on the outside…yet on the inside
I was a wreck.
I grew angry, as I still can find myself doing after all these many years later,
angry that she is not here…not here to listen, to help, to offer me her advice,
her love…
She missed the birth of her only grandchild.
She missed his growing.
She missed so much, as I missed her so much…
So the story about a 23-year-old Arkansas gal who would text her dad’s cell phone every
day after his death, just to text him her thoughts…
talking and texting into a phone with no voice or words responding back…
but a continued effort of reaching out to his phone,
as she desperately needed to connect to her dad…well, her story left me speechless.
She still yearned for her dad… his wisdom, his strength, his presence in her life.
I could understand that yearning.
She would text and share her ups and downs.
The milestones he was missing…
Little did she know that there was someone listening and reading on the other end of that phone.
For four years he read yet never responded with a word.
He let her just talk or write about her world without her dad.
This went on for four years.
And the twist to all of this turns out that the person on the other end of the phone
was a father who had lost his own daughter.
And so now here was a daughter reaching out to her dad…
and here was a dad who had lost his daughter…
who knew that one phone number was now another’s number.
A number of one grieving reaching out unknowingly to another who was grieving.
Below is a portion of the story along with a link to the full story at the bottom.
I text my dad every day to let him know how my day goes,
for the past Four years! Today was my sign that everything is okay and
I can let him rest!
❤️
A 23-year-old woman in Arkansas lost her father four years ago,
but she continued to text his phone every day to update him about his life.
She never got a response from the number, until this week.
Like she did every day, Chastity Patterson, of Newport, texted her father’s number on Thursday,
the night before the fourth anniversary of his death.
“Hey Dad it’s ME,” she said. “Tomorrow is going to be a tough day again!”
In her texts, Patterson recapped all of the highs and lows she had gone through over
the past four years without her father by her side.
She talked about how she beat cancer and has been taking better care of herself
like she promised her father she would.
She talked about how she finished college and graduated with honors and how she’d fallen
in love and had her heart broken,
“(you would have killed him),” she told her father.
“I’m sorry I wasn’t there when you needed me the most,
but one day we will [sic] our chance to watch that game!”
she wrote in her latest text.
This week, Patterson received a response from a man who had been receiving her
daily messages these past four years.
“My name is Brad and I lost my daughter in a car wreck August 2014 and your messages
have kept me alive,” the response read.
“When you text me, I know it’s a message from God.”
“I have listened to you for years and I have watched you grow more than anyone,”
Brad said.
“I have wanted to text you back for years, but I didn’t want to break your heart.”
He said he wished his daughter would have become the woman Patterson is.
“I’m sorry you have to go through this but if it makes it any better,
I am very proud of you!
P.S. I think your father would be happy to know you bought another dog instead of having children.”
Patterson posted the exchange to Facebook.
“Today was my sign that everything is okay and I can let him rest!”
It has since gone viral.
In a later post, Patterson revealed that the loved one she’d lost,
Jason Ligons, was not her biological father, but she called him dad.
“Jason was not my ‘biological’ father, but blood could not make him any closer!”
she said.
“He never missed a school dance, prom, my games and YES he would give me long talks
about my mouth and attitude.
I had to introduce my boyfriends to him (If I was allowed to date)
and he would act like a normal dad and give us the long talk,” Patterson said.
“I shared my messages for my friends and family to see that there is a God
and it might take 4 years, but he shows up right on time!” she added.
I don’t want to wait for our lives to be over
I want to know right now what will it be
I don’t want to wait for our lives to be over
Will it be yes or will it be sorry?
Lyrics by Paula Cole
I was in a bit of a daze, lost deep in my thoughts as I pushed my
shopping cart up and down the aisles of the grocery store.
A familiar song, that was playing over the store’s intercom system, pierced
my melancholy mood with a bolt of searing heat.
Suddenly I was very conscious of my attempting to blink back stinging tears.
“I don’t want to wait…for our lives to be over…”
And just as suddenly, I had to stop myself from shouting it out loud, lest everyone look at
me like some sort of nut was now loose on the cereal aisle.
NO!
No, I don’t want to wait.
I’ve already waited for 60 years.
And in many ways, it is too late.
Most of you probably recall my recent posts regarding my quest to find my birth mother
along with how that abruptly ended via the response of an attorney to a social worker.
“You are in the past, and the past is where you will remain…”
However, biology teaches us that there are two parents involved in the
making of a baby.
A mother ‘and’ a father.
Yes, yes, I know… we are living in odd times when the father may simply
come frozen via a sperm bank…but nonetheless—there is a female and a male involved.
And to me, that female remains the biological mother and that male, the biological father.
The door was obviously gut punched shut regarding my birth mother but the social worker
followed that slamming of a door with a question… “would you like for us to now search for your father?”
Now let’s back up this story a tad.
You may remember me telling you how, at the first of the year, I opted to
participate in the growing DNA puzzle quest…23 & Me
And thus searching for my past, I sent in a vile of spit.
But if the truth be told, that was in part because my doctor suggested that I do so
in order to learn some of my medical history.
Odd things continue creeping up and my doctor didn’t want my son and grandchildren to
have the same sort of out of the blue surprises.
Once the specific DNA company sends you your breakdown, as part of the information
you receive, DNA matches are automatically shared.
And it just so happened that there was a very strong DNA match with a person
who was marked as a first cousin.
Out of the tens of thousands of “relatives”, I had but one close relative match
and that was of a first cousin.
As more tests continue being processed, more matches come your way.
And nearly 6 months after the fact, I still have but one close match.
There is a messaging option on the DNA site so when I saw the numerical link,
knowing this might be my only opening for some sort of answers,
I immediately knee jerked and excitedly reached out to this man.
His smile in the provided thumbnail picture was warm and genuine.
I explained who I was and provided an abbreviated version of my story of adoption,
an adoption of which eventually lead me to look for answers in a DNA test.
I’m sure it is no doubt a surreal feeling to find sitting in one’s inbox
a new and unknown relative has, out of the blue, reached out.
But I was fortunate—he messaged me back.
We exchanged e-mails and began corresponding.
I shared the redacted information from my original adoption file
regarding my birth father and he shared his family’s history.
I told him my father was…
28 years old
A Lt. in a southern state’s State’s patrol
Romantically involved with a 23 yr old nurse in Georgia…
He later shared this story with his two brothers.
Following a few days, he emailed back that both his dad and his dad’s cousin were
28 in 1959 and were lieutenants in their state’s State Patrol…
but that it was the cousin who had dated a nurse in Georgia.
And given our DNA percentage as only cousins and not high enough to be siblings,
he was pretty certain, the cousin was my father.
Sadly both men are now deceased.
There is, however, a daughter, now grown and two years younger than myself.
This cousin of mine has now encouraged her to do the DNA testing.
So when the social worker had asked about searching for my biological father,
I had shared with her about the DNA testing and the connection with this cousin.
She asked if I had a last name.
I did.
Yet the surreal thing throughout all of this process has been the fact that my complete file,
a file full of all the answers to all my questions,
has been sitting right in front of this social worker all along— a person who knows
the names, the states and the dates to my entire life but due to the laws, she
can not share a word.
It’s as if I’m telling her everything she already knows…things I’ve labored and toiled
over discovering yet information that is readily sitting in a dusty old file on the desk
of the person I find myself spilling my guts to.
Well… she called yesterday.
“Julie, do you have a few minutes?”
She begins by telling me that since her office has determined that my birth father is deceased,
they could release his name…
of which she did…
and he is indeed the state patrol cousin.
This story is obviously fluid and on-going.
I have once again reached out to “my cousin” with
this latest information.
I now wait as both he and his family must process this information…
There is a half-sister who must decide whether or not she is ready for
a half-sister she never knew existed.
How they will respond is yet to be determined.
One half of my life’s puzzle is now known.
Yet, I wonder if this will be welcomed news to this unsuspecting family
or will it be just too much?
I went from feeling a euphoric sense of joy following the news the social worker shared
to that of a guarded sense of trepidation.
And in all of this, the irony came flooding over the intercom system of
a grocery store with its choice of song.
And I couldn’t help but notice…
So open up your morning light
And say a little prayer for I
You know that if we are to stay alive
Then see the peace in every eye
She had two babies, one was six months, one was three
In the war of ’44
Every telephone ring, every heartbeat stinging
When she thought it was God calling her
Oh, would her son grow to know his father?
I don’t want to to wait for our lives to be over
I want to know right now what will it be
I don’t want to wait for our lives to be over
Will it be yes or will it be sorry?
He showed up all wet on the rainy front step
Wearing shrapnel in his skin
And the war he saw lives inside him still
It’s so hard to be gentle and warm
The years pass by and now he has granddaughters
I don’t want to to wait for our lives to be over
I want to know right now what will it be
I don’t want to wait for our lives to be over
Will it be yes or will it be sorry?
You look at me from across the room
You’re wearing your anguish again
Believe me I know the feeling
It sucks you into the jaws of anger
So breathe a little more deeply my love
All we have is this very moment
And I don’t want to do what his father
And his father, and his father did
I want to be here now
So open up your morning light
And say a little prayer for I
You know that if we are to stay alive
Then see the love in every eye
I don’t want to to wait for our lives to be over
I want to know right now what will it be
I don’t want to wait for our lives to be over
Will it be yes or will it be sorry?
Paula Cole
“But the stars that marked our starting fall away.
We must go deeper into greater pain,
for it is not permitted that we stay.”
Dante Alighieri, Inferno
(a wedding day in 1983)
We’ve been talking recently about prayer…
but I thought we’d take a little break while I continue working on putting something uninformed for
us to use as our “prayer” tool
Heather, Salvageable and IB all added some great words yesterday, so I’ll compile our composite…
and throw something out to us next week.
I did want to offer an update on a few other sundries but first, a little back story as this
will be a two-part post–in part to keep things relatively brief.
You see that grainy picture up above?
Well, that picture is from a very hot late summer’s day back in 1983.
My mom is happily looking on as my godfather, the priest who was to conduct that day’s wedding,
came to the “brides” room, in the basement of the church, where all the girls were getting ready
for that day’s big event…
A 23-year-old me had stayed up late the night prior in order to write a long letter.
A letter of gratitude and love between a goddaughter to her godpoppa…
I had slipped the letter under his office door early that morning, long before the
big day’s event was to unfold.
He had read it and came to find me.
Ours is a long convoluted story of a relationship that began when I was barely 15.
It was a relationship between a father and daughter who were neither to the other…
He had 4 children and I had a father…yet we both knew God had a hand in this
mismatched union of two unlikely individuals—as I was considered a 5th child and he was
a surrogate father…a true God-parent.
It was a relationship that began perhaps as happenstance but was actually Divinely conceived.
I know that God knew I would need a guide…much like Dante with his guide Virgil—
Virgil leading Dante through his journey through hell—while The Dean guided me through my own
tumultuous life….that of adolescents, adoption, and dysfunction.
Something you should know…we were both adopted individuals.
And whereas that may seem coincidental, the relationship was God-given as there is a great
deal buried in the heart of an adopted individual….the Dean had lived that and knew
I was just in the middle of mine.
I needed not only guiding but I needed healing.
A literal laying on of hands with an anointing of oil and serious prayer.
Dean Collins had had his time of living with those holes in his life…and he helped
me to see, soothe and heal my own.
Shortly following my leap into blogdom 6 years ago…
I wrote a post about that very adoption.
I reread the post yesterday and went back in to clean it up a tad as I have hopefully
gotten a bit better at this thing called blogging and perhaps it flows a bit more easily …
It is a post that explains some of my life growing up adopted…with a nod to the story
(a different early post) of my adopted younger brother’s spiral into darkness and our family’s
sad dysfunction from that darkness.
He could never come to terms with having been given up for adoption despite having been
an infant at the time and yes, eventually committed suicide despite my parent’s desperation
to find every sort of help available—- up to granting him an annulment—
the first annuled adoption ever in the state of Georgia.
In the post, I also explain how I reached out to Georgia’s Adoption Reunion Registry
in order to receive nonidentifying information regarding my “case”…
Yet when the papers arrived, I received only a copious amount of bewildering questions.
More painful questions rather than fulfiling answers.
Something that wasn’t available nearly 10 years ago to the general populace wishing to glean
information regarding ancestry and or unknown medical issues.
And so I took the two tests that are available for the curious.
Ancestry and 23 and Me.
The latter’s results came in this week.
The genealogy is on the money…English / Scotch / Irish….nearly through and through.
The results also provide a list of those individuals in their pool of testers whose DNA
links to your own…
be it parents, siblings, cousins…on down the line…
meaning that there are relatives…relatives either known or unknown…
And here is where we will end Part I of this long and odd individual’s tale…
Oh—
the man in that picture up above, that man with that mischievous
twinkle in his eye…
well, he passed away two years ago and that young girl is now knocking
on the door of 60.
When I went to bed the other night carrying the burden of what
I should or should not do…
wrestling with the idea of initiating a search for my biological parents…
in large part because I want some solid information about my past to
give to my son and now my grandchildren…
I lamented how I wished my godpoppa was here to continue with his guidance…
And so the following morning when I pulled out those now 9-year-old papers
from my initial non-identifying adoption case packet,
out fell a printed copy of a 9-year-old email.
It was a letter written to my Godfather from a biological cousin
he had found when, in his mid 80’s, he discovered while searching for his
biological family.
The letter spoke of his long-deceased mother and the difficult decision she,
as a young unwed woman bore in the 1920s in having to “give” her infant son “away” —
but as to how one day…they would again meet…and she would embrace him with a lifetime of
love that had been stored away in her heart.
Seems my “Virgil” continues guiding me during this roller coaster journey of mine…
out of the Inferno and Purgatorio, as I work my way to the light of Paradiso…
always pointing me back to the place I truly belong–in the arms of
my loving Heavenly father—our Omnipotent Father…Abba
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