The Heart of James 1
If two things can be true at the same time, then I always wanted to be an adoptive mother and I also never thought I’d be an adoptive mother. If a third thing can also be true, then I never expected to be a mother at all.
The heart isn’t so straightforward; our decisions and who we become aren’t based solely on the thoughts we express at the age of fourteen. Thank God.
As a teenager, I told all my friends that I would never be a mother. I felt that was a safe future for me; I joked with friends that I would be the cool aunt and never-married-English professor. But I also really wanted someone to convince me otherwise. I wanted someone to show me that marriage, family, and motherhood mattered. I wanted to believe that I was not as cursed as I felt.
It turned out that the first person who convinced me I could be a mother was me.
In a high school health class, my teacher assigned as essay containing several prompts about the future. That class was blessedly anonymous for me. I’d taken it early, during a district-wide summer school, to have enough room in my schedule for a second extracurricular class the next school year, and none of the other students went to the same high school as me. In this class, where no one knew my past, I imagined a future where I overcame it.
This girl, who kept telling everyone that motherhood wasn’t for her, wrote that she could see herself as a mother. She even embellished: She would mother biological and adopted children. She would put motherhood first.
I wasn’t Catholic. I’d never heard about a “vocation” and the only “calling” I’d heard mentioned in church was for a person to become a pastor and for a sinner to repent. Yet, somehow, God had planted a desire for the vocation of motherhood and for a special call within that motherhood in my heart. I have heard the call to adopt my whole life, but I was also terrified that He meant it. I didn’t believe I, who had experienced a hard and broken mother, could live out this call healthfully.
Maybe this is the most honest and reasonable way to have a calling placed on your life – you both hear it and question how God could mean it for you. At some deep, deep level you know you are completely incapable of fulfilling the call. You hear the Word and respond in truth that you can’t accomplish it. The ‘yes’ and ‘no’ together produces humility, which lodges the call firmly in the heart, where it cannot drift away and cannot be ignored, where God alone can nurture it.
I heard a religious sister on a podcast say once that every sister in the convent ended up there not primarily out of a natural nun-like personality, but out of a profound, howling sense that that they could not go anywhere else.
Out of the dread of grace, we welcome what He plants within us.
I kept that essay for health class. I squirreled it away in a stash that I held onto, pieces I wrote which held some truth I couldn’t yet look in the eye but knew I would either need to live out or lose my faith. God had placed a specific dream of motherhood in my heart. I could ignore Him or I could let Him use it to save my soul.
If every Christian church in America supported one family to adopt one child in foster care, there would be no more orphans in this country. But I don’t know that I’ve ever looked at another family and encouraged them to foster or adopt. How could I ask another family to walk into that fire unless Fire was already calling them there?
Motherhood, especially adopting my girls, has been simultaneously the hardest and most redemptive experience of my life. Their trauma. Reactivating my trauma. And all of it involving motherhood, failed motherhood, and hurts to our femininity. I could never ever have done it unless God had told me over and over and over that I had to. Or rather, that God has told me every day since I first turned over my life to Him that if I asked Him, He would fill this life with the graces to make it possible. I have put this call to adoption on the altar at countless Masses and Jesus has helped me to welcome it.
Because here’s really the one thing I know to be true about vocation. Where God plants a word, He also sends His grace. Receiving His call is following the breadcrumbs of grace right into the hardest and best work of your life.
After we adopted Lilly, we sent out announcements with a verse from the first chapter of James, because for both Chris and I the call to care for the orphan in that chapter rests heavily on us. To ignore that call would have required us to look away, to deny the afflicted, to hoard the many gifts God entrusted to us. To reject that call would have let the fear of motherhood prevail in my life.
I ran across a photo this week taken almost five years ago, our family in a school gym, foster baby on my hip, other children in various states of cleanliness, all of us a little weary from busy weekend after a big week. While I know all the literal and historical elements of the photo, what I see now is the spiritual truth God enacted in us when we said yes to the call to adopt. That audacious, tired, trepidatious family that gave a humble yes to the Word planted in their hearts, God has knitted together and continues to make us healthier, happier, and holier.
The call within the vocation, whatever that is in your life, will draw together woundedness, fear, affliction, and grace. God will accomplish our salvation through our total healing and forgiveness while achieving a glory that is His alone. God enacts His Word specifically in our unique life. It feels like a demand and a miracle at the same time.
Readings for the Twenty-Second Sunday in Ordinary Time (Year B) on the USCCB Website