The Evidence of Belonging

The Evidence of Belonging--June 29, 2017

"For all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God. For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received a spirit of adoption. When we cry, 'Abba! Father!', it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God; and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ--if, in fact, we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him." [Romans 8:14-17]

My son asked me a question the other night that I knew I would one day have to answer. I knew for a long time, from the beginning, really, that it would be coming, but I had hoped might not form on his lips for another few years--not because I wanted to keep secrets or hide something from the boy, but because I feared failing him with an answer that was inadequate for his five-going-on-six-year-old mind.

My son asked me, quite directly, sitting up from his blankets in the darkness of his room after the lights had been switched off for bedtime, "Who is my real daddy?"

The moment had been building for some time. He had been noticing differences over the last few months, or maybe a year, and wondering why his skin was so beautifully brown, while my wife and I have the same pale pink-white skin of our northern European ancestors.  He had been observing for some time how he and his sister have the same curly dark hair, while the grown-ups in the house have hair that is straight, lighter brown, and graying.  He knew little pieces about an infant brother and a toddler sister who lived elsewhere, but his precocious mind had never pushed further beyond thinking it strange that they lived in different places before being overcome by interest in some toy or other distraction before.  He had had flashes of memory from when he had lived with his foster mother, but was for the first time pulling at the thread that lay underneath them.  And for the first time, the question arose about who had given birth to him... and whether that also meant there was another person he should have been calling Mommy... or Daddy... all this time.

And so the question there, up in the darkness of his room, "Who is my real daddy?" which is another way of asking, "Where do I truly belong?"

Well, where to even begin?  My son is five--and there is only so much reality that any of us can bear at once.  Trust is important, and so I could not lie to him.  Nor was it fair to cast his biological parents as villains--that is unfair to him, and to them, as well. And so, this week, the conversation began--one I am sure will be revisited and rehashed, reopened and reconsidered over the rest of his life--in the darkness of a five-year-old's bedroom.

"Yes," I told him, there was indeed another man and another woman who had been his birth parents.  Yes, they were real, and yes, when the time was right sometime we could look them up and know them some day.  Yes, it is true that there was a time "before us," a time even before his earliest recollections, and yes, that realization made our collective picture of the world infinitely more complex than it had been just a few hours before. Those things were all true, and they had to be spoken--to remove the possibility of lying to my son, to affirm the solid and real trust we already have between us, and to allow the groundwork to be laid for whatever comes one day when my son wants to know or meet those other faces that will look more like his than my own.

But at the same time, I told my boy, it is love that makes this family. He belongs in this family, and I belong to him as well, because love binds us to each other, and such love will not let us go.  It is love's claim that makes it true to say, "Well, even though it is accurate that other people were responsible for your being born, I am your daddy, really and truly, because of love"--because love is more essential than chemistry, than biology, or even than what genetics say. 

Our whole family is staked on a gamble, I must admit--the four of us are bound up in a grand wager that love is more powerful than the differences of biology, chemistry, race, or the cookie-cutter social construct of what families are "supposed" to look like.  Up until this week, I suppose I had been keeping the terms of that bet pretty close to the vest, but now it is out there for my son to know, too.  We have staked our lives on the notion that love can meaningfully make me this boy's father, and he my son, even though he does not share my DNA and I cannot share all of what it will feel like for him to grow up as a young black man in this time and place.  We have staked our lives, mine and his as well, on the hope, however absurd or flimsy it may seem against the cold, hard facts of chemistry, that a promise can last, can hold, can endure, as sure and true as the bonds of biology.  It is all pinned on the strength of a promise and on the durability of love.

I know that there will be many more rounds of conversation with him, and with his sister, as the months and years go by.  I know, too, that there will be bitterness as well as sweetness in those future conversations, and that a bell has now been struck that cannot be un-rung.  I know, too, that I have given my boy the ammunition, some day in a teenage fit of outrage, to say, "You're not my REAL dad!" or "You're not my REAL mom!" to my wife, and that one day those words could be weaponized without him realizing the scars they will leave on our hearts.  But I also know two other things from that conversation lit only by the hallway chandelier. For one, I know there is no more possibility of some fear-driven impulse to hide or cover up the truth, which would have only delayed and magnified the possibility for destroying trust.  And I know this, too: that night, having taken in as much of the answers which he had asked for as his five-year-old mind could grasp, my son had me sleep next to him in his Ninja Turtles blanket, and he rested his head in the crook of my arm while we slept.  And in the morning, he called me Daddy as he always has.

And that, ultimately, is how I know that I am his daddy.  That is how I know he is my son: his own voice speaks that truth, and as the words come out of his mouth, the promise holds and love endures.  His voice calling to me, "Daddy..." is the evidence that, for whatever heartaches or struggles are yet ahead, whatever failures will be mine or mistakes I will make, love is strong enough to create belonging apart from chemistry or biology or social expectation.  It is love that creates the belonging.

It is the same for us as the children of God.

In this ancient letter we call the epistle to the Romans, the early church made a radical claim: that biology and chemistry were no longer definitive in creating belonging.  In fact, Paul would say, they never really had been, except that we had acted like tribe and clan and race and ethnicity and biology and cookie-cutter-thinking were the defining powers that drew the lines.  Paul the apostle dared to envision that God was creating a new kind of family, one that included the biological descendants of old Father Abraham and Mother Sarah, but also included people from every other place, every other tribe, every other color and clan.  And in this new kind of family, held together by the Spirit who moves us and leads us to one another, we no longer depend on just "making more babies" to continue a family line.  The church does not grow by birthing new members, but by welcoming an infinite variety of faces alongside us for the journey as children of the same God of all. That means, in a very real sense, the thing we call "church"--despite the fragmentation and schism, despite the persistence of 11:00am on Sunday morning being the most segregated hour in America, as the old observation goes--this lumbering institution that T.S. Eliot once compared unfavorably to a hippopotamus, this thing called "church" is really a two-thousand-year and counting experiment in the gamble that the love and promise of Christ really are strong enough to create belonging... for all.

Now, to be utterly honest, most of the those twenty centuries have revealed that we Christians do not really believe that love is stronger than differences in nationality, race, skin color, language, biology, chemistry, or adherence to cookie cutter expectations.  We have fallen, again and again, back into the old beliefs that such things get to draw lines between us. We have doubted, over and over, that the love and promise of God can hold together people who share nothing else in common except that they are beloved of God and claimed by Christ.  We separate ourselves into smaller and smaller pie wedges of denominations and worship styles, ethnicities and political niches, that we act as though we really do not believe that there is anything powerful enough to create belonging across all of those boundaries.  We are, like a frightened five-year-old in the dark of a late Monday night in June, afraid that the truth of our differences is too powerful, too strong, too real, and that our hopes of real belonging were all just wishful thinking.  We are afraid that the gamble on the power of love is lost.

But then here are these ancient words from Paul, a Greek-speaking Jewish Christian whose skin would have been darker and hair curlier than mine, who dared to reach across all the boundaries he could have imagined in his day, to me, and to you on this day, and to say, "But God has not given up on this dare--the living God still calls us children."  And beyond that, Paul says, when we listen to our own voices calling on this same God, "Abba!"--Daddy!  Papa!--there is the evidence of our belonging.  It is the evidence that you belong, and I belong, and everybody else moved by the Spirit to call out as sons and daughters call out in the darkness and fall asleep in the crooks of arms they trust.  It is love that creates the belonging, not biology.  It is the love of God that has claimed us, despite all the heartbreaking ways we still divide ourselves or think it is in our power to exclude others who are still children in the same family whether we like it or not, and it is the prompting of God's own Spirit that coaxes the word from our lips, "Abba!" by the light of the new day.

So... how do I know--like deep down in my bones, know--that I belong?  And what will remind me that you belong, too--and countless others regardless of whether they fit my cookie-cutter picture?  We will listen for the Spirit prompting our voices to call on the living God like we really do belong.  And we ourselves then will become the evidence that the dare was worth taking, and that the power of God's promise is strong enough to hold together all of our varied faces in love.

Abba, God whose child I dare to believe I am, let me rest in the crook of your arm, and let me find there the space for all this human family, too.