"Separation..............."

Beth and I are driving to Lexington later today, attending a party celebrating our third grandson’s graduation from high-school. It’s yet early morning. She’s still in bed. The old man’s brain is yet a bit sluggish, but a short chapter in that psychologist’s book just consumed has my thoughts in a bit of a spin, my mind pondering the secrets we all hide. While this fellow offers advice to others regarding their marital status, he speaks of learning he was adopted, such revelation passed along by an analyst who was part of his residency training, a friend of his estranged wife’s therapist. I confess to smiling at the whole scenario, but the details concerning his eventual reconnection with his birth mother brought to recall a number of similar stories within my own extended family. One of my paternal grandmother’s sisters was actually the oldest girl’s daughter, a fact passed on to me without any explanation long after their death. Each of my maternal aunts gave birth to a baby out of wedlock, the younger somehow permitted to keep hers, the older, for whatever reason, denied the same privilege. Nowadays that sort of event is probably less common, the stigma it carried in decades past no longer with us; but, in finding mercy for mistakes made, it seems we have opened the door in other ways, many among us separated from parents and siblings through no choice of our own. The woman who lives in the house next to us, twenty-two years old with a son who does not know his real father, she, herself, only recently entering into the bonds of matrimony with the young man she has been living with the past year or so, and he, indeed, the product of but another broken home, a perfect example of where we stand as a nation. Working in the yard yesterday, we learned from her of how she left her mother and an abusive step-father when she was sixteen, just reconnecting somehow with her biological father and other siblings in the last few weeks. I speak out of sadness, not judgment, that spiritual umbilical cord shared in any manner seemingly a vital part of our identity. Whether it always knows that supportive flow of love needed by all, or not, humanity being humanity, we recognize that it should; and it is but one more reason why each of us, whether we admit it or not, search for that relationship renewed with the Father we lost in the very beginning of this mess. Hopefully, divine opportunity will present itself for witness here in this co-existence shared with our neighbors……