The Adoptee and The Mother as Sacred Beings -- How Loss Transforms Us

I first read Mircea Eliade’s book The Sacred and the Profane in a religion class I took as a freshman at Kenyon College. I’m pretty sure if I’d stayed there, at Kenyon, I would have majored in religion, but people in my family didn’t study religion, they studied English, and so I went down the road most traveled because it felt safe. The irony, of course, was that when I found my paternal birth family, I learned that religion was a major part of their lives, but that’s another story.

I’m working on a book about living close to nature, close to self, and I’m rereading Eliade’s book. It occurred to me as I was reading that this book could turn the experience of mother/child separation on its head. I have noticed that people who have lost their mother or their child at birth because of relinquishment or, in the case of the Mexican/American border, for example, theft, are generally different from those who did not have this kind of experience.

You could say they are damaged. Broken. Fucked up.

You might come to those words because you see they have, or that you have, an inability to focus, a tendency towards depression, anger, seclusion. You might see those who lost their mother or their child because of relinquishment/separation/theft as less than because they can’t seem to get their acts together. What’s wrong with you? That happened years/decades ago? (Or, what’s wrong with me?)

So many adoptees and birth mothers tell me they feel bad about themselves, inherently bad, like—they not only feel bad: they are bad. Rotten. Ruined. They are normal-looking people walking around with a poisoned apple wedged in their belly that eats at their guts, heart, and brain.

The suffering of the separated comes from many places, from the unnatural act of mother/child amputation, the physical and mental damage this kind of action causes, and the suffering also comes from a lack of societal mirroring. It’s one thing to grieve in ways that society understands, and it’s another to grieve something that others see as no big deal, as something for which you should feel lucky instead of suicidal.

Nancy Verrier named the damage for the adoptee as the primal wound, and, in my twenties, when I read her book I felt tremendous relief. There was a name for my problem! It wasn’t me that was crazy! It was the primal wound that had me dropping out of colleges, quitting jobs, running, always running. I was not alone!

And yet.

I was still alone for the larger world had no idea what the primal wound was. The larger world was a place in which I did not fit because I had the primal wound and the population of the larger world did not.

I may lose you here, but I’m going for it because this is my blog and I can write what pleases me.

In Christianity, the stigmata are visible wounds that correspond to the crucifixion wounds of Jesus. St. Francis of Assisi is said to be the first person to become a stigmatic. Oh, the holy wounds! Oh, how they connect the bearer to all that is amazing and horrifying about living in the world in a human body!

Eliade wrote, “Man becomes aware of the sacred because it manifests itself, shows itself, as something wholly different from the profane. To designate the act of manifestation of the sacred, we have proposed the term hierophany. It is a fitting term, because it does not imply anything further; it expresses no more than is implicit in its etymological content, i.e. that something sacred shows itself to us. It could be said that the history of religions—from the most primitive to the most highly developed—is constituted by a great number of hierophanies, by manifestations of sacred realities. from the most elementary hierophany, e.g., manifestation of the sacred in some ordinary object, a stone or a tree—to the supreme hierophany (which, for a Christian, is the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ) there is no solution of continuity. In each case we are confronted by the same mysterious act—the manifestation of something of a wholly different order, a reality that does not belong to our world, in objects that are an integral part of our natural “profane” world.”

He wrote, “The sacred tree, the sacred stone are not adored as stone or tree: they are worshipped precisely because they are hierophanies, because they show something that is no longer stone or tree, but the sacred, the ganz adere.

Ganz adere. The wholly other.

What if mother/child separation is something of a wholly different order? What if it is a reality that does not belong in our world? What if, then, that those who have this experience are no longer an integral part of the natural “profane” world and become hierophonies because they show something that are no longer mother or child, but the sacred, the ganz adere?

What if the children at the Mexican/American border are ganz adere? What if their loss makes them portals to another world, one which not everyone has such complete access to but a thing which everyone will experience in their lives? What if these children live and carry grief in a way that forever both separates them from and unites them with humanity?

What if this experience, this knowing, makes them sacred beings?

How would we treat them then?

What would we say?

Rilke said every angel is terrifying.

What do you say?