“You learned so early how dangerous people can be,” my therapist (who is also adopted) says to me, as I feel a spark of mutual understanding pass between us, heart to heart. On the surface, she is referring to the fact that I had been placed with adopters who were not safe. On a deeper level, however, that spark contains our shared knowledge through painful experience that relinquishment and adoption, even in the best of circumstances, convey a catastrophe of cosmic proportions to an infant’s freshly developing nervous system.

To an infant, mother is a cosmos, and when she cannot be found, every cell of the infant’s body, every sense impression empty of her presence, registers the loss. At a preverbal level, the infant internalizes the message that life cannot be trusted, that existence itself has betrayed it; therefore, nothing is safe.

And yet, we had to go on.

Placed with genetic strangers, we learned to adapt to survive, to mirror others in the absence of the continuity and depth of mirroring only our mothers and biological family could provide. In the process, we became someone other than who we were when we were born. We lost not only our mothers, our families, and our basic sense of relational safety, therefore; we left behind a vital part of ourselves.

In both the Hebrew and Christian scriptures, the desert evocatively symbolizes a place set apart from the conventional assumptions and workaday world of family, culture, and society—a place of transformation and revelation, where true self-knowledge is gained. And of course, throughout the Judeo-Christian tradition, no self-knowledge is complete without knowledge of God—or more accurately, without a breakthrough to discovering who we are in the loving knowledge of God: Jesus, guided by the Holy Spirit into the desert for forty days, plunged into the full depth and breadth of all that underlies human temptation to sin, and emerged attended by angels, readied for his salvific mission. The prophet Elijah, utterly dejected by the apparent failure of his labors and hunted by Queen Jezebel, escaped to the desert wanting to die. Instead, an angel roused him and sent him on a forty day’s journey to Mount Horeb, where he encountered God in a gentle whisper and was revived and sent forth once again. Led by Moses, the Israelites wandered through the desert for forty years, enduring many trials on their way to discovering who they are as God’s people. In light of the particular challenges I face as an adoptee, however, my attention is first drawn to the far less dramatic forty years Moses spent in the desert region of Midian, before he encountered God in the burning bush.

Moses fled from Egypt to Midian—where he knew no one and no one knew him—after his own biological kinsfolk rejected him when he tried to intervene in a conflict between two Hebrew slaves, while Pharaoh sought to kill him for murdering an Egyptian. He married Zipporah, the daughter of a local shepherd and priest, and named their first child Gershom (a stranger there in Hebrew), as he cried out, “I am a stranger in a foreign land” (Exodus 2:22). In Midian, Moses came to the painful recognition that he is a displaced person, a “stranger” on multiple levels, right down to his basic sense of identity, since he could neither identify with his biological kin nor with the people of the Egyptian princess who raised him. As such, while it is anachronistic to identify Moses as an adoptee according to modern understandings and practices, he nonetheless poignantly embodies the central conflicts of adoptee identity: If I am neither wholly this nor that, who am I? Where do I belong? Do I even have a place in this world?

As a twice-relinquished, twice-adopted person, I grew up having to repeatedly take off one identity only to put on another, determined by circumstances beyond my control as my primary relationships kept changing, with each change reflecting another “me.” And yet, for most of my life, I had to mask the deep sense of fragility I felt, of doubting not only who I am but even whether I am real in the first place. I lived inside a false sense of coherence, a false self-identity—a fragmentation that could only be healed by first entering the desert of the radical incoherence of the life that I had actually lived. I had to come to the realization that I, too, am “a stranger in a foreign land,” neither this nor that, with no stable ground of belonging beneath my feet. And I couldn’t take that step alone.

I remember the first time I met with other adoptees when I was just beginning to explore more deeply how relinquishment and adoption have impacted me. When I introduced myself, I felt a welling-up of shame—as if I, as a twice-adopted person, was somehow an impostor even among other adoptees; as if I was twice-stamped with the stigma of rejection and therefore not worthy to be in the company of others; as if, by exposing myself, I was risking yet another rejection, this time at the hands of those like me. My voice cracked, but I kept talking. And as I passed over that threshold, I felt others’ welcome and understanding and my own relief in the dawning knowledge that I didn’t have to mask or to hide anymore, because I was no longer alone in my pain and confusion.

Moses’ life in Midian remains largely obscure. As the story unfolds in chapters two and three of the Book of Exodus, we move abruptly from the naming of his firstborn son to the burning bush—from Moses’ recognition of his status as a relative stranger among the people of his own place as well as his own flesh and blood, to being recognized, identified, and called forth by God decades later for who he truly is. For those of us who are adopted, this very obscurity can reflect the painful transition from clinging, mostly unconsciously, to a protective false self-identity, to shedding the stories other people have told about us on our behalf—stories informed by others’ expectations, projections, needs, and assumptions, built primarily around the interests of adoptive parents and the adoption industry—to finally discovering a deeper wholeness that is truly our own. In the midst of this transition, we suffer the dissonance of not knowing who we are, or of feeling as if we are between competing identities, between stories and stabilities, wandering somewhere between Egypt and the Promised Land. We may wonder at times whether it was wise to leave behind a familiar servitude in order to cast ourselves into an unknown and uncertain freedom. We may even feel guilty for stepping out of the roles that other people prescribed for us, whether out of ignorance or to avoid facing their doubts, insecurities, and anxieties around adoption’s complexities. Nonetheless, in the company of those who understand and support us and share our struggles, we carry on. As we make our way through the desert, we reclaim parts of ourselves that we had to leave behind in adoption’s wake. We recover awarenesses and feelings that we were not safe enough or resourced enough to feel or to know as children. And as we become more of who are, we expand and make room for something greater than ourselves.[1]

At the burning bush, the culmination of his time in Midian, Moses at last encounters God who knows him intimately and calls him by name; God who is moved with compassion by his people’s suffering and invites Moses into close friendship to save them. God initiates a relationship that restores Moses not only to himself but also to his destiny and mission among his biological kin. And while finding our place among our biological families may not reflect our unique destinies, God is nonetheless moved to compassionate action by our suffering as well. As Catholic feminist theologian, Elizabeth Johnson, writes, regarding God’s words to Moses, “I know well what they are suffering,” in light of Christ’s incarnation and suffering on the cross:

The verb “to know” here refers to an experiential kind of knowing, being the same Hebrew verb used to describe sexual intercourse in Genesis: “the man knew his wife Eve, and she conceived” (Genesis 4:1). God knows what creatures are suffering; such knowing is continually part of the Spirit’s indwelling relationship to the world. What is new in view of the cross is divine participation in pain and death from within the world of the flesh. Now the incarnate God knows through personal experience, so to speak.[2]

God incarnate not only sees and knows but suffers with us, in our bodies, hearts, and minds, for our healing and transformation. The burning bush now casts its warmth and radiance through our own hearts. We touch divine compassion and extend its penetrating light whenever we suffer with one another for love’s sake. This is our manna in the desert, the nourishment that sustains us, liberates us, restores us to ourselves in community, and calls us forth.

“I will hold your incoherence with you for as long as you need,” my therapist tells me, and in that moment I know myself as I am known, standing safely on holy ground, barefoot and undisguised before the burning bush.