This year my wife Lisa and I spent the Triduum—the liturgical celebration that begins on Holy Thursday and ends with the Easter Vigil on Sunday morning—at a monastery, Our Lady of Guadalupe Trappist Abbey in Carlton, Oregon. We spent most of our time in silence, including lots of hiking in the forest. While I had a deeply meaningful experience throughout, it is my sense of connection with the land and its beauty that lingers with me at least as strongly as formal times of prayer and meditation. More and more, I notice that prayer, which is to say, opening to God’s presence, often seems most fruitful when I am not conscious of praying, per se, but simply paying attention and letting the world touch my heart.

As I slowly settled into the quiet ambience of the monastery, I found my heart touched by the world in other ways, as well. On Good Friday, as we remembered Jesus’ arrest, trial, torture, and execution, images of contemporary crucifixions kept coming distressingly to mind—of the rampant dehumanization and scapegoating of vulnerable people, especially immigrants, and the staged displays of dominance and cruelty on behalf of political leaders. I thought of Kristi Noem, for instance, U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security, posing in front of prisoners at the notoriously brutal Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT) prison in El Salvador, where the current administration has sent several hundred people without due process, among whom the vast majority have no U.S. criminal record.[1] The optics are clear: See what we can do to you, a message she conveyed as unambiguously in our day as Roman authorities did when they nailed a young, troublemaking Jewish man to wood along the road outside Jerusalem two millennia ago. Crucifixion as the violent means by which those in positions of power instill terror and compel submission remains persistently with us. And this awareness, too, recognizing the incalculable cost to human lives, relationships, and communities, became part of my prayer.

With time, however, as the quiet penetrated more deeply, my focus shifted and became more internal.

Even before the Easter Vigil, I found myself drawn to Mary Magdalene as she encountered the risen Christ in the garden outside his tomb (John 20:11-18). The sense of newness the story evokes felt vividly palpable to me, as the author brings us symbolically back to where it all began in the Book of Genesis: a man, a woman, a garden—a new creation, a new beginning, at once cosmic in scope and yet intensely personal. In a beautiful reflection entitled “Deep resurrection: hope in God,”[2] which I read during this time, Catholic theologian Elizabeth Johnson eloquently captures this connection between creation and resurrection: “Since the loving Creator can call the creature from non-being into being, then this same Creator, acting with the same infinite power of love, can also call the creature from death to life.”[3] Non-being into being, death to life: It was not only Jesus who received life anew on that first day, but Mary Magdalene, as well. The loss over which she had earlier bitterly wept before the empty tomb was total. The man she loved, her teacher and friend—with whom she found healing from her past wounds and meaning, purpose, and community in his vision of God’s reign, at once present and yet to come—was dead, and now even his body had disappeared. And with his death and the apparent disappearance of his corpse, all her hope collapsed, and the vision he shared with her turned as vacuous and empty as the tomb behind her.

Then, in a shocking moment of deepest intimacy, the risen Christ—whom she had first mistook for the gardener—speaks her name and everything is transformed, made new. A curious kind of reunion.

On Easter, my first mother, with whom I’ve been in reunion for six years, contacted me and we had a brief exchange, checking in and wishing one another a happy Easter. These contacts are almost always bittersweet. On the one hand, I am grateful that she is in my life now, that she is no longer a shadow, a question mark, or a fantasy. But her presence now also recalls the complicated felt-sense of her absence during the first decades of my life—the first years, months, weeks, days, hours. This lost time suddenly feels all the more poignant, a sorrow that can seem bottomless and can quickly curdle into echoes of old frustrations, longings, doubts, hopelessness, and despair. Here is where I feel closest to Mary Magdalene in her initial grief. Here is where facing the dark abyss of an empty tomb resonates as a most apt symbol of my own particular suffering as an adoptee.

While I may feel a resonance with Mary Magdalene in her loss, however, my story of reunion after the loss of my mother doesn’t map well onto the rest of her story. Relinquishment and adoption loss is ambiguous, perhaps all the more so after reunion. We lose someone as infants or as children who most often has not died. Sometimes we don’t know if they are alive or dead. But we wonder. And our wondering is as much about ourselves as the one we’ve lost. Does she look like me, think like me, act like me? Do I share her gestures, quirks, idiosyncrasies? Does she mirror and affirm me in my deep-down body-being, she who made space in her own body for me? And after all those years of wondering, now I know. I know, for instance, that she agonized over relinquishing me, although, as an unwed teenage mother in 1970, she was not given much of a choice. I know that she has prayed for me every day of my life. I know that she can seemingly talk endlessly without stopping for breath, while I tend to be slow to speak. I know that we are on opposite ends of the political, cultural, and religious spectrum, which can make some conversations hard. I know that she longed for my forgiveness, carrying a terrible burden of guilt and shame, mostly in silence, for almost 50 years. For all of this knowledge—heartening, heartbreaking, and otherwise—I am grateful. But receiving her back paradoxically hasn’t taken away the sting of loss. For all the hopes, fears, and fantasies I pinned on her going all the way back to childhood, even in reunion I still carry an empty tomb inside of me.

Still, in the midst of all this ambiguity, on Monday morning, as we prepared to leave, sitting in meditation for one last time, it was Mary Magdalene’s ecstatic joy that struck me most piercingly—joy at hearing her name spoken by the risen Christ, at being “turned around” to receive not only her beloved friend back, but also herself, her life, her deepest wellspring of vitality in his knowing, loving presence. I felt something of her joy well up in my own heart, softening the shadows cast by the devastating losses and loneliness of the past. I, too, felt anchored in the faithful love of the one who knows me down to my deepest roots, deeper than biology.

What can I say? This Easter I felt as though I was stretched between two very different kinds of reunion, each an answer to the question: “Where do I come from?” But only one of those reunions communicates to me, however obscurely, a sense of wholeness and freedom, reconnecting me with my origins in the mystery of having been called from non-being into being, and the hope of being called from death to life. Only one of those reunions calls me into a vision of life lived in solidarity with all suffering creatures, all sentient life, toward the blessed hope of a new creation where death is no longer a barrier, but a graced transformation. Only one of those reunions kindles a fire in my heart alluring me into ever greater intimacy with the heartbeat of all that is. And only one of those reunions communicates to me not only where I come from, but where I am going.

For all the confusion and pain that I carry, all the irreparable losses, all that remains unresolved and unresolvable in my heart, I give thanks that I can still taste Mary’s joy.