I returned to the Catholic faith of my Italian ancestors under highly unusual circumstances. In my early thirties, as I pedaled down the Pacific Coast Highway on a bicycle laden with camping gear and all that I needed for long distance travel, I unexpectedly came upon a Catholic monastery and felt an irresistible impulse to pay a visit. In the course of events that followed that afternoon, I met the monastery’s maintenance supervisor, who offered me work on the maintenance crew, which was fortunate because I was running out of money and had no other foreseeable source of income.

Once I settled into my new job and new home, moving into a small cabin behind the monks’ residences, I asked to meet with a monk to talk about my spiritual life. I spoke briefly with Father Michael and he asked me when I had last been to confession. I told him not since I was a kid. “Then why don’t we begin by scheduling a time for confession?” I agreed, but warily, as discomforting impressions flitted through my mind, of ornate lacquered confessionals, dark and claustrophobic on the inside; cinematic scenes of shadowy, pensive, anguished faces listening intently to the disembodied, soft-spoken, sing-song drone of a man’s voice wafting through a small grate; and, of course, the memory of my own childhood anxiety and bewilderment as I rattled off a generic list of the expected round of puerile transgressions: I lied to my parents, I was mean to my brother and sister, etc.

When the scheduled day arrived, however, I felt relief as I entered a disarmingly simple sunlit room with a candle burning in front of an icon on a table next to two comfortable chairs, where I took a seat facing Michael. I chose not to do much preparation but proposed instead that we explore together what I most needed to bring to God. Michael invited me to share more about myself, and as our conversation unfolded, he offered his own reflection and asked how it struck me: He sensed that, at the root of most of the harm that I had done, to myself and those closest to me, was my belief that my experiences of relinquishment and adoption defined who I am, a belief that bound me in fear and shame and generated distorted, alienated relationships with myself, other people, and God. Perhaps this was my core sin, he suggested, where I am most in need of healing and transformation.

His words pierced me to the heart. Michael had indeed probed the depths with me and articulated what I could scarcely voice on my own, that I suffered profoundly because I believed that I am the person adoption told me I am and, just as consequentially, who adoption told me I am not. The truth of my story is that, as a double-adoptee—relinquished and adopted as an infant and then relinquished and adopted again at age nine in two closed adoptions—I had three birth certificates issued to me by the State of New York, each listing a different mother and father, and had two different first names, two middle names, and three surnames all before my tenth birthday. Adoption had completely severed me from my history and primary relationships twice, and then compelled me to recreate myself as if from nothing in order to become the child of those who adopted me. As such, I was never under the illusion that adoption had been a force for good in my life. Nor did I absorb the kinds of messages that many other adoptees hear as children, that I was chosen, given a better life, that love is what truly makes a family. Even so, until this day with Michael, no one had ever told me that I had a choice in the matter of determining who I am and to whom I belong—I simply believed what I was told to believe, that I am the person listed on my falsified birth records, without roots or ancestry, born not of a woman but, as it were, by judicial decree.

We do not exist in isolation but are intimately shaped by our relationships. Our identities, therefore, begin to form in the womb in relation to our mother and our biological lineage encoded in our genetic makeup. We are not born blank slates. Hence, in rearranging our primary relationships as if we are arbitrarily interchangeable across family systems, relinquishment and adoption disrupt the integrity of our development as persons, and even in the case of open adoptions, often leave us feeling divided in our inmost experience of ourselves.

For me as a double-adoptee, undergoing the process of relinquishment and adoption twice exponentially magnified its impact. Following the limited logic of the infant and the child I was when these events occurred, experience seemed to teach me time and again that I must somehow deserve to be abandoned, rejected, deprived, punished; that I was a mere passive object whose whole world and identity, right down to the documents that could prove that I had once been somebody else, could be taken from me, disappeared, at the whim of those with power and agency in my life; that I was a person determined by the will of others and had to vigilantly look outside myself for cues as to who I was supposed to be for others’ sake in order to survive; that I was nothing in and of myself, not innately related to anything or anyone, spinning helplessly in my own orbit. No wonder I felt most alive, most real, in nature and on the road, traveling off the beaten path for weeks and months at a time, never more than a pedal stroke away from my treasured solitude.

And yet, as I silently gazed at the candle flame, still intently absorbing Michael’s words, I felt something like a warmly personal invitation well up inside of me, to leave behind what I thought I knew and step into a new freedom; to begin the journey of liberation from the fractured mirror of adoption into a wholeness of being and belonging that is sheer gift, sheer grace. And at the heart of this invitation, grounded in such compassionate truth-telling as I had just experienced, pulsed an emerging new conviction, a felt-sense of a companioning presence—that God is with me, within me, on my side, for my good, illuminating the way.

As the varied hues of the setting sun shone through the window behind us, Michael placed his hands on my head and prayed over me: “May God give you pardon and peace in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”

Amen.