A Taste of Paradise

 This week, I stumbled upon a documentary on Prime called Three Identical Strangers about male triplets separated at birth by adoption. Turns out they were unknowingly part of a psychological study and purposely placed in homes at three different levels of society. At age nineteen, they found each other and had their fifteen minutes of fame. I’ll let the movie fill in the details. Suffice it to say, the young men were amazed to find they had mannerisms, speech patterns, and many likes and dislikes in common. At this point in the film, one might conclude you are your genetics. But the plot thickens. I will leave it there not to be a spoiler. Check it out; it’s worth the watch.

Like the triplets, I’m also adopted, and last year found biological half-siblings with whom I share many similarities even though we were raised by vastly different parents.

I’m also reading a book titled Finding Paradise by Allison Lockwood about the settlement of Northampton, Massachusetts, the small city closest to my hill town home. Because my husband has already done genealogical research on us both, I knew going into the book that one of my biological ancestors was among Northampton’s founders. He and fellow settlers trudged from northern Connecticut through the western wilderness of Massachusetts to make a new start.

Born an illegitimate child in Connecticut and raised in upstate New York, it was a handsome guy I met at Syracuse University who drew me to Northampton, MA, the town where he was born. After college, we married and lived up and down the Connecticut River Valley as if we were swimming back to our spawning grounds to raise our family. How many times have I traveled one of Northampton’s main thoroughfares not knowing, until I read Finding Paradise, that the street was named after my long lost relative because it runs beside the location of his long-gone home built in the 1600’s. Again, genetics would seem to spell destiny.

But here my own plot thickens. Lockwood’s book describes how Northampton has long been home to reformers looking to make the world a better place. Key residents were involved in the women’s movement, prison reform, mental health, the underground railroad, and utopian communities. Northampton was even the home of Sylvester Graham, father of the graham cracker, invented as part of a more healthful diet. When Jenny Lind, an opera singer, honeymooned in Northampton, she dubbed it the “paradise of America.” Paradise City is a nickname it holds to this day. For all the fascinating details check out Lockwood’s book too.

But Northampton’s most important resident for me is the preacher Jonathan Edwards who launched the Great Awakening, a kind of American protestant reformation that espoused the gospel of grace. Although much is made of Edward’s threats of hell, in his famous sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, Edwards concludes with God’s infinite compassion for helpless sinners shown through the sacrificial blood of his only son, Jesus, that alone can mediate our ultimate fate.

Centuries after Edward’s sermon, living in a town a bit to the north, my husband and I drove to Northampton and parked in the lot behind Edward’s Church. At the time, I didn’t know it was named after the famous theologian. Nor did I know anything of his legacy. I was simply waiting in the car with a sleeping infant while my husband went into the Peloton bike shop next door. There in solitude, recovering from a crisis in our marriage, I signed my name in the back of a Gideon’s Bible, acknowledging my faults and regrets, and my need to be saved from my horrible capacity to inflict harm even on those I loved the most. That was the beginning of the transformational love of God in my life, so like Job, I can say,

All to say, genetics are part of our destinies, for it is God who forms us in our mother’s wombs, and our stories are written in His book of life before we take our first breath. (Psalm 139)

But God also grants us free will, so we can choose his love. I have witnessed His mysterious leading through the wilderness to my true home as His daughter adopted by grace.

So, no matter your gene pool or your circumstances, it is God’s overwhelming, never ending, loving-kindness that grants us, even in our ordinary lives, a taste of paradise.

Where are you dear reader on your journey?

Cover photo by Patrick Fore on Unsplash