The year Diana Ross's hit song "Love Child" hit the top of the pop charts, I was born to a single mother who was unable to care for me. At three weeks, I was adopted into a family who raised me in an affluent suburb outside of Chicago. The view from the curb was that we were the perfect family, in the perfect home, in the perfect town.On the inside of those stately brick walls, though, my home life was shaped by alcoholism and domestic violence. My parents divorced when I was 6. My mother remarried another alcoholic, and my father, who'd moved away, also remarried. By the time I was 15, both of those marriages had ended. What I learned about trust people was that they went away. What I learned about myself was that I wasn't worth loving.
None of the adults in my life had a clue I was suffering. My broad smile fooled them and even me. It disguised the protective shell around my vulnerable heart meant to keep me from being be hurt again. As I moved into adulthood, though, that girl-size armor, pinching, chafing, began to fail.
In college, my roommate—single—became pregnant. That she decided to raise her child instead of placing him up for adoption created the first crack in my cardiac shell. Nine months later, holding her precious son in my arms, five hundred more fissures rippled around my guarded heart. Baby Isaiah's blessed arrival, as well as his familiar origins, unleashed a deep wondering about my own.
Soon after Isaiah's birth, curious, I submitted an application to an international reunion registry that linked separated kin. Within a few weeks I was reunited with my birthmother. She was delighted to find me, and our relationship has continued to this day.
When I tracked down my birthfather, he was not interested in knowing me. With my unwillingness to face the sting of his second rejection and the chronic layers of grief it triggered, my pain eventually became unmanageable. Suffering from depression, I flitted between whatever psychological and spiritual resources promised healing. For over a decade, every book, praying church, healing conference, therapist's office, and prayer circle left me more disappointed and devastated than the last. The spiritual reality that I was a beloved daughter of God—the one to which I agreed in my head, and sincerely preached with my lips—had yet to sift its way into my deepest places.
At my lowest point, I told a friend that my quest for relief was just about done. Though far from healed, I could simply no longer justify the time, energy, and financial resources being poured into fixing my broken heart.
"Doesn't God have better things to do?!" I demanded of her.
Certain there was more important work—famine, poverty, and orphan care—to which the Almighty was committed, I was less convinced that God loved me. My wise friend gently assured me that an infinitely resourced God was not, in fact, too busy to care about the needs of my hurting heart.
In that lowest point, I finally released my fury at God, demanding, with raised fist: What reliable adult was for me when I most needed one?
In reply, two words drifted down from heaven, like fall leaves, landing into my desperate heart: I Am.
Resistant, I reasoned, "That can't be a message from God. Those Bible words probably just bubbled up from my subconscious as an expression of my deepest longing."
Then, two more words dropped: I am for you.
When an image of Jesus' body hanging on the cross filled my mind, I finally understood, in my deepest places, who God was and who I was. This deity wasn't, as I had suspected, the kind of Father who cavalierly sacrifices his own kid. Rather, this was the kind of Father who, rather than preserving his life at my expense, poured out his life, out of love, for me. It's what none of my well-meaning caregivers, who had longed to love me well, had been able to do.
Suddenly, what I'd known about the Father of Jesus in my head, and even in my heart, had penetrated my deepest places. The Enemy's sinister voice, which whispers lies into the ears of children who've lost parents to death and divorce, illness and addictions, work and war, had insisted that I wasn't worth loving. In the face of both the evidence of my experience and the hiss of the deceiver's lies, God had assured me that, in Jesus, God was with me and for me.
My redemption could not be recognized by strangers like it can be on ABC's Extreme Home Makeover: by a broad, goofy smile. Instead, my insides were finally freed from the cover of that artificial mask. Relationships reordered, the experience of inevitable absences—a friend showing up late to the movies—were no longer narrated by the quiet voice of the Deceiver hissing: "You're not worth showing up for. You're not worth loving." I knew, at a cellular level, that I was and I am.
Like me and like the woman in the Supremes' hit song, the beginnings of many have been cloaked in shame. These beloved ones have been identified by words like "illegitimate," "accidental," "foster child," "impoverished," and "trafficked." Today I am convinced that Jesus' self-giving love on the cross sets God's children free not just from the guilt of sin, but from shame as well. Whether scarred by a father's absence, wounded by his presence, or raised by a pretty good one who did his best but nonetheless fell short, the Father of Jesus longs for all those adopted as his children to know, in the marrow of our bones, his constant whisper: I am for you.
Margot Starbuck is the author of The Girl in the Orange Dress and Unsqueezed, both published by InterVarsity Press. She has written for Her.meneutics on strip clubs and jiggly thighs, and spoke with our blogger Alicia Cohn about searching for a father's love. Margot writes at MargotStarbuck.com.
Lou Lumenick reminds us that a “75th anniversary edition” of Cecil B. DeMille’s Cleopatra (1934) is coming out on DVD tomorrow – along with a number of other films that were made in the early 1930s, right around the time the movie industry was beginning to enforce the morality code that would dominate American films up until the 1960s.
I happened to watch Cleopatra for the first time a few months ago, and I was surprised when, a little more than an hour into the movie, Herod the Great showed up. In his first scene, he says that he has come directly from Rome, and that he is on his way back to his kingdom in Judea, but while he is in Egypt, he has a message for Cleopatra: namely, Octavian wants her to kill Mark Antony.
In the next scene, Herod and Mark Antony share some drinks and some laughs, and then Herod, still laughing, tells Antony that Octavian wants Cleopatra to poison him – a message that Antony himself laughs off, until a later scene in which he discovers that Cleopatra is testing different kinds of poison on her prisoners.
So Herod gets to be friendly with all the major political figures – Octavian, Cleopatra, Mark Antony – while at the same time disturbing the two political figures with whom he shares actual screen time. And you get the impression that he rather likes disturbing his friends, even though they are all discussing serious matters of life and death. The important thing, for Herod, is that he has influential connections, that he can flaunt those influential connections, and that he can keep those influential connections.
I have no idea whether there is any historical basis for these particular scenes. But for what it’s worth, Wikipedia indicates that Herod secured his position as “King of the Jews” with help from both Mark Antony and Cleopatra between 40 and 37 BC, and that, when civil war broke out between Antony and Octavian, Herod switched his allegiance to Octavian in 31 BC. Antony and Cleopatra would go on to die in 30 BC, after losing their war with Octavian, while Herod continued to rule Judea until his own death in 4 BC. Octavian, who went on to become the Emperor Augustus, did not die until AD 14.
The Herod cameo in this film is particularly interesting for two reasons: One, I am not aware of any other Cleopatra movie that has included Herod as one of its characters. And two, both Herod and director DeMille are often associated with biblical epics, yet this is the only DeMille film that depicts Herod – and it is not, strictly speaking, a biblical epic! Even DeMille’s one life-of-Jesus movie, The King of Kings (1927), never gets around to depicting Herod the Great, because it focuses exclusively on Jesus’ adult ministry and never depicts the Nativity.
Herod, incidentally, is played here by Joseph Schildkraut, who had previously played Judas Iscariot in The King of Kings. Cleopatra, of course, is played by Claudette Colbert, who had previously bathed nude in asses’ milk as the Roman Empress Poppea in DeMille’s The Sign of the Cross (1932) – and would soon go on to win an Oscar for starring opposite Clark Gable in Frank Capra’s classic screwball comedy It Happened One Night (1934).
Cleopatra was previously available on DVD as part of a five-disc set of DeMille films that also included The Sign of the Cross, Four Frightened People (1934), The Crusades (1935) and Union Pacific (1939).
